While roaming through blogs today I found a horrible thing at Another Knitting Blog (http://mimoknits.typepad.com/ ): I missed Talk Like A Pirate Day. Here is the official website for others who, like me, missed it: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

I've been sick. I've fallen behind on my quilting, missed rehearsals, and scarcely kept up with the laundry. And of course it was also #2 son's birthday, which might have been slightly more important. It was also a Sunday, so I was not at work and could not have taken the opportunity to say things like, "Avast me hearties! I think you'll find that Base Ten Blocks are an excellent manipulative for algebra, bucko!" And since I was in bed when not doing birthday things, I would not even have had the chance to say, "Shiver me timbers, Pastor, I certainly enjoyed your message this morning!"

Still, it is sad to think that I will not have the chance for another year. Aaargh!

I guess I'll have to face it: I've been rejected.

I got into the queue for the Knitting Bloggers webring before they closed, and it now is apparent that I have been left in the queue. The mistress of the ring says that only people who failed to follow The Rules were left behind.

I post very regularly, I didn't get into the queue till I had been blogging for a month, and my grammar is unexceptionable. Therefore it must be that I broke the cardinal rule and talked too much about things other than knitting. I am, apparently, not a true Knitting Blogger, but rather just a Blogger Who Knits.

What can I say? The DNA scarf (70% completed) reminds me of Crick and Watson. A trip to my Local Yarn Shop makes me think of globalisation. I pick up something to read while I turn a heel and pretty soon I'm musing on saints, or male-female differences, or cake. That's just the kind of mind I have.

Ah, well. Silkenshine is still allowing me to be one of the Yarn Hos. I can take comfort in that.

I was reflecting on this morning's post today, and found my mind turning to #1 daughter's wedding. Son in law's mother called me last night -- she is flying out to the see them, and taking along the frozen top layer of their wedding cake, and of course I am rushing to finish their anniversary quilt, so it may not be surprising that I thought of it. But I thought of it in terms of objects and consumption.

If you have never arranged a wedding, or if it has been a long time since your last wedding, you may not know that the modern wedding is an orgy of consumption. It is very difficult to avoid turning the whole thing into a shopping spree. Even when, as with the wedding we planned, it is a small, simple wedding with the focus on the ceremony, it is hard to avoid becoming fixated on the stuff.

Our bride had very specific ideas about all the details of her wedding, so even though we made every attempt to shop locally, we ended up with objects from all over. We made the wedding gown ourselves, with lace sent from Louisiana and organza bought in Kansas City. The cake was made by the local family-owned bakery, but we had heart-shaped ravioli flown in from New Jersey. There were ribbons from Tennessee and flower-embedded papers from California. And of course people flew in from all over the country.

We gave the guests carved sandalwood fans from China. The scripture chosen for the ceremony was sung by a quartet from Missouri: "Awake O North wind and come thou South/ Blow upon my garden that the spices may flow out!" So the fan, as in the old folktale, was the wind, and the sandalwood was the spices, and we added a heart cut from seed-embedded paper (from Canada) to be the garden. #2 daughter and I made tag art from copies of family photographs and ephemera, each one different so that guests could choose one they loved and know that it was unique. We hand-calligraphed another of the scriptures from the ceremony (and the cantata) for the tags. The one pictured here used an announcement of a French woodland festival from the early 20th century, so the fan honors both the European and Asian parts of #1 daughter's heritage. We used childhood photos of both the bride and groom, too, to remember their families and upbringings as they began their new family. While the guests probably did not catch all the symbolism, it was certainly true that these objects had deep meaning.

When people had fewer objects, it might have been that all of them had that level of meaning, those layers of meaning. Things belonged to many people, or were made by someone, or brought from a distance at some danger and difficulty.

On the other hand, we no longer face frostbite in our search to get pepper. We can merely go to the grocery. Let us not get carried away with our nostalgia. But do let's make as many of our presents as possible with our own two hands.

