I am reading Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett. I think that this book, being a humorous tale about three witches, with heavy influences from Macbeth, caused me to hear the prayer shawl group cackling.
There were conversations going on like
"Aside from her bossiness, we get on real well" and
"Doesn't she have a degree in something?" "So she says."
We did not know any of the people involved, so I cannot say whether this was gossip or mere plainspokenness. But probably the ladies were just laughing robustly, not cackling. It just sounded like cackling. One of them remarked that the good part about being old was retirement and menopause (she phrased it more plainspokenly) and they all cackled, or possibly laughed robustly.
The divine Mrs. M's husband came in and shook hands with us all rather solemnly, upon which note Mrs. M remarked that he felt there was too much frivolity. I figure you can frivol a bit in a knitting group, though.
In addition to the elderly ladies, there was one young girl and a large woman about my own age attired in lace-edged fuschia stretch capri pants. And #2 daughter and me. #2 daughter began her prayer shawl. She is using the "Windsor" colorway. Some of the ladies were edging theirs in eyelash yarn instead of making fringe. One of the ladies was using Trinity stitch. One was crocheting. There was also quite a range of knitting styles. Everyone holds her hands a little differently. One lady used straight needles and anchored one under her arm, a style I have read of but never seen before. And the lady in fuschia held a lacquered finger straight out along her needle the whole time. You don't want to stare, do you? But I found it intriguing. I sort of wanted to talk about knitting, and find out how everyone had learned and so on, but with car accidents, health crises, and the man who painted his silo to look like a roll of Life Savers, there just wasn't time.
Then came book club. We discussed Kitchen, and also The Blind Assassin, last month's book. The novel Middlesex was proposed for next month -- a touching read about hermaphroditism and incest, apparently. We were not all up for that as a summer read, so we compromised on Lolita, a classic which some of us have not read for years and some have not read at all. Its subject matter is unpleasant enough. This was followed by a good talk with La Bella. In all, a very social day, for me. Then I came home and worked further on the quilt. I will show it to you someday.

This is a picture from our hike. #2 son is running pellmell down the path, arms and hair flying.
Pokey is trying to teach me how to put in pictures by this alternate method (known by the mystic symbol "html"), since xanga still hates me. So far, I cannot actually do it by myself, and the pictures must be in her photobucket. I wrote to xanga about the problem. I got a very real-sounding response signed "Chris" suggesting things I could do to my computer that might help. Deluded into believing that Chris existed and was actually corresponding with me, I wrote back pointing out again that my daughter could -- on the selfsame computer -- do all she wanted with her xanga. It was just my xanga that wasn't working, so it couldn't be my machine. I quickly received another copy of the exact same missive from the supposed Chris. Oh well. I may be able to learn to work around this. Or not. I am practicing. Either I will develop the skills to post things without xanga's assistance, or it will begin working again, one or the other. My subscription comes up for renewal in another week or two, so I have a logical deadline for it.
But do not be fooled by this Chris person.

This week I am working from Tuesday to Saturday, so today is my day off for the week. #2 daughter and I are going to class at the gym, and then to the Prayer Shawl ministry meeting, and then to Book Club. We are discussing Kitchen, a book by Banana Yoshimoto. I cannot underline or italicize the title, let alone show you the cover, so I hope you are not confused. This is because xanga hates me, Pokey says, and she should know.
I am looking forward to the Prayer Shawl meeting. I am normally at work at this time, so I have not attended one before. In fact, I have not attended a knitting group meeting of any kind. I have been in groups where someone other than myself also happens to be knitting, but never in an intentional knitting group.
#2 daughter has set them up in her dormitory, so she will be the experienced one. I will be interested to hear how the experiences compare.
This will also be an opportunity for us to meet more people from our (relatively) new church. If you are in the choir, you get to know your fellow choristers, but not the other people in the church. You are up in the choir loft, and during the post-service socializing you are off in the choir room. You have to make an effort to get to know people. This is such a friendly church that there is less effort involved than at many others, but there is still some effort required. So this can be part of that effort.
Actually, yesterday we made a bit of a breakthrough with the organist. He is a really good organist, but apparently very shy. Our previous attempts to speak with him, together or separately, have failed, as he mutters something, looks at the floor, and scuttles off. But yesterday he stopped in the hallway when we spoke to him, made eye contact, and said several words. The best of the words was "Pachelbel."
Those of you who know us in person and are thinking that we are scary people are mistaken. We are kind, unassuming people, mild-mannered and soft-spoken. There is nothing about us that ought to frighten an organist.
I still cannot show you pictures or give you links. I am finding this irritating. What does it say about my character that I am irritated by so small a thing? Pokey said I could show you a picture by doing this:

However, I find that this does not result in a picture. You must imagine the current prayer shawl in that place. I am knitting it in the Pacifica colorway, a combination that will remind you (as you imagine the picture) of the reflection of sunrise on that film of water that lies across the sand in the early mornings. Do you hear the seagulls?

