If you are a really credulous person, and thought that The Da Vinci Code was based on reality, or if you are interested in early church history, you might like to read this book. It is clear, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented.

I am enjoying it, as Holy Week begins. We had palm fronds waved in church, and sang some cool stuff. Then we had a pleasant lunch with my parents, and a visit from a fellow knitter, who obligingly admired my WIPs.

One of the things I was working on this weekend, along with the things I had actually planned to accomplish, was this origami wallet. It was designed by origami expert Oschene, who kindly helped me figure it out.

The idea is that you can just tuck a few cards in and slip it in your pocket. Sometimes a couple of cards is all you need. Sometimes, of course, you also need your lipstick, agenda, pen, lunch, water bottle, paperback, and knitting -- but in such cases, it is easy to grab the little wallet with your license and debit card, and tuck it into your purse.

If you want to see the really clever way it works, you should click on the link above. I have linked to it a couple of times already, so I am going to assume that you have already looked at it.

Once I had finally grasped the concept in paper, it was not too difficult to convert it to fabric. Perhaps someday you will want to do the same. With this in mind, I took pictures while I went through the process.

So, to begin the origami wallet in fabric, I cut a scrap of fabric to the shape and size of the pattern. Then I ironed on interfacing to stiffen up the cloth.

I determined that I really only needed interfacing for the center, traced the pattern of folds onto the interfacing, and ironed it on.

The part without interfacing ends up being folded in, so there is no need to finish the edges.

Next, I pressed the folds, according to the pattern.

Since I had made this a couple of times in paper, I knew which ones needed pressing, and which I could just fold later.

Pressing just at the very edge seems to work best -- you don't end up pressing out the folds you made earlier.

And, no, I don't have an ironing board. It was my mother who pointed out to me that, if you own an iron and ironing board, people expect you to iron things. It's better to keep the whole process fairly primitive, in order to discourage this. I don't know how to type properly, for the same reason.

Here are the "later" folds all done. It begins to look like a wallet.

There is a whole flap-and-tucking thing going on here that obviates the need for side seams.

However, since it is fabric, I did just catch the edges together at the top with a couple of invisible stitches. This might have been completely unnecessary. However, I had at one point considered doing a blanket stitch around all the edges with perle cotton, so this was restrained.

 

And here I have folded the pressed folds.

At this point, it looks like an origami wallet.

Unfortunately, in spite of the interfacing, it doesn't behave like an origami wallet. Every time I open it, it relaxes into the shape in the previous picture, and has to be folded back into its final shape again. This is where paper clearly has an advantage over fabric for origami. Those cranes you were thinking of making out of satin? Forget it.

Dweezy and Oschene both suggested starching the fabric so it would behave more like paper, and that would probably be worth trying.  Since I did not have any starch, though, I just forged ahead.

I did some sashiko-inspired stitching along the pressed lines in hopes of improving the fabric's memory, but it still didn't pop into shape the way I wanted it to.

At this point, I strayed from proper origami form. Well, yes, there is the whole fabric aspect, but the thing I refer to is the fact that proper origami doesn't ever include fasteners. Even tape is frowned upon.

This is why I am adding props to the pictures: to distract you from this fact.

You can hardly see, in this photo, that I have gotten into the leftover wedding trims box and added a couple of pearl beads and rouleau loops to the wallet. The rose canes and leaves prevent you from seeing this, but really, they are not very obvious in person, either.

 

I simply sewed them onto the points of contact: the beads at the bottom of the folded rectangle, and the loops at the center top corner of each "card" section.

Now, by simply pulling a bead through each loop, I can instantly remind the wallet of how it is supposed to fold up.

I can actually also remove and insert cards without unfolding it at all. It is a more elegant version of that library card pocket sort of thing some people carry their cards around in.

 

Actually, I don't think it really needs distracting props. It's pretty cute, isn't it?

My appetite for fabric origami has only been whetted, not satisfied.

I have found a couple of origami-inspired purses described online, and I have a slightly larger scrap of this fabric left. I am thinking that I will try one of the others as well. I will have a matched set of bags.

Assuming I can figure out the directions, that is.

I might not do it this week. The bagalong deadline is not till April 30, and this particular week is feeling a little full already. Today I have to take a kid to the dentist and do a workshop in a neighboring town. tomorrow I have a CAPS conference and a UMW meeting. Wednesday is dress rehearsal, and there are services on Thursday and Friday nights, and then houseguests arrive and I will have 10 for Easter dinner. Somewhere in there I need to clean house and bake and do something about the garden.