Book club, today. We will be discussing Fair Warning. Having read Fair Warning and Samurai William essentially at the same time has, I think, given me a different take on it. Fair Warning is all about objects and ownership, including objectification and ownership of people, even of oneself. And Samurai William, a nonfiction work on the history of European contact with Japan at a particular time, as much as the story of William Adams himself, turns out to be largely about objects. Yes, there are plenty of adventures and lots of geography, but it all comes down to the stuff: Japanese silks, English broadcloth, Indochinese perfumed woods, silver, gold. People lost their lives, their extremities, their ships, their fortunes, their families, their peace of mind for the sake of pepper or tin.

Nowadays globalization has lost its romance. We are no longer seeking things that can't be made or grown where we live, and exchanging our own local products for someone else's local products. I still think that that is the right reason to trade, but most of the time "Made in China" is not about the silks and spices of Cathay, but about the cheapest possible VCR. We in the U.S. can have a plethora of consumer goods -- more than we need or perhaps can use -- because people in China work for $2.95 a day.

In A Distinction of Blood, one of the minor themes is the fact that the English felt good about not having slavery as the Americans did -- and yet every bit of sugar or cotton they had depended on slavery. We in the U.S. today can overlook the living and working conditions of the people who make it possible for us to have more stuff than we need or can use. Certainly more than we can value or appreciate. The objects in Fair Warning get their value from their rarity, their authenticity, their connections with people. I think this is true in a sense for the objects in our own lives. The things that we make are rare, valuable,and connected with us and with the people we make them for -- since we thought about them as we made the items. When we try to separate the objects from the people who made them, or the traditions behind them, or the place where the raw materials are grown, we lose their value.

The Yarn Harlot (http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/ ) admitted that she watches Survivor. Now I do not watch reality shows and never would, except for one episode of one which was made in a town near here, which I had to watch for reasons of local pride. However, my husband has taken up watching an extremely disgusting one called Fear Factor. He watches it while he eats. The central thesis of this program is the same as other reality shows: some people will do anything for money. In this case, they eat insects and rotten fish, allow themselves to be locked into boxes with mice and snakes, and attempt feats of derring-do.

My husband comes from a country where people eat insects on purpose, and the main condiment is made of putrid fish. And he is physically fearless, able to deal with snakes without turning a hair. If I were ever shipwrecked, or having to face a tiger or something, he is the guy I would want on hand. So he enjoys watching people freaking out while doing things he would not find scary at all. He laughs at them, the wusses.

I would never attempt any of those things. And I would like to make him watch them in some other room, but instead I have to leave the room myself. I hope he gets tired of it soon. He could have been one of the intrepid explorers in Samurai William, all of whom would have laughed at those half-clad "Fear Factor" wusses.

As for the Yarn Harlot, I will overlook this quirk, for the sake of her beautiful mittens and excellent writing style.

Well, I finished it and felted it, and you would never know it was knitted. The Classic Wool doesn't felt up as soft and fuzzy as the Lamb's Pride, but it is nice. Cozy, interesting nubby texture. I had a few more felting projects in mind, but I may chicken out on them. The loss of the stitches continues to bother me.

I have early meetings today and tomorrow, and errands to do, and the horrible mess the house falls into when I am not up and taking care of it, and I am still feeling bad enough to find all this burdensome. I am also worrying that I will not be able to finish the quilt by October 5th. Or The Empress's chemise by the 10th. Especially since #1 son has lollygagged around so much that I also have to drive him to school. Whine, whine, whine.

It is #2 son's birthday today. I now have no little kids any more, as he is now a teenager.

I tried to work on the DNA scarf, but I am too fuzzy-minded when I am ill, and make too many mistakes. So instead I began one of the holiday gifts -- all stockinette -- in the Paton's Classic Wool. Here it is in all its unidentifiable glory:

I love this yarn! The colors are so saturated and it feels so nice -- I will definitely add this to my list of favorite yarns -- although I don't use worsted weight normally. I like finer yarns as a rule.

And I will suffer over felting this, I think. But I am hoping that as I do more felting, I will get over that. Or else I will quit felting, of course. But I am determined to give it a fair try.  