Except that now, some hours later, it does result in a picture, because Pokey came in an added a lot of things like "img.photobucket" and "v211." It is not the same as pushing the button and getting to put in pictures, but I do get to show you my prayer shawl.

This is not fibermom but her daughter. I have hijacked her site in order to find a solution to her non-posting Xanga problem.

Also the Xangazon question.

It is still not working.

We spent all of yesterday morning doing errands. We went to the farmers' market, where we met friends, admired dogs and children, bought eggs, bread, fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and also got in a little bit of a walk. We finished up at the LYS, where we were able to admire lots of novelty yarns, but not to buy a set of handles for the gray Sophie bag, nor a couple of skeins of non-variegated sock yarn. We still enjoyed the visit, squeezing and patting the yarns and admiring their sample pieces.
Next stop was the Co-op, the local health food store, where we replenished our supplies of bulk foods and did a search for hot chocolate mixes which were not produced by child labor. There were not many choices, so the idea of blind taste tests is currently on the shelf. However, there are at least two choices. Since I live in such a small town, I am sure that you, too, can make this change if you need to. I think that a few dozen people will come and read this, so that will be a few dozen people who are aware of this problem. (Don't know what I am talking about? Go to stolenchildhoods.org and get up to speed.) Then, if each of you will just mention this to one other person, we will all have done something toward making a solution. We also bought fair trade coffee, another simple step that we can all take.
We also visited the library, the crafts store, where we were able to find a set of handles for the gray Sophie, the video game store, the grocery, the bank, the pharmacy, and a couple of clothing stores for #1 son's swim trunks. Just for the record, that is way too many errands for me.
Arriving home, we surrendered to sloth. We watched videos and knitted and ate junk food all afternoon. I put our vacation photos in the scrapbook at one point, and cut back the raggedy sailors (you may also know them as cornflowers or bachelor's buttons or centaurea) that were growing to unseemly heights in the front border, and #2 daughter made some phone calls. The guys all went out with friends after a bit. But mostly we lazed. It must be summer.
I would show you my knitting, but xanga still will not allow me to do so. Sigh.
Well, happy Father's Day to you all. We intend to make this dessert:

#2 Daughter's Chocolate Nemesis

2 sticks butter, 12 oz 70% bittersweet chocolate, 5 large eggs, 1 c sugar, 7 T water

Grease cake pan and line with parchment paper. Melt chocolate in double boiler and remove from heat. Beat eggs with 1/3 c sugar until mixture forms a ribbon. Heat remaining sugar with water over moderately low heat, stirring till syrup is clear. Pour into chocolate, stirring to combine, and then cool 10 minutes. Add chocolate and eggs slowly, beating till combined. Pour into cake pan. Set pan into water bath and bake at 300 degrees for 1 hour, till set. Cool completely before removing pan from water bath. Turn out and serve.

With morally irreproachable chocolate, of course.