I thought you might like some pictures of spring, especially those of you in the Frozen North having winter and those in Kiwi-a-go-go-land having autumn.

We're having communication problems chez fibermom. For one thing, if you are talking to a robot on the phone, you have to be careful. #2 son talks to robots all the time, but I always hang up when they call me. I figure, if it's not worth the time of a human, then it's not worth my time, seeing as how I am a human. I therefore have limited experience in talking with robots.

But in this case I had called someone, and suddenly found that I was speaking with a robot. Because of my limited experience, it took me a while to grasp that I could talk back to it, rather than pushing buttons on the phone. And then, once I got the hang of that, I made my big mistake. It said it wanted to ask me something, and I said "Okay."

 This put the robot out of sync. It seemed to believe that it had already asked me the question, and that I was giving it the wrong answer. I tried saying, "What was the question again?" I tried saying, "Could I talk with a human, please?" It didn't work.  It kept saying, "That is also incorrect." It put me on hold. I waited for fifteen minutes, in case there was going to be a human involved in the discussion at some point, but it kept playing misogynistic music at me, and eventually I gave up.

We are also having trouble with mail. We want to send a letter to Laos. Unfortunately, while we have the address in Lao, we cannot figure out how to change it into our alphabet.

My husband wrote down "ngon" and "ngohn" and said, "How would you say those?" This was in the nature of an experiment to determine the most likely spellings. I retaliated by writing down "John" and "Jon." "How would you say those?" I asked him.

We are not sure that you have to change the address into our alphabet, for that matter, but cannot find anyone who knows the answer to this question. The post office says it is best to write in English, but I am not sure that an idiosyncratic guess counts as "English." We are thinking that perhaps just writing "LAOS" in large letters would get it to where people could read it in the Lao alphabet. However, there are a lot of people who would not recognize "LAOS" as a country, so we are uncertain about that.

My husband said, "Everyone in Laos speaks French! Just write it in French."  He gave me pencil and paper and recited the names of the towns and instructed me to write them down in French, as though that would be more successful than trying to write it down in English. I was, meanwhile, pointing out that -- while Laos was a French colony when my husband was born -- it has not been one for a long time. What made him think everyone in Laos would still speak French, I wanted to know. I may have been frowning.

Following that pointless exercise, we called the people we are sending it to, in Laos, and he asked them to spell their address for me in French.

I have no idea what they said, but it was punctuated on both sides of the conversation with loud "Oy!"s and wild laughter.

They recommended writing their phone number on the envelope, with a note telling the postmen to call them when it arrived, and they would just go get it.

Lao always sounds very emotional to me. Once, early in our marriage, I was a silent and uncomprehending participant in a conversation. People were going "Oy!" (a sound requiring at least an octave between the beginning of the word and the end of it) and much gesturing and many papers were being waved around. Later, I asked my husband what they had been talking about. Whether an "E" on a child's report card meant "excellent" or was between D and F, he explained, surprised that I hadn't realized that.

So we continued dithering about how to write the address. Meanwhile, I went to the bank to get some form of money to send in the envelope.

A couple of the workers were debating the best way to do this and making phone calls to check, when I noticed a third teller. She looked like a Lao girl. Her hair covered part of her name tag, but I could see that her name began with an X. I heard her speak to another customer, and she spoke English like my own kids. What a miracle! I was thinking. A Lao-American right there in the bank!

I stared at her, politely, I hoped, until she joined in our discussion.

Her parents sent money to Laos all the time, she said. I was delighted. I was about to pull the envelope from my purse to ask her opinion, when she said, "Is it 'Sabaidee'? Is that 'hello'?" My heart sank. This girl spoke less Lao than I.

Well, so do my kids, if it comes to that.

I asked her how her parents sent money -- did they use a money order?

"Oh," she said, "They just send cash."

It is specifically forbidden to mail cash to Laos. I had learned this from the post office.

We just put the money order in, and bunged down some letters which we hope will get the envelope to some place where they know the guy it is addressed to.

#2 son and I took it to the post office. I asked whether it could be registered, or have delivery confirmation. "Nope," the clerk said firmly.

We relinquished the envelope to her anyway.