Natalie (http://knitting.xaviermusketeer.com/ ) has a contest going for favorite knitting-related lines from movies. Cheating slightly, I nominated the Sock Gap scene from Coupling. Then the second season DVD arrived and it contained the following exchange:

"He's gorgeous!" "How gorgeous?" "Knitting pattern!"

Now, they are British, with all those explosive Ts and no R, so I backed it up to make sure that was the line, and it was. I was home from work early because I am sick. I was lying on the couch, feeling as though I had a sauna going in back of my eyes and a bird in my mouth scratching my throat with its feet (yes, I do feel awful, thanks), so I might have imagined the whole thing. But no, that was the line. A line or two later, she says "You can put down your knitting needles."

Is this common British slang, based on Cockney rhymes we will never be able to guess? Or is it a reference to the type of model preferred for illustrations of British knitting patterns? The guy fishing in Alice Starmore's Fair Isle waistcoat will be classically handsome, you can be sure, with maybe a bit of a five o'clock shadow to complement the vampire make-up on her female models. Or maybe the chaste beauty of knitting patterns themselves has inspired the term's use.

I don't know. But it does seem like a discreet way to discuss the subject, at least for Americans. "Knitting pattern," you could say, with a glance toward the guy serving the coffee. Your companions would not miss the opportunity to admire him (and actually the guy who serves coffee at our local bakery is the handsomest man in town, at least until #1 son grows up), but neither you nor he would be embarrassed.

Unless he has also seen the show.

Partygirl: "I think I'm the kind of pagan who thinks Mother Earth is God."

Fibermom: (pause) "I didn't think that was an option for Catholics."

One never knows, do one?

The Lecturer had just asked us, "When was the last time you engaged a stranger in theological discussion?" There we were, several hundred women, all trying to remember the last time we had engaged a stranger in theological discussion. Or, perhaps, trying to imagine doing so. I don't  think I have ever engaged a stranger in theological discussion, unless perhaps my occasional remarks in this blog could be considered a discussion with a stranger who might happen to read it.

I talk to strangers all the time, but never engage them in discussions that might lead to controversy. I save that for friends and family. I enjoy theological discussions, especially with people who have different views from my own, but I am aware that it is easy to offend and upset people with such discussions. And sometimes hard to express views clearly, as evidenced by my exchange with Partygirl, who is I happen to know a devout Catholic, but has made herself sound distinctly pagan. It is possible that she understands the word differently than I do. Or maybe she has more of a fusion outlook than I had thought.

I once had a coworker who was, I think, a witch. She said she was a Unitarian. She also said that she met with a group of other ladies several times a year, on the major festivals such as Samhain, to celebrate their spirituality. She made us Green Man figures for our Christmas trees and had mystic symbols tattooed on her arms. She may very well have hesitated to engage in theological discussions with me, although we did once have a very sprightly conversation about the hymn "Amazing Grace" while dusting books. I imagine that witches living in the Bible Belt often hesitate to discuss theology with their supervisors. But for most of us, I think the hesitation to discuss theology has less to do with fear of persecuation or pigeonholing than with fear of boring people.

In fact, religion is not the only subject that I hesitate to discuss with people. My degrees are in linguistics, so it is not surprising that I find things like syntax and language acquisition fascinating. And yet I know that most people consider these subjects boring, and also know very little about them, so I must rein in my enthusiasm for discussing them. #2 daughter has recently studied ballads in her music history class, and my immediate reaction was "Oh, goodie! Write a paper on that so I can talk with you about it!" Because I know that most people's tolerance for discussions of, say, American vs. British murder ballads, with examples sung, is very small. And of course I have made a knitting blog for the express purpose of discussing knitting without seeing people's eyes glaze over.

Discussions of science, though to me they are interesting enough to warrant reading up on the subject in order to continue them the next day, are not most people's cup of tea either. When I was telling Cleverboots about the DNA scarf and how I love it because it reminds me of the excitement of first learning about Crick and Watson (thus neatly combining two unpopular topics), I could see that the discovery of DNA was not in fact one of her favorite bedtime stories, and that she was seriously wondering whether I had gone off the rails entirely.

