Completed dull socks for the last day of Sockuary. (Impressionist snap with toy camera.)

But wait -- tomorrow could also be the first day of Sockuary!

These socks may be dull, but they are very nice and cozy as well, and I have a lot of this yarn in several colors, so I may just keep going.

I am trying out some of the traditional Fair Isle patterns from the Traditional Fair Isle Knitting book. This is how they recommend making a swatch, but if I add a heel, it will be a sock.

I had intended to continue with my scientific sampling of churches yesterday, moving on to the Episcopalians, but I am enjoying time with #1 daughter instead. I made a traditional Basque cake, except with nectarines instead of cherries, and was able to do a good amount of sock knitting while we talked about local politics, dogs, decorating, and family members.

Not that I skipped church. I went to the early service at my own church and sang "Rest in the Lord," another of Mendelssohn's greatest hits. The organist did not turn a hair when I showed up with my music 30 minutes before the service.

#1 daughter and Son-in-Law will be going up to visit #2 daughter soon. They are hoping to have their assorted siblings to visit them in The Frozen North as well -- waiting until summer, of course.  

Here is the second dull sock at the heel-flap stage. The first dull sock is keeping it company, but you can see the incomplete sock with its heel-flap on a dpn. You work back and forth on half the needles, letting the other half rest on their sleeve needle. I'm doing slip 1, knit one across on the right side and all purl on the wrong side, which as you may be able to see creates a denser fabric for the heel. Some people add a reinforcement thread of nylon at this point, but it is also easy to replace the heel-flap if your heels get holes.

I posted a link last week to a tutorial for turning a heel. Once you've done that, get it all  back onto the sleeve needle for some more relaxing knitting.

And here is the sock back on the dpns to finish up the toe. You can leave it on the sleeve needle till the very end, but then you have to keep track of the decreases. If you divide it onto three needles -- the front half on one needle and the back divided onto two needles, then you can just do your decreases at the end of the needle. Beginning at the back, you knit to the last three stitches and k2tog. K1 on the front needle, then ssk, knit to the last three and k2tog. K1 on the third needle, ssk, and knit to the end. Then you knit one row plain. Alternate these two rows till you get it as small as you want it. Turn it inside out, divide the stitches onto two needles and cast off both of them together. There, you have a sock. and I will surely have a pair today. Since they are rather large, I may let #1 son have them to go with his grunge mittens. But I may also keep them for myself.

This is my new knitting book, and, like most of my knitting books, it doesn't actually have patterns in it. I noticed this, I think, because The Knitting Curmudgeon (http://www.knittingcurmudgeon.com/) was being curmudgeonly about new knitting books yesterday, and today recommended some old ones. Elizabeth Zimmerman's books, not for the garments but to improve your knitting skills. Mary Thomas's Knitting Book, the one I reach for most often. And Barbara Walker's stitch treasuries. She recommended a couple of others that I don't have, and since her top three were exactly my own choices, I think I will have to go buy her other suggestions.

But when it comes to new knitting books, she is very negative. She says that we don't need any more patterns for basic socks, scarves, hats, or mittens. I think an experienced knitter doesn't need any patterns for those things at all, unless he or she is very math-challenged. But it is true that the new knitting books normally contain nothing but patterns for rather simple things. Old knitting books are different.

My new knitting book, which was first published in 1981, is in the typical mold of 20th century knitting books. There is some history. The SnB books are not going to tell you what the Moors were doing with their needles in the middle ages, or how the Victorians kept their white work clean, but for the traditional knitting books, it is de rigeur.

Then there are instructions on how to do things: make a glove, or do jazz knitting, or as with my current book, knit Fair Isle garments. The idea is that, knowing the method, you will then choose your yarn and needles, decide on a color pattern or pattern stitch, plan the details of neckline and sleeve and such according to your own preferences, and knit yourself a garment. People who do that nowadays consider themselves designers, but until very recently, it was part of the definition of knowing how to knit.