We took these cheering pictures, picked up #1 son from his ACT test, took him out for a birthday lunch, and got him home in time to leave for a climbing competition. He had only climbed once before, and yet made it into the top five in the beginning class. As a prize, he won a marvelous Gerber Nautilus, sort of like a Swiss Army Knife for climbers. A nice thing to happen on his birthday -- perhaps enough to make up for having to take the ACT on his birthday.

Then we finally had time for him to open his presents. There were just a few, as he wants a sound system for his car, and the main present is a promise to take him to shop for such a thing. I had gotten him Da Vinci's Challenge, a cool new game. Unfortunately, the box had two sets of light pieces, rather than one of light and one of dark. Rather like opening your new chess set and finding that it contains two sets of white chessmen.

So we could not play the game. Instead, he spent the evening lying on the couch watching DVDs and ordering people around with the plaintive cry "It's my birthday!" He probably enjoyed that just as much.

Following all this excitement, I did some hemming and some knitting. I started the fourth ball of Regal Orchid yarn. Here is the beginning of the lace on the Regal Orchid Jasmine sweater.

As we all know, unblocked lace looks like nothing at all. But I think it will turn out nicely.

I also did a bit of experimentation with the origami wallet. I can fold it from the printed-out pattern pretty well. But I want to make a more permanent one in cloth. So I tried it in a soft handmade paper, as a sort of intermediary step. This type of paper doesn't take a crease the way ordinary paper does, and is much more fibrous and cloth-like.

As you see, it doesn't hold the folds well, and rounds a bit at the corners. I made an initial attempt with a piece of cloth, too, but there is no point in my showing you that, because it really doesn't keep its shape at all.

Fortunately, I know cloth. Pressing, interfacing, and if necessary topstitching will tame a piece of cloth.

It is Palm Sunday, and we are meeting my parents for lunch, so there may be limited time for pursuing my origami, but I intend to give it a try.

Well, I am very chuffed! If you go to this page, you will find that the clever origami designer mentioned below has kindly posted step-by-step directions with photographs. The clever origami wallet can be made in about ten minutes by a complete tyro. And let me just tell you, for future reference, that when folding origami from patterns covered with red and blue lines, you do not simply start at the upper left and work your way across and down the page as though reading. In fairness, it must be said that Pokey was able to figure it out on her own.

Next, fabric.

I have been tagged. I am supposed to list six weird habits, or six weird things about me.

I am finding this difficult. This is because I am convinced that I am extremely normal. (For some reason, other people do not agree with me on this, but I am at a loss to explain that.) I went to college, got married, had a couple of children in the eighties and was successful with my career. In the nineties, I had a couple more, downsized, moved to the country, stayed home with my kids, homeschooled.

Then I went back to work at something more low-key, we moved back into town, the kids went back to public school, and we had a million activities to drive to. We did a lot of camping, family game nights, all that. We had prom, college applications, a wedding. Then I had more time for my own interests and took up some really ordinary hobbies -- singing in choirs, gardening, needlework, Book Club, blogging.

I go to the gym, do a little volunteer work, shop at the farmer's market, visit with friends.

It seems to me that I am an absolutely iconic normal woman of the turn of the century. I could be used in history lessons in future centuries as an exmaple of my times.

However, I admit that there are some statistically uncommon things about me.

1. I started college at 14.

2. I have agoraphobia. I discovered this last year when I found a list of weird things, all of which were true of me. I think it would be cheating for me to list these things as my weird characteristics, so I will avoid that.

3. I am subject to bursts of enthusiasm. That is, I find myself fascinated by something or other and must pursue it, often beyond the point at which sensible people would give up.

4. I read more than most people. I don't think I spend more time reading than most people -- 30 minutes before I sleep, and some weekend afternoons, which is what everyone I know claims to do. But I do get through a lot more books than most people I know.

5. In every generation of my family, from 1500s onward, there has been at least one of us who has emigrated or married an immigrant. My mother married an immigrant, I married an immigrant, my daughter married an immigrant. My grandfather emigrated, as did his father, and his father also married an immigrant. I think this is a statistical abnormality.

Hmm. I need one more. Excuse me while I go ask my kid.

6. I get up really early in the morning. Every morning. And I do not talk to my dogs. I'm surprised that that is a weird habit. I say things to them. Sit. Stay. Good dog. Do that again and I will hack you into collops. But I don't discuss world events with them or anything.

With regard to #3, I have an example. I made a couple of skirts last month for the knitter's sewalong. This month we are to make a bag. I have lots of bags. So, if I am to make one, it has to be an amazing one. I decided, having mused on this for a while, that it should be an origami bag.