Xanga continues to be uncooperative with me. I am able to post on a sort of alternate page, but it will not let me show you pictures or books or anything like that. I cannot read your comments, either. I do not know what I have done to offend xanga.
No matter. In our last thrilling installment, we had determined that Nestle was among the bad guys in the child labor issue. Chez Fibermom, we care a lot about these things. I try to buy locally as much as possible, and otherwise to make sure that the companies I support financially are also companies I can support philosophically. But my children are hot chocolate fans and I, like my mother before me, have always bought those cartons of Carnation instant hot chocolate. It is one of the few convenience foods to be found in my kitchen. And it is made by Nestle. Fortunately, my kids have bravely agreed to try other brands of hot chocolate.
So we began our search for a chocolate company with clean hands. This is not as easy as you might think. Nestle has plants in Cote d'Ivoire, and observers saw bags of beans labeled to be sent to them, at plantations with child labor. They are a clear case. Yet there are plenty of ambiguities.
For example, Lindt (Ghirardelli's parent company) is the source of the occasional eating chocolate around here. They say that they are committed to human rights and working with other European chocolatiers to end the problem in Cote d'Ivoire. They also say that the chain from cacoa bean to chocolatier is so long that they cannot guarantee that they have no tainted chocolate. Observers did not find direct evidence of a connection between Lindt and child labor, so this company may be okay.
There are companies -- Cadbury and Rapunzel, for example -- which buy their cacao only from growers known to them. There are others which buy only South American cacao. Fair Trade certification for chocolate exists, just as it does for coffee (another industry with serious child labor problems) and tea. These seem like solutions to the problem. Some people have simply given up chocolate entirely.
But the chocolate industry points out that result of an overall chocolate boycott, or a boycott of chocolate from the Ivory Coast, would also be to take away the livelihood of the people who are not using child labor or slave labor, in a region of desperate poverty.
Even the plantations that use child labor are in a bit of a cleft stick. In a fairy tale, they would free the children, reunite them with their families, and perhaps build a nice school for them all to attend. In real life, Nestle could do that, but small growers are stuck with the children. They cannot send them away with no source of support. They cannot adopt them all. They cannot, in many cases, return them to the families that sold them, because they have been bought by middlemen and do not know where they came from. And of course their families sold them, and may not want them back. We are a long way, here, from the happy M&Ms on the TV.
We are starting with the small step of removing Nestle from our house. Blind taste tests are planned. I'll let you know how it turns out.
On a lighter note, but still within the category of consumer information, here is a review of Booksfree.
I have been with Booksfree (find them at Booksfree.com) for two months. Their service is simple. They send you books in the mail. You read them and send them back and they send you some more. If you are familiar with Netflix, then you understand Booksfree. The service is simple and works well. The selection is large, and the site is easy to navigate. The books are obviously used, but not in bad condition. Each package contains an envelope to return the books in, and you must not lose that envelope while you read the books, but most of us can handle that.
I have the "four books at a time" plan. Ideally, I send them a package of books each Friday and receive a package from them each Friday, so I will have two books a week. I will pause for a moment so you can work that out. A calendar and a couple of toy trucks will make it clearer. Because of the vagaries of the mails, however, it doesn't always work that way. In two months I have actually received 14 books, which works out to 1.6 books per week. However, you can have as many as 12 books at a time.
Is it a good deal? At $12.99 per month, it works out to $1.86 per title. Your results would probably be better if you live East of the Mississippi, and worse if you are a slow reader. But with new paperbacks going for $6.99 to $14.95, this is clearly not a bad deal. Even used books are going to run you more than $1.86. For books that you would buy, read once, and then throw out or sell at a garage sale, this is a vast improvement. The only cheaper way to read would be the library (obviously your best bet if you are looking mostly at cost).
Now, I read about three books a week, I think, so Booksfree is not providing all my reading material. There are books I want to own, books that Booksfree does not stock, books I reread, books I borrow from other readers or from the library, and books that I want to be able to read at the lake without worrying about spoiling them. In combination with these, Booksfree works perfectly for me. A steady supply of books appearing in the mailbox with no great effort on my part is certainly worth the subscription fee.
As with Netflix, the only real drawback seems to be that you cannot choose a particular book at a particular time. I cannot, for example, use it confidently for book club. You could not decide that you were in the mood for P.G. Wodehouse and just have some right then. These services are for those of us who are flexible about what we read or watch.
On the fiber front, I have begun another prayer shawl and am working on the T-shirt and the quilt, but xanga will not let me show you these things, so it will just have to wait.

We tend to use military metaphors a lot. Our "war against terrorism," the "war on poverty," battles against cancer and other diseases. But NPR has reported a victory that seems worth calling a victory: the people who pick tomatoes for Taco Bell have gotten the mega-corporation that owns Taco Bell to buy only from growers who pay a decent wage to their workers.
Having spent many years trying to persuade Florida's tomato growers to do the right thing, the pickers (who earned an average of $12,000 a year, here in the United States) realized that the growers didn't really have the power in the situation. It was actually the company -- Yum Foods -- that bought the tomatoes. They set the prices, which determined what the growers -- who were not themselves getting rich -- could pay the farm workers.
So they banded together with college students, the Presbyterian Church USA, and other not particularly powerful groups to work on persuading Taco Bell to change their ways. After write-in campaigns (we all wrote to Taco Bell to let them know that we would happily pay an extra 15 cents per taco, which was the estimated cost to the consumer) and a four-year boycott, Yum Foods gave in.
Here's why this matters to you, even if you are not a farm worker trying to support a family on $12,000 p.a.
Our government is not going to do anything about people working in poverty. They do not care. But we, the consumers, have a great deal of power. If, for example, we consumers refuse to buy anything produced with child labor, then the multi-nationals will have to give up child labor. It is that simple. The same force of the marketplace that has led to floods of "low-carb" items in the grocery could also lead to an end to child labor.
Now, if you have ever thought about slavery in the early years of American history, and wondered why people went along with it, here is the answer to your question. Take for example the chocolate industry. There are between 10,000 and 15,000 children of school age working on chocolate plantations on the Ivory Coast. They are slaves. They have been sold by their families in some cases, but none of them is old enough to have chosen to take these jobs. None of us would allow our children to do what these children are doing. If you buy things made by Nestle company, then you are supporting slavery. You, like many slave-owners and the people who benefited from their production, are supporting slavery because it would be inconvenient for you to do otherwise.
You might not have known this before today. But now you know. So if you continue to buy products made by Nestle, then you are now supporting slavery.
Nestle is not the only company involved, but they have a major presence in Cote d'Ivoire, and are also a major brand in the U.S. Persuading them to take this problem seriously -- which means persuading them that American shoppers take this problem seriously -- would lead to change.
You can get more information on this subject by going to stolenchildhoods.org. If you intend to watch the film clips, you should have your handkerchief handy, because they are heartbreaking. But the very good news is that you can help. Consumers -- not rich, powerful people, but ordinary citizens who chose to be responsible consumers -- helped the farm workers in Florida to force a rich powerful corporation to do the right thing. You and I, by refusing to support child slavery in Cote d'Ivoire, can help end this disgraceful situation. That would be a worthy victory.

