The price of perfect zucchini is eternal vigilance. This is what happens when you get busy and don't get into your garden for a couple of days -- unnaturally huge zucchini, shown at top of picture consorting with ordinary zukes for scale.

I see zucchini bread in my future, although I quite understand the point of view of those who say that zucchini bread is a waste of good raisins. The only other option is stuffed zucchini, and I can just see my boys if I tried to feed them that.

 

Here is my garden. While it is pretty, it has only zucchini and herbs ready for the table. Lots of green tomatoes and baby peppers, but mostly it's herbs and squash.

 

 

So #2 son and I hied ourselves to the farmers' market, where they had all this simply gorgeous produce.

I was smitten with the turnips and the lovely crinkly Savoy cabbages.

#2 son? Not so much. In fact, he expressed his loathing of the vegetables on offer and went straight for the blueberries.

Nothing wrong with blueberries. There used to be a lot of berry farms around.You could -- and we always did -- drive up and buy four gallons for about $25 and put them in your freezer and have blueberry pancakes all winter, plus pies and jam and plenty of fruit salad.

 

Now most of the farms have been sold for subdivisions. The Piano Teacher said that when the price of blueberries (already up to $22 a gallon) goes high enough, people will sell their houses for blueberry farms.

The garden on the square is looking lovely as always. It is a great pleasure just to stroll around the square and admire the garden. Even in winter, so you know it is a feast for the eyes in summer.

I like these purple leaves, though I do not know what they are.

Since it is not a botanical garden, but merely a town square in a town that rather prides itself on being pretty, there are no labels telling passersby what the plants are called. I would like to have some labels, or possibly a picturesque gardener in corduroys and a disreputable hat, whom I could ask.

 

#2 son also likes the bakeries.

The rain kept the French bakery from coming out, but the local coffee house had plenty of customers. They are getting their bottoms wet in those chairs, I am sure, but I like their devil-may-care spirit.

We got bread and croissants to go with the blueberries. #2 son was the chooser of breads, so there was white flour involved.

 

And just beyond the bakeries, you can find Cheap Thrills, one of my kids' favorite stores.

They have lots of vintage clothing and odd stuff. Costumes, and vinyl records, and old lunchboxes. It is a fun place.

 

 

#1 son got a T-shirt that says he hearts Uncle Bills, which I am hoping is not something rude that I don't understand. I had him google it, and he said it seemed to be a pancake house. If you know otherwise, let me know.

Cheap Thrills is a great place to get yourself some cheap frills.

And go-go boots to go with them, if you want.

Me, I have a sore throat and achiness and generally feel as though I am coming down with something. I do not have time to come down with anything just at the moment, so I am going to take my cup of tea and my book and go back to bed till time to get ready for work. Better to skip the gym and the housework than to spread the plague among innocent shoppers for planbooks. Those of you who think that germs have invaded my body and will not be put off by a couple of hours in bed should keep it to yourselves, because this process requires strong suspension of disbelief.

Thank you for your kind and witty comments on my butchered solo. One person sought me out last night to tell me that she had been moved to tears by it (as you may know, musicians can always gauge success by the amount of crying in the audience), so it is possible that it was not as bad as I thought.

It was pretty bad, though.

Anyway, the show last night was very enjoyable. There were some fine voices in the group, and they were well-rehearsed and very cute. This was the youth choir from St. Andrew's in Plano, Texas, doing Celebrate Life. If you have the chance, go see their production.

I had heard or sung most of the pieces -- my kids have done most of them, I think, at one time or another -- but I had never seen it staged. They were all in white cotton and natural linen, and had both rousingly funny choreography and quite beautiful liturgical dance.

Afterwards, I brought a couple of them home. I had cooked and cleaned in preparation, but my hostessing duties were very light. I hooked them up with my boys, dogs, and PS2, and then just kept out of the their way. I'll be doing blueberry pancakes for their breakfast and then putting them on their bus before I go to work.

The number of people who have served as host families to my own kids is so large that I never hesitate to take visiting choristers in.

Week Four of the Summer Reading Challenge is beginning, and I actually have been reading two books per week. I am moving on to the third of the Yellow Rose mysteries, Leann Sweeney's light novels about a Texas PI who specializes in adoption cases but nonetheless keeps finding herself embroiled in murders.

If you like spunky girl detectives and a bit of wit in a book, you could look further and do worse than these. They have bons mots like "Her hair looked like it had been combed with a dead fish" and "He couldn't pour pee out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel." That may be the Texas part.

Our local university -- and therefore the town --  used to have a big rivalry with Texas. I think it was about football, but it was intense. When we first came here, there would be Longhorn steers penned up on the campus when a game was coming up, and people would taunt them. The radio stations played "I'm a Short, Squat Texan" during football season. Even now, older folks make Texas jokes. The young people do not so much as remember this rivalry. I think the football team changed conferences or something. We play LSU and Ole Miss and so forth, but no one gets emotional about it. There are no grand rivalries.

Taunting cattle is an ignoble occupation, to be sure, so I guess this is an improvement.

My solo went very badly.

It was a song I have sung many, many times before. I know it by heart, so I stood up with no music and sang it a capella. People were talking, but once I started singing they responded in the usual way -- with apparent astonishment.

I don't know why people always look surprised when I sing, but this has always been the response from people who aren't real familiar with my singing, so I was reassured that things were going as well as usual. I sang the first couple of lines, and then went up to do the first bit of flashy ornamentation -- and my voice cracked.

This never happens to me. I have a really reliable voice. My brain is not so reliable. I have forgotten words, missed entrances, and lost my place in a song, but I have never had my voice fail me in the middle of a song.

Naturally, what you want to do in a case like this is sit down and give up. Not an option, though. If you have painted or knitted or written something and you mess it up, you can redo it. I suppose if you were playing some instrument and a string broke or something, you could stop and fix it. But if you are singing, you just have to keep going.

That is not the end of the trouble, though. I was singing a gospel song which depends for its charm on expressive, free singing, and for its power on flashy ornamentation. But once my voice cracked, I was too afraid it would do it again, to be able to relax and sing the song properly. I smoothed out the lines and skimped on the high notes, and it just was not very good.

I guess the people who had heard me run through it before church heard the song done properly, but the rest of them just heard me butcher it.

My fellow choristers told me how good a job I had done in the choir room when we were changing after the service, but I said, "Don't say that. It was terrible. If you say 'Good job' now, I will never be able to believe you in future." The director -- fortunately, he made it back from Vicksburg in time for the service so I didn't have to pretend to conduct -- said something kind about allergies.

Oh, well.

A woman came into the store yesterday looking for microscope slides -- of which we were, shockingly, out. I helped her find some good children's books while she was there, and in the course of the conversation, she showed me some amazing art projects she had made with microscope slides -- rather like these seen at right, or like the one in the picture at left.

Hers, however, were elaborate collages with witty captions, which she had made full-size and then scanned and reduced.

Here and here are directions for a faux-soldered similar sort of thing, but hers were not faux, and were extremely cool. Here are directions for making real ones, and here. That last link has a lot of neat examples.

Here is one more, from a site for artist Lori Roberts.

The customer had been a fashion illustrator for a Chicago newspaper before her retirement, and her skill at graphic design was evident in her projects, but I really felt, having seen them, that I could