Did I think this because I have skills in origami? Because I had a pattern for an origami bag? Because I had always wanted an origami bag? No. It was a mad whim. So I found this origami wallet pattern. I printed it out. I gazed at it. I attempted to fold it. It persisted in having only two dimensions. I turned it around and around.

I went to work. I came home. I tried again. I commented the designer a couple of times. Would not a sensible person have given up at this point?

I asked Pokey for help. She is more adept with physical objects than I. I am essentially an abstract person, living in the world of ideas. I must rely on others who are more in touch with visual-spatial things.

She is working on it. I have an excitingly creased piece of paper.

Here is part of our conversation:

Bouthdi:  I feel close
CHOMPHOSY:  woo hoo!
Bouthdi:  ok...
Bouthdi:  right shape
Bouthdi:  wrong order
CHOMPHOSY:  aha
Bouthdi:  there are two valleys next to each other
Bouthdi:  with no room for a mountain...
Bouthdi:  that's not possible
CHOMPHOSY:  yeah, i noticed that
CHOMPHOSY:  maybe it is the bottom of it?
CHOMPHOSY:  or that is where it twists excitingly inward upon itself?
Bouthdi:  No
Bouthdi:  those are the edges
CHOMPHOSY:  you're kidding
Bouthdi:  no
Bouthdi:  those are the sides
CHOMPHOSY:  i see the two cards
CHOMPHOSY:  and it seems as though the whole thing will be sort of like a star
Bouthdi:  well
Bouthdi:  sort of
Bouthdi:  I've gotten the shape
Bouthdi:  and its basic-ness
CHOMPHOSY:  hurrah!
Bouthdi:  but not the connecting bit
CHOMPHOSY:  mine is still flat
CHOMPHOSY:  crumpled by now, but flat

I am imagining how cool this will look once I figure it out and transfer it into fabric. And sew it. I think it will be sort of star-shaped. I am thinking that, once I have mastered this, I will be able to make larger variants for different purposes.

Mind you, I have put the paper down completely. There have been a couple of moments when I have, for a split-second, felt as though I dimly glimpsed a third-dimensionality lurking somewhere among those red and blue lines. That is about as close as I have gotten to success. I am hoping that, when Pokey gets it, she will have the perfect explanatory words to clarify to me how to make it, even though we are in two different states. I realize how unlikely that is.

And yet I find myself determined to make an origami bag.

On my schedule for the day I have celebrating #1 son's birthday, taking him to his ACT exam, taking #2 son to the GT scholars convocation, meeting both boys for birthday luncheon with presents, shopping for said presents, grocery shopping, the post office, hemming the curtains I began last week, practicing the music for Holy Week, finishing a ball of Regal Orchid Luna, cleaning house, and figuring out how to make an origami bag.

Oh, and I tag Chanthaboune, Silfert, Jamie, Sighkey, Dingus6, and Andrew.

The gym I go to is not very chatty, and also there are very few women. These two facts are not unconnected. Since I am mostly over in the weights area with the 20-something male bodybuilders, I do not expect conversation. [As I proofread this, it struck me that someone might think I am suggesting that these men are not capable of conversation. I am not. I am just saying that, since I am so far from their demographic group, I do not expect them to chat with me. We just grunt -- them -- and breath stertorously -- me -- next to one another while we lift weights.] However, I had predicted that the recent remodel might increase the female population.

I was right about that -- but they haven't come into the weights area. They have stayed in the girlie area, even though the demarcation no longer seems so obvious to me. But there are more women on the snazzy new treadmills, and more in the classes.

So yesterday, I was running a bit late (can I still claim that it is the time change?) and was heading back to to the locker room just as the girls started into the CardioPump class.

"Ya wanna come to class with us?" one asked me.

I tried to get out of it. I didn't say that I was too old (that was obvious to her, I am sure) but that I was going to be late to work if I stayed. She would have none of it. She said I could just go to the first half. She got out all the gear for me. The instructor said, "Are you coming to our class?" in a sweet and delighted voice. My captor told her I was, but that I would have to leave early. Other girls said they would put my stuff away for me.

They were so nice that I could not refuse. I followed along helplessly.

Actually, it was fun. I kept up just fine. I will go back. I go to the gym directly after dropping #2 son off at school, and normally leave before this class begins. How I intend to justify spending another half hour at the gym instead of doing housework I have not yet determined.