We're busy at work, both with the amount of shopping going on and with new stuff arriving. When new things come in, we have to re-arrange everything to find places for it, so there is a good deal of manual labor going on as well.

Yesterday the state of Oklahoma came to shop -- well, not the entire state, but it obviously was grant-disburstment time in the Sooner state. We had boxes labelled "Killer" and variations (Fourkiller, Mankiller -- these are not common names where I live, but over the border they are) all over the shop waiting for delivery, and folks shopping with purchase orders for as much as we sell in a normal morning.

We also had a request for our house plan book -- the one we make ourselves. We do not make one ourselves, I'm afraid. The Empress tells me that we could have one done for us with the usual stuff inside and our name on the outside, and maybe we should. The Poster Queen has gone to the beach for her vacation, and of course I am glad that she is having a vacation, but sorry that she wasn't there for that request. I think I would have enjoyed her reaction.

Number two daughter and I began T-shirts in Plymouth Stone Cotton. Mine is a few rows along, and she is still swatching.

Number one daughter was, when last heard from, still waiting for her husband's return from the briny deep. Apparently, they got back to the base safely, but then there was some trouble with getting the boat plugged in. I am imagining something like a cell phone recharger here, or just an enormous electric plug that goes into an outlet on the pier. I am sure that is not accurate. In any case, if you are a submariner, you cannot leave your boat until you get it plugged in, so the guys were all still out there working with the cables and whatnot. I hope that by now daughter and son-in-law are reunited.

Here is some roving, nice fleecy wool. The fibers are only very loosely connected, and can be pulled apart with no great effort.

And here is a bit of felt, strong enough for any amount of pulling with tooth and claw.

What's the difference?

 Felting is the process of turning fluffy wool into a strong, thick fabric that will neither unravel (as knitting will) nor ravel (as weaving will).

You can begin by making the wool into yarn, or having that bit done for you, and using knitting or crochet to produce a shape which you then felt, or full, using heat, agitation, and soap to turn it into felt. This is how the traditional French beret is made.

The book Caveman Chemistry explains how the formation of raw wool into thread mirrors the formation of polymers. It also outlines the possible dangers of spinning and how to avoid them. This bit is just because all the chapters have a section on dangers (most of them being about making gunpowder, etc.) and the author didn't want this chapter to be left out. You can tell he doesn't have his heart in it.

This page clearly explains spinning, and shows you how.

I knitted two Sophie bags with the same yarn. The green one used smaller needles, and looked like normal knitting before I felted it. The gray one used needles which would be too big for this yarn under normal circumstances, and so it had to be felted down more severely.

On the left is the gray Sophie bag before felting. After felting, it looks like this:

We have put books in it to give it the rectangular shape we want. There are still no handles. You might notice that in the unfelted picture, the bag takes up the full width of the bench. After felting, there are a couple of inches of bench left over. So the bag is a good deal smaller, and much thicker, than before it was felted. It also can -- until it dries -- be manhandled into roughly the shape you want.

The green Sophie bag, with handles, is slouchier. It has not been felted as severely as the gray one. It is softer, and maintains its original knitted shape pretty much. Much of this kind of difference is controlled during the felting process -- how much hot water and agitation do you use? The gray bag went through a full wash cycle in hot water and spent a few minutes in the dryer, too. The green one just had a bit of a rinse and spin.