This is why I was so pleased to find this page: http://www.ncbe.reading.ac.uk/DNA50/ephemera1.html 

This is a page showing myriad artistic uses of the DNA spiral, including the DNA scarf. It is clear that the people who made this page are as enamored of the DNA spiral as I am. And hey, if you are growing indignant at the thought of all those people who would rather discuss TV than, say, physics, allow me to recommend the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, one of the most exciting books I have ever read. The people I actually meet in the flesh will not allow me to recommend it, so it is a relief to be able to do so here.

Yarn, Ho! Avast, me hearties!

This week on HGP we are to buy all the materials for our handmade holiday gifts, and my shopping list includes both cotton and wool. So here is some cotton in yummy colors, which I intend to use to make little things from a clever Japanese pattern.

Then there is my wool. I will be making things from Felted Knits. Now, I made my first attempts at felted knitting from Lamb's Pride (in fact, if we count the  ruined sweaters I recycled, I also used Harrisville tweed). But I cannot get over the feeling that felting knits is a kind of recycling, which ruins the knitting even as it creates lovely cozy wooly things. Sort of like altered books -- however wonderful they may be as art, they still wreck the book. So I found that I couldn't happily make felted stuff from the fine all-wool yarns at the LYS. Since they do not carry any bargain all-wool yarns, and the Big Discount Craft Store doesn't carry all-wool yarns of any description, I went to yarnsale.com (http://www.herrschners.com/yarnsale.aspx?id=2&tab=3 ) and bought up half a dozen skeins of discontinued colors at startlingly low prices. That was a couple of weeks ago. Yarnsale has a feature which allows you track the package on its way to your door. I found this rather fun. I could see that the wool had gone to Roseville, wherever that may be, and then taken ten days to get to Memphis. Admittedly, I don't know where Roseville is, but it's hard to see how it could take a box of yarn ten days to get from anywhere in the U.S. to Memphis unless it was stopping off on the way. So I assume that the wool was having adventures.

Some may find this idea a little too precious. They are thinking that wool is inanimate and therefore cannot have adventures. However, I have met sheep. They obviously have no thought processes at all, and yet can have adventures. There was one in particular, one with very fancy horns, whom half a dozen museum workers tried to get out of a truck and into a pen. It was certainly an adventure for us. The next time, we brought in Agri students, who made the whole thing look as easy as carrying yarn. In any case, I think that wool is just slightly less sentient than sheep, so I will continue to speculate on its adventures between Roseville and Memphis. I think it would be something like Cash Peters (http://www.cashpeters.com/ ) in Gullible's Travels. Cash Peters is a former NPR reporter who travels the world visiting weird places. I was so distressed when I discovered that he had gone from St. Joseph to Carthage without checking out the Pig De-Snooter at the museum in Liberty that I had to email him about it. And he answered me. What a guy! But I digress.

The wool then moseyed over westward from Memphis to me, taking another four days, and finally arrived. It is Paton's Merino, with a solid, honest sheepswool feel and soft colors with pretty names like "Ocean" and "Pearl." Working with color and texture is a big part of what I love about knitting. And now that I am looking at it and feeling it, it seems to me that it would make a beautiful, subtle Fair Isle sweater. But I am going to resist this and instead make the snazzy felted objects I have chosen for my loved ones.

The only yarn for holiday gifts that I do not yet have is that for #1 daughter's DNA scarf and hat. She wants cream, which was of course not a discontinued color. And I do want to get a really nice yarn for her. She is rather a glamorpuss, and takes good care of her clothes (unlike #2 daughter, who allows her scarves to become mottled, and then throws them on the ground where they are picked up by strange men who smell them. See her September 5th entry for details:http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=chanthaboune. She will be getting superwash for sure). I definitely foresee a trip to the LYS.

But at the moment I am revelling in having a bona fide stash at last.