Another mad thing that I am doing is joining Knit the Classics. Kali Mama told me about this group. They read books and knit. Obvious choice for me, eh? However, as Kali Mama pointed out, there is a time commitment there. These knitters read a new book each month, which means a new project each month. I had already calculated that, in order to finish the Regal Orchid Jasmine sweater in April, I needed to finish up a ball of yarn every two days, and I haven't managed that speed. You can see at the right both the lovely purple color and the ball of yarn which I should have finished yesterday if I were keeping on schedule. How could I expect to complete a new project every month?

I am cheating. Now, I am not a book club cheater. My real-world book club was started by women who were sick of their book clubs, in which nobody ever actually read the books. Tea, cookies, conversation -- all very well, but not if you were counting on discussing Lolita.

So they invited me, knowing that I could be counted upon to read the book.

I can be counted upon to read the books for KTC as well.

I can also be counted upon to knit. However, the catch in this book club is that you are supposed to knit something inspired by the book of the month.

I have cheated by ascertaining that the next several books are romantic British books, and determining that I am going to knit romantic things (two Jasmine sweaters) and British things (Erin). The cheating part is that this is what I had already planned to knit.

Don't tell on me, okay? 

Dweezy asked whether gluttony could relate to fibers. It is possible that he was asking this tongue-in-cheek, but it is an interesting question.

There are three elements of gluttony. Let us consider them in relation to yarn.

First, gluttony can simply be excess.

April 1 was Flash Your Stash Day. I flashed mine, and I went around to look at some of the other flashers, too. It was light-hearted fun.

But after a while, it began to seem like a celebration of excess.

This yarn is enough, I think, for my knitting for the rest of the year. Now, there are plenty of faster knitters than I, more prolific ones, more devoted ones with less else going on in their lives. Still, if we accept that this is roughly a year's worth of yarn, then we have to accept that many of the stashflashers have more yarn than they can reasonably knit up in the next decade. Some have enough on hand to cover a sudden ice age.

It is like having a whole stable of boyfriends, or eating an entire cake -- more than the reasonable and healthy quantity.

Another form of gluttony is excessive delicacy: wanting everything just so, and being peevish if you cannot get it. The point here is that material things ought not to be so important to us that they rule our tempers. We should not be incapable of taking the rough with the smooth, and should not insist on being pampered to unreasonable degrees.

Can this apply to yarn? Well, there are knitters who will only use Rowan yarns. There are knitting blogs which devote a lot of time to whining about their minor dissatisfactions with one yarn company or another. It is possible to find folks who must have particular knitting paraphernalia, with a depth of emotion rivaling the princess and the pea. Perhaps these are examples of delicacy.

The third form of gluttony is allowing one worldly pleasure to overshadow all others, or to overshadow spiritual pleasures. The danger of this is obvious when food stands in for the company of other people or drink prevents a drinker from having a job or family. But could this apply to fibers?

There is a widespread joke in the knitting blogs about Stash Enhancement eXperiences; I have no comment, you can draw your own conclusions about that. Some of the yarn collectors appear to have allowed the acquisition of yarn to overshadow knitting with the yarn. Are they skipping church or temple to spin their fibers? Losing themselves in the lush softness of all that wool and silk and cotton and falling like drug addicts into a single-minded life of fiber? I don't know.

The image comes to mind of Dweezy spinning while his partner, his customers, his family members cry. Where is Dweezy? Where is that whimsical humor that brightened our lives before he had a spinning wheel? Why isn't he updating his xanga more frequently? How will we cope with our split ends, outgrowing roots, and unbecoming hairstyles if he is only spinning and knitting all the time?

Well, I don't think that this is really happening.

But it could.

Kali Mama came to visit. I had the opportunity to have lunch with her, her amiable sister, and her three charming sons. We spoke about regional differences, our life stories, ghosts, blogging, and in fact about almost everything but knitting. Here we are in an unrecognizable picture.

Kali Mama's blog tends toward the salty and spicy, but in person, she is also sweet. I hope this is not a secret that I am giving away, here.

Work was calm, apart from my making a serious mistake with the charge machine, and then I had my class in the evening. My friend Partygirl and I, as you will know if you always read my blog and have total recall, go together to a class largely populated by fundamentalist Christians. We are then split up into small groups, and she and I are not together. In my group, I am the only one who accepts the theory of evolution, so I already know that some of them disapprove of me. As one of the ladies from my church put it, "They all think you're going to Hell."