Vogue Knitting and other pattern magazines were probably a reaction to that. They offered special things designed by professional fashion designers, which would look different from the traditional stuff. They still do. You might not want to knit yourself a metallic corselet like the one in the current issue of VK, but Mayflower just made herself a beautiful sweater from it. It is a very recognizable design -- I see it around and think "Oh, that's Mayflower's purple sweater!" And I have a few books that are collections of excellent designs by special designers -- Elsabeth Lavold, Alice Starmore, Debbie Bliss. They mostly do have history in them, and charts which can be used with plenty of other garments, but they were departures from the Mary Thomas tradition.

After all, some people are math-challenged. Trying to "Establish the size of the garment..." as Traditional Fair Isle Knitting puts it, and "Work out the number of stitches needed by multiplying..." would give them a headache. Plus, old knitting books have no pictures of belly buttons, and no directions for making cell-phone cozies.

So what new knitting books might be good? Big Fish, Little Fish has all the basic garments, plus stylish photos. No history, though. The Yarn Girls' Guide to Simple Knits has many basic patterns, as long as you don't object to all bulky all the time. It also has a lot of errors and omissions, but I am told that the errata pages are readily available on the web. Simple Knits for Sophisticated Living could be your main knitting book if you knit for gift-giving and home decor more than for your wardrobe. It has all the popular stuff, including cell-phone cozies and a couple of really nice felted bags, but no set-in-sleeve sweaters.

#2 son tells me that a lot of kids at his school knit in class, on their pencils. Doesn't the yarn get dirty?

The reason I am musing on things like this is that I got up at 4:30 am again. My husband has had to be at work at 5:00 lately, and every morning  I get up and fix his breakfast and help him find stuff ( some people think the most irritating male characteristic is the refusal to ask for directions, but in truth it is the equal and opposite insistence on asking where their own belongings are. The honest answer, boys, to the question "Where are my socks?" is "Wherever the heck you put them! They are your socks!" However, I am a good wife and I just go look in the drawer for him. #1 daughter also does this, but #2 daughter, who is single, claims she will not marry anyone who expects her to get up in the middle of the night and find his socks). Then I am faced with the question: do I attempt to go back to sleep, knowing that I will finally be able to fall asleep just 40 minutes before I have to get up and make breakfast for the kids, thus ensuring that I will feel groggy and disoriented all morning, or do I stay up, thus ensuring that I will feel tired all day?

Mostly I stay up. This has allowed me to roast a turkey before leaving for work, input bunches of genealogical data sent to me by the nice lady in Alabama, and -- well, that's it, because I can't really concentrate well enough at 4:30 am to do anything very complex. It has also gotten me in trouble with my choir director, because on Wednesday night, having been up for so long and unpacked that truck and come home to find dinner with #1 daughter and the rest of the family, I skipped choir practice. #2 daughter has rehearsals that begin at 9:00 pm, and she attends even after a day filled with personal drama. However, she is getting graded. Anyway, the director called me yesterday, identifying himself as "the truant police," and blackmailed me into singing a solo on Sunday morning at 8:30 am. Possibly a little Cesar Franck. I asked The Empress if she wanted to do "Panis Angelicus" as a duet, but she refused to make eye contact.

So, this morning, having been sleep-deprived for the whole week, I am able to do nothing more than knit the second dull sock and idly read blogs. If you are in a similar state, allow me to offer you a few worth reading. Someone recently claimed that the typical blog begins "Today I went to the mall..." but actually the typical blog begins "I hate my &^%$#@ life! Today I went to the &^%$# mall..." But the ones on the subscription bar to the left are all entertaining and thought-provoking, and so are these non-xangas:

This is my favorite knitting blog, although I have a lot of favorites. It combines that cheering personal goofiness with really skillful knitting.  http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/

This is a truly funny political blog: http://fafblog.blogspot.com . It is possible that people of different political persuasions may not find it funny. And you do have to be up on the news. For example, if I hadn't read a review of a book that claimed that Abraham Lincoln was gay, and LikeWowMom's report that the sexual preference of SpongeBob Squarepants (sp?) was recently in question, I would have been baffled by one of the paragraphs. Allow me to say that I find SpongeBob repulsive, and do not believe that he has a sexual identity. I will also report that the Wall Street Journal review of the Lincoln book caused me to look up a word in my unabridged dictionary, and I still do not understand the nature of the sexual act it suggested. So Fafblog seems to be expecting a higher level of hipness than I possess. However, I am very low on the overall hipness scale, so you probably won't have any trouble.