To the right, you can see the felted fabrics. The stitches are gone, essentially. Both are felt now. Sigh. There is always something a little sad about that for me, although I have now gotten used to it. The exact texture you end up with in your felted stuff depends largely on the yarn you use. Things like cables and other texturework lose their character during felting.

A third example is the coaster below. It used to be a normal sweater, and has been so severely felted that it is not just felted -- it is felt. I cut a circle out of it, something which of course cannot normally be done with knitting.  Such thorough felting gets rid of the stitch texture entirely and blurs the colorwork, too. It no longer appears knitted. I felted a batch of old wool sweaters by completely washing and drying them in hot water, by machine. I cut them up and made a patchwork throw out of them, and coasters from the scraps. There is, by the way, an old CD in the middle of the coaster, to make it firmer.

Now, the hat on the right was never knitted. The fibers were pushed together so aggressively that they became felt without any intermediate steps. The shape of this kind of felting depends on using a form of some kind. It is then fulled -- that is, worked and shrunken down. You could say that the knitted pieces were fulled, too. The swirl designs were put onto the surface of this before it was felted, and they were just pushed right into the surface by the felting process -- which involved dribbling the thing around like a basketball. We're talking serious agitation here.

Note that this process requires wool. You can't do this with cotton, flax, fur, or even the fiber of the lovely acrylic plant. They will just laugh at you. That wool does this at all is sort of like magic. Or at least like chemistry.

I enjoyed my first day back at work. We did have a little girl who took off her diaper and hid it in the math manipulatives, then ran through the store bare-bottomed while her mother tried in vain to find the article of clothing in question. And there were some odd phone calls. But this sort of thing livens up the day and gives us something to talk about. The thing that gives me an opportunity to practice patience and compassion (and we all need these opportunities, don't we?) is grade book shopping.

The season for grade book shopping has just begun. We have had only a few people in so far looking for their grade books or plan books. My public position on both is that they are like contacts or brassieres: very individual, and very important. Since you use them every day, you have to have exactly the right ones, and all the little details are important.

This position reflects, I think, the views of our customers, and it is therefore a real, though perhaps specialized, sort of truth. However, just in case you are not familiar with grade books and plan books, let me tell you about them. They are spiral bound books of pages full of squares. Plan books have big squares. Grade books have small squares. You could pull pages from every single grade book and plan book in existence, and a randomly chosen observer would be unable to see any significant differences among them.

We carry, at the height of grade book shopping season, about three dozen different ones. Thick ones, thin ones. Bright covers, plain covers, cute patterned covers, pretty covers. Ones with blue lines, ones with brown lines. No underwires, but otherwise, one would think our selection would suffice for any reasonable person.

And, invariably, we do not have the precise one that the customer seeks.

At this point, it is very difficult for me not to say, "Oh, for heaven's sake, they're all alike! Just pick one!" But I do not do this. I ask probing questions to determine why none of the ones on the shelf will do and try to figure out which grade book might fulfill the desires of the customer. This is good for my character.

Here is a toy camera picture of the second felted hat. Below and to the right is a close-up picture so you can see the surface decoration. I think we are getting the hang of it.

 I intend to write about felting (Sighkey has inspired me to do so) but not yet. I also intend to write about camping, but also not yet. The fact is, I am having a personal problem, and do not feel like writing anything except whiny things. I cannot whine effectively about either felting or camping, so they will have to wait until I either solve my problem or get over feeling whiny about it, whichever comes first.

Kelty[plus numbers] has an intriguing picture at her xanga of a bunch of men knitting in their underwear. They are all standing up while knitting, which is intended either to make them look more manly or to show off the underwear. Kelty also says that people are maggots, so she could proabably use some cheering up while you're over there.

I am going back to work today. Also back to the gym, back to a regular schedule of housekeeping, back to normal altogether -- except the summer version of normal, of course. I enjoyed my vacation, but I will enjoy returning to the usual, too.

Another Sophie bag. It will be a gift, but not a surprise, because I didn't want to use my last feltable skein on something the recipient wouldn't want. It is the same yarn (different color) but much larger needles. This is how it is supposed to be done -- big, loose knitting that is then felted down severely. However, my stitch markers do not fit these needles, so I gave them up and am therefore having to do a good deal more counting than with the first. No matter. This is still very easy knitting. A good first project, particularly since the stitches disappear into the felt -- if you make errors, no one will ever know.

I have not yet decided about the handles. I have another pair of handles, but the recipient of this gift doesn't care for them. I don't care for the original handles, myself. I have seen some nice beaded ones at other blogs, and some bamboo circles at the craft store. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.