So last night there was a bit of discussion of worldliness. Now, I am fairly sure that those of you who read this have never found yourselves in a discussion of worldliness. If you did find yourself in such a discussion, you would probably be for it, rather than agin it.

But the ladies in the class were pretty down on worldliness. They were discussing Acts 19:19, which is a little vignette of people burning scrolls about sorcery.

I had to admit that I hadn't seen much application to my own life, though I had come up with superstition and materialism as things to avoid. I often draw a blank in this class. We are supposed to be able to extrapolate from a five-word sentence to a whole raft of conclusions about the motivations of the characters and how it resembles our own lives. I am constantly having to write down "insufficient data."

The other ladies are more creative than I, however.

"I don't have any scrolls of sorcery," one admitted, "but I have books. And Sudoku puzzles."

There was widespread murmuring. Apparently many of these ladies are tempted to do Sudoku puzzles in the newspaper. And what they suffer from the temptation to read worldly books instead of the Bible is something awful!

They are also troubled by gluttony.

The group that Partygirl is in were confessing to reading horoscopes and watching unseemly TV programs.

Actually, there are some pretty unseemly TV programs out there. She may just be in a wilder bunch than I am. But -- even if we accept the burning of occult scrolls as a good thing -- it seems like a big jump from occult scrolls to novels.

Of course, I don't know what kinds of books these women are reading. And I don't know about their personal experiences with gluttony. It just seems to me that Mother Teresa could have read novels and done Sudoku puzzles without causing any raised eyebrows.

I caught the woman in the hallway as we were leaving. "I think you should do your Sudoku puzzles," I said. "Just get up a little earlier and then you'll have time to do your Bible study, too." She is a nurse, so we chatted a bit about the importance of keeping the brain elastic.

Partygirl looked askance at me, so I told her about the discussion we'd had, as we walked out to the car. St. Francis, I pointed out, had been in favor of enjoying God's creation, and no one could call him worldly.

"Are Sudoku puzzles part of God's creation?" she asked. And, indeed, one of the more extreme ladies had suggested that Satan was planting all these worldly distractions.

We are just out of our element in that group, that's all. This probably helps us to keep our brains elastic.

But I do think that outsiders fail to realize the level of creativity fundamentalists bring to their reading of the Bible. We think they are literal about the Bible. We don't realize that they can look at "Dinah went to visit the women of the land" and conclude that Dinah was seeking sensationalism, that she dressed like a tart, and that she was -- in short -- being worldly. No wonder she was raped. There was widespread agreement in the group -- and these are intelligent, sincere women, too -- that this little phrase about Dinah was enough to demonstrate her worldliness.

I look at these passages and think "Where are they getting this?" And I have taken lit classes from Freudians, too. You'd think I would be beyond amazement.

Today is Book Club, a good antidote to the fundamentalist group. We are discussing Henry James's Daisy Miller, a novel about respectability. The heroine behaves very scandalously, by the standards of her time, and dies in the end, perhaps as a punishment, but at least she doesn't do Sudoku puzzles.

One of the most difficult things in retail is when customers want something that doesn't exist. Yesterday, we had a gentleman who wanted decals of every state that he could put on his car as he visited all the states, eventually ending up with a complete map. He had been looking from Canada downwards without luck.

Now we can see plenty of reasons that such a thing would not exist, but we still sympathize with his desire for it.

His was an unusual request. There are some things that people ask for frequently. For example, many people want reproducibles for our state history. Many want test preparation materials for kindergartners, DVDs that will serve the same purpose as a governess, and on-grade-level science materials for special needs high school students.

There is one item that folks often request that stays in my mind. Teachers want pictures -- photographs, preferably, of animals in nuclear family units.

The most natural response to this request is, "As you know, most animals don't live in nuclear family units." In fact, That Man and The Empress and I made an effort to find some that did. Many of our suppliers are glad to know what our customers want, and glad to supply it (except for those reproducibles for our state history, etc.) They did Western bulletin boards at our request, and all those jungle-themed things, and sets of photos for preschool. So we thought we might find them some nuclear families in the animal kingdom to work with.

Marmosets, crocodiles, gibbons, and certain birds. Oh, and humans, of course.

This will not satisfy those who want to show the children a Daddy tiger, a Mommy tiger, and a Baby tiger. I can tell you with complete assurance that those teachers do not want a Daddy, Mommy, and Baby marmoset.