And this is an extremely weird blog: http://www.x-entertainment.com/updates/ I read it fairly regularly with a sort of dreadful fascination. I think it is about... shopping. The writer of it goes and buys very odd things and reviews them. Since I would never even go to the sort of places that sell Pokemon pasta or bug ice cubes, I find the whole thing very exotic. It is well-written (of course, or I wouldn't suggest it to you), but as though it were a 14 year old boy writing it. A 14 year old who apparently has a job, and the wherewithal to purchase Pokemon pasta.

This one is also funny: http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/ No knitting content, however.

Well, it is now time to cook another breakfast. If you find yourself buying toys or, say, math books today from someone who appears to be turning into a complete zombie from lack of sleep, it could be me.

Serendipity. After two years of ignoring my family history project, I began receiving communications from people as soon as I took it back up. It has been one week and one day since I got started again, and I have heard from three complete strangers with interesting tidbits of information, without my having to ask anyone. Isn't email wonderful?

On the other hand, I have heard nothing from xanga homeschoolers. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Here is Hopkins, at an earlier stage of life, reposing on the hearth. It does look better from a distance, doesn't it?

The big news here is that #1 daughter and Son-in-Law are visiting. It is wonderful to see them. It had been over a year since they were able to visit. The sad thing is that #2 daughter cannot visit at the same time, as she has opera rehearsals.

Yesterday at work, a truck driver came in with the news that he had brought 8,000 pounds of books for us and intended to leave them at the back door. Being by myself at the time, with customers, I just thanked him. When the other workers arrived and we went out to start carrying in the books, we found -- not 11 pallets waiting for us, but an entire trailer! The driver had unhooked his cab and driven away.

So for two hours, we unpacked. I carried the boxes from the back of the truck to the front and That Man carried them into the store, and then he took a turn inside the truck and The Empress and I carried them in. The Poster Queen looked after the store and the dog. By the time the sun went down, I was filthy, with bruised arms and a bright red face and hair like a fright wig.

So I went home, where I had roasted a turkey in the morning, and found that my wonderful family had finished making dinner and thoroughly cleaned the kitchen. I just showered and sat down to enjoy the meal. What a great feeling!

I finally picked up the prints of my Christmas pictures, just in time to show #1 daughter, who -- hurrah! -- is here to visit.

In order to finish up that roll of film, I documented the Great Tidying of the Crafts Cupboard. Here is the messy "before," which had become a source of irritation and frustration. Notice the paper bag containing the shards of the antique plate my husband accidently broke, and which #2 daughter thought we could turn into a lovely mosaic. That hasn't happened yet.

Note also the welter of papers, chemicals, and sharp things spilling all over the place. Is this what you want to see when you go to get your #3 dpns? By no means!

Here is the "during" stage, in which I piled all the stuff on and around the kitchen table.

And here the triumphant "after" stage, when the cupboard has become, once again, a useful and pleasant thing. My yarn stash is in the bright green container on the second shelf. I am obviously a piker where yarn stashing is concerned. 

But this is the sort of crafts cupboard to which, if you have a school project or a sudden middle-of-the-night desire to try out a new technique, you can go with a pretty confident hope of finding the stuff you need.

#2 son made the mask on the wall here, by the way.

The Empress and That Man are endeavoring to tidy up the dreaded Back Room at work. It had reached levels of untidiness never even dreamed of by the Crafts Cupboard. They have unearthed lots of stuff, including many wonderful toys which I have been delivering to local childcare centers, feeling like Santa Claus as I do so.

My personal scores from their largesse include a neon "OPEN" sign which now graces #1 son's room, and many yards of canvas. I will have to think of something really cool to do with that.

It is Tuesday, family history day, so allow me to introduce to you my great-grandparents.