Nor do they want the Three Bears (this is Jan Brett's coloring page), which is where you can find a nuclear family of animals in its natural setting, a storybook. They dismiss this suggestion out of hand, muttering that they just want a Daddy, a Mommy, and a Baby elephant, fox, and pig. They want all the familiar animals that the children will recognize, but in family units. It could be a puzzle, they suggest hopefully, or matching cards, or posters.

Most of our human family materials now show a lot of different groupings, but we can give them flannel board sets with Daddy, Mommy, and Baby. This doesn't satisfy them either.

The thing that keeps this on my mind is: why? Why would anyone seek to teach something completely false?

We see lots of teachers who teach false things about grammar, say, or gravity, because they don't know any better. It is widely claimed in English classes that "Yesterday he played; now he plays" is a sensible sentence, by grown people who have never and would never utter that sentence in real life.

But the family structures of animals are not little-known arcane things. We live in a rural, agricultural area. Most of the people asking for these things have seen farm animals in their usual groupings, and forest animals in the wild. There is a sculpture in the poultry science building of our local university (and poultry science at our university is something folks come from around the world for) that shows a nuclear family of chickens. This is not because the people in the department believe that chickens live in nuclear families.

I'm mystified.

Well, while contemplating this deep and important question, I got to 13" on the Jasmine sweater. I don't expect to get much further today, because the Butterfly machine at the gym has these balls to grasp while you push, which have left my hands in a painful condition. I am probably doing it wrong.

Today I will be having lunch with Kali Mama and her kids (and perhaps her sister?), who find themselves in my town. This is the second time that I have had the opportunity to visit with a xangan. (Well, I mean besides those xangans whom I know in the physical world.) Exciting!

Ah, spring!

It's a week and a couple of days since the last snow, but yesterday was a perfect spring day.

Early spring here is not about burgeoning and lush growth and asparagus -- that'll be next month -- but about things that are brave enough to poke their heads out of the mulch. You have to admire them for their courage.

I strolled over to church in the new skirt I sewed, enjoying the soft breeze that carried the scents of the blossoming trees, and strolled back home again afterwards. Then -- having fed the ravening hordes at my house -- I washed the dog and dug the vegetable garden. The garden is tiny, only about 8' square, so that is a manageable task. I pruned the winter's worth of dead wood from the roses and the lavender, giving the new growth some air and space. The thyme released its spicy fragrance for me, and I hoed carefully around the mint and melissa to encourage them.

The iris and lilies are sticking their blade-like leaves up, and the hostas are unfurling beneath the crepe myrtles. Violets and phlox and  lamiastrum are blooming already, and the columbines and raggedy sailors and salvia -- well, really everything is up and getting ready. These of course are the perennials, which live in the front. #2 son and I dug the front garden a couple of years ago and planted all these, and now we just leave them to their own devices, adding some annuals when they look lonely and clearing space for them when they seem to need it.

Soon it will be time to plant things. Green beans, onions, and lettuce, at least. Tomatoes and peppers and direct-seed flowers and herbs have to wait till later, of course.

This is the time of year when you just have to restrain yourself from planting things. The farmer's market opens up and no one has any vegetables, just plant starts. We wander around and look at them longingly, knowing they have come out of greenhouses and won't flourish in our back yards yet. It is part of the promise of early spring -- saying not to despair, winter is ending and life goes on. But don't plant those babies yet, or we will find that death also goes on.

Having gotten dirty and wet and sweaty, scratched by thorns and glared at by the dogs (and having thoroughly enjoyed all these things, I admit), I then repaired to my porch with knitting and this novel, which is set in Maine in winter. The contrast of the weather in the book and the weather on my porch was piquant.

I finished the second ball of Orchid Regal, but it is still just a stockinette rectangle. I'm putting its picture in with a nice old garden chair, in an attempt to make the knitting look interesting.

It works for Martha Stewart.

I am enjoying this book, even if it is distinctly out of season. Nowadays, since I rely on Booksfree and Frugalreader for my everyday reading, I have a fairly random selection of novels, and I read them when they arrive. I had not read anything by Sarah Graves before, but I will track down more of her books. She has a plucky heroine and interesting minor characters and plenty of local color.

In this book, there is a claim that someone can make fox-and-geese mittens in an evening.

Naturally, I had to google to find out what these fox-and-geese mittens might be. It appears from my cursory study that they are the square Sanquhar pattern, rather like this. I have made Sanquhar socks, so I feel that I can say with certainty that that is a flat out lie.