This is not the adventuresome great-grandfather of whom I have written before. This man, Armand, was the owner of a shoe factory of some sort. He had a hundred workers using "rafia" to make shoes. This is hard for me to understand. Perhaps they were espadrilles. Perhaps it was something other than what we now call raffia -- I know that it was imported from Africa, so it may have been a different fiber. So often a lack of knowledge of local history makes it difficult to understand exactly what an individual was doing.

At the time that this man was born in France, another ancestor of mine was making shoes in Quebec. They had no idea that they would have descendants in common, let alone in the United States.

I love this picture, though. I think that in it, my great-grandfather looks like a young Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's famous fictional detective. My sons think that Poirot, like TV detective Adrian Monk, had obssessive-compulsive disorder, but if so, he did not suffer from it. He gloried in it.

Poirot disliked knitting. "A woman did not look her best knitting," he thought in The Labors of Hercules."The absorption, the glassy eyes, the restless fingers!" The clicking of the needles irritated him, and he particularly disliked the use of variegated yarn. I cannot at the moment put my hand on the book in which his dislike of variegated yarn is expressed (I think it might be The Third Girl, but I have mislaid that book; it was not one of her best), but it seems to me that he said it had "no order, no method," this being one of his most common complaints. I do not think that this is what I have against variegated yarn (since Sighkey asked), but it could be. I have admitted before that order vs. disorder is one of the inescapable themes of my life. In church on Sunday we sang "Take from our souls the strain and stress and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace," and I think it is often true that order allows us peace and a lack of stress. Poirot took the whole thing too far, though.

I also like this picture of Armand in his later years. By the time I met him, he was bed-ridden and too ill to bother with visiting children, but I think I would have liked him.

 Armand lost his hearing in the first world war. His shoe factory closed down in 1955, when he was 76 years old. A cousin suggests that it was not profitable enough for the next generation to continue. There had been a dozen such businesses in the town of Pau before the war, and afterward only two or three remained. Again, greater knowledge of local history would probably make the individual history clearer.

I often thought of that when I was at the museum. A letter from an individual would say something like "We got the toms in" or refer to picking strawberries for a hat, and I would think that the descendants of those people, living perhaps in a city in some distant state, would have no clue to the meaning of those sentences. I have a 19th century letter from Ohio whose writer refers to "working on the bank" and I have no notion what he might have been doing. Perhaps someday I will find out.

Yesterday morning I sang in an anthem at my own church (terrible) and enjoyed a sermon by our associate pastor. I then headed out to the country Presbyterian church, where I sang along with some praise choruses, heard their anthem (also fairly terrible), enjoyed another sermon on the same text, and had a chance to see some folks I hadn't seen in a while. Our text (preached in all Presbyterian churches that morning) was about the importance of unity in the church. The first pastor pointed out that without some disunity, she wouldn't be standing in the pulpit, and we Protestants wouldn't have been there at all, which was an indisputable point which hadn't previously occurred to me. The second one cautioned us not to confuse unity with uniformity. It was interesting to hear two intelligent viewpoints on a single text. I was also reminded of the P.G. Wodehouse story "The Great Sermon Handicap." I did not learn anything about other denominations today, although the abstract topic of denominations came up in both sermons, so I had a chance to contemplate the subject.

I ordered this pattern for #1 son's quilt. I am hoping that the instructions with the pattern will be clear enough that I will be able to succeed with the stained-glass bit. It seems that you simply do ordinary applique, and then outline everything with black bias tape. If so, then I should be able to do the borders with Celtic knots from other sources and a bit of math. I could even use some Viking cable patterns.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. I must wait for the pattern to arrive. I tried to find it locally, but had no luck. I did, in the process, discover somethng I found startling: If you link to an Amazon book from a Brit's blog, you end up at amazon UK, where they have prices in pounds and "dispatch" things rather than send them. Okay, I was way too excited by that, but it felt as though I had gone through a magical cupboard or something.

Then I caught up on my scrapbooking, so I can show #1 daughter what we did in 2004. I made a big pot of lentil soup and a batch of whole wheat rolls and packed them all up in single servings in the freezer so I can easily grab a healthy lunch on my way to work. That was enough for one day -- back to my knitting while the guys watched football. Apparently the outcome of the games yesterday determines who will play in the Superbowl.