Will it turn out to be a clue? That is the real question.

A couple of years ago, I found a bunch of fabrics from the Waverly "Echoes of Ireland" collection at one of those end-of-the-bolt clearance sales. I bought up a bunch of $33/yd fabrics at prices in the $3 to $10 range and redid my soft furnishings.

As the shelter publications would say, I revived my tired soft furnishings. They are always concerned about the feelings and health of the furniture.

I really like plaids and florals together, and these are my favorite colors, but in dark enough hues that they are not too girlie for the living room. I covered all the cushions, the ottoman, and so forth, did a simple treatment for our sliding glass door, and made new pillows for the sofa. The one thing that did not get done was the front window.

We have a little place to sit in the front window. It is a favorite spot for the people and the animals of the household. I made cushions and pillows for it, but no curtains.

I did not have enough of any of the fabrics to do a window treatment for it, so we just had blinds. I had it in the back of my mind that I would come up with some unique and elegant pieced thing from the remaining fabrics, but that has not happened.

Really, I wanted another of the collection: "Irish Prose," it was called, and I had not seen it in person, but had admired it online. It has calligraphy on a sheer tea-dyed ground-- how cool is that?

Recently, I found it online at a very low price and ordered five yards of it.

Now, just in case you are as fascinated by this fabric as I, I need to warn you that it is absolutely a decorating fabric, not a lovely soft printed voile such as you might want to use for a blouse or something.

That was a bit of a disappointment, but it was mitigated by the fact that the calligraphy is bits of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a perfectly wonderful book which you should go read immediately if you haven't yet.

My husband put up the hardware for me yesterday and I sewed up some curtains. This involved a little swearing on his part. Me, I was going for an artless simplicity, and that never requires swearing. My husband doesn't believe in artless simplicity, and always measures. Twice. Naturally he has to swear.

Actually, I did measure the curtains, too, but measuring doesn't prompt me to swear. Don't know why not. Maybe because I don't do it often enough or well enough, as evidenced by the number of errors that I make.

Here you see the curtains pinned up to different lengths so I can decide exactly how I want them before I hem them.

A person sitting here in the window knitting or hemming or something, will be able to look up and see "A veiled sunlight lit up faintly..." silhouetted against the sky.

A moment to appreciate the charm of this.

 

And another moment, I suppose, to recognize that the most frequent denizens of this spot will completely miss the charm of the Irish prose.

Nadia mostly sits here to watch the birds.

#2 son did, however, test to make sure that the curtains would guard our privacy. I stood inside and made faces at him while he was outside, and he had to admit that he could not see me at all.

In addition to yesterday's rudimentary sewing, I did banking, cleaning, shopping, bill-paying, cooking, and a bit of gardening. Then my menfolks ganged up on me, as they are sometimes wont to do, and I stopped doing anything particularly productive and read and knitted instead. As you know, this is one of my favorite things to do, so it may be that I seized the excuse rather than that I was actually driven to it by their lack of appreciation for my gardening. They did express a signal lack of appreciation of it, though. My gardening tends toward the wild and cottage-like, which is what I prefer, and the guys persist in seeing this as evidence of incompetence on my part. What's more, they think that it would be easier to mow the lawn if there weren't flowers and things poking up out of it.  And then they wouldn't have to eat so many vegetables, either, and might have a better chance of living on bacon and cakes.

Yes, I was definitely driven to it. This is what is currently going on with the Regal Orchid Jasmine sweater: a rectangle of wonderful soft purple cotton. I hope that the picture shows the lusciousness of the color, and I wish that it could show the softness and subtle sheen. Yum. 

This is Luna, from the Endless Summer Collection, in the color Regal Orchid, on #2 needles. It knits up very nicely and has an excellent hand. If you are looking for a good cotton for some special summer stuff, this is certainly one to consider.

I was tagged by whopeedinthepool to say what books my kids enjoy. Unfortunately, my youngest is currently reading H.Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, so I cannot answer that question in a useful way -- that is, with children's books. I am just too old for that question. Or at least my kids are.

You can read the whole book by clicking on the link I just gave you, and you might prefer it to the Joyce link earlier in this post if you are feeling more like adventure and less poetic. #2 son is not reading the book online, because he is too adventurous himself to sit for long in front of a computer. He forgot himself the other day and said, "Once when I was crawling through a cement pipe..." Usually he tries to shield me from these things. But he obviously has to have paperbacks, so he can read in trees and stuff like that.