Hopkins is getting bigger. I like the fretwork. It makes the variegation more tolerable, and from a distance is quite nice. It occurs to me that I have not given the details about the patterns. Who knows, there may be someone out there who wants to recreate this sweater in spite of my continual badmouthing of it.

The shaping is that of Siv, from E. Lavold's Viking Patterns for Knitting. The colorwork is from charts in A. Starmore's Celtic Collection. The large band at the bottom is from Erin, which I plan to make according to the pattern (or pretty close, for me) for my next big project. The fretwork is from Roscrea. Both were designed with bright colors in mind, and you can see Erin in even brighter colors on this blog: http://tricofolk.free.fr/blog.htm

I did get my house cleaned up, with a bit of help from my boys. Good thing, too, because no sooner was I ensconced on my couch with Hopkins (that's a sweater, for those who do not possess total recall), but one of the Methodists came to my door.

Toby the stupid dog (I am not being unkind here, I'm just distinguishing him from Fiona the glasses-wearing dog) went into his Cujo imitation and had to be removed from the room. I invited the nice lady to sit down, feeling extremely thankful that we had done at least some of the needed housework -- and then there I was in a very constrained state.

While I would have enjoyed discussing Toplady and Wesley, and I would really like to know the theological specs for Methodism, and I am dying to know about their music program -- I did not want to tell her that I am a member of another church and not happy there. Since she was wearing an eyelash-yarn scarf (bright pink), I also wanted to ask her if she was a knitter, and learn more about their knitting ministry -- but without making it clear that I am engaged in church shopping. In short, there were lots of things I wanted to ask, and many lively discussions that could have resulted, but I was carefully avoiding telling her anything. So all her polite questions, which carried the under-message "Why did you come to our church and are you coming back?", I treated as though they were small talk on a bus. I didn't even offer the woman a cup of tea.

With some advance warning, I could have done better. However, at my church, a person could visit any number of times in complete anonymity. No one would ever come to your house, for heaven's sake. Does this mean that my church is stuffy and unfriendly, or that Methodism is more evangelical than Presbyterianism? It did make me want to go back to her church.

This experience will not cause me to give up my scientific approach. Today, I am going to the 8:30 service at my own church (this is my solution to the whole guilt problem -- I am singing at the early service and then conducting my search), and then I will go to the country Presbyterian church. This church has the advantage of being within my current denomination, and has a charming old building and a really nice pastor. It has the disadvantage of being rather far away -- in fact, I am not sure I will be able to get there without getting lost. It also has the disadvantage of being a praise-music church. Praise music is okay, it's fun to sing and all, but it isn't Bach, is it?

I've done the armhole shaping on Hopkins's front and am heading up to the neck. By the time I get there, I will I hope have decided how to pattern the back.

It took me 17 minutes to go all the way around the Yarn, Ho! blogring. That includes clicking, reading, and commenting. There are 19 of us in the Yarn, Ho!s. There are 605 in the Knitting Blogring. I think this means that I will never make it all the way around the ring.

Nonetheless, I am planning to visit some other rings. Among my goals for this year is a work-related goal: to make our store more useful to our homeschooling families. So I am asking the homeschooling xanga-ites for help: what would make your local school supply or educational toy store more useful to you? Would you like workshops? Are there particular products you'd like to be able to buy locally? Are there kinds of help or support that would make a difference to you? I will appreciate your responses enormously. Thanks! I intend to post this message hither and yon on the xanga homeschool rings, in hopes that the power of xanga will help me make our store the best possible resource for the homeschool families of the area. I think the Mighty Mouse theme music would be a good sound track for this.

Here is the completed dull sock.The plain stockinette top has given it a lovely, loose, slouchy grunge-type feel to match the grunge mittens. I will now commence another just like it. Well, not right now, because as you can see from this picture (taken with my toy camera, which always gives an impressionist air), my house is an appalling mess. I would like to pretend that it is just a few extra papers on the visible computer desk and window seat, but in fact, a picture taken almost anywhere in my house right now would show a similar degree of untidiness. So I have my work cut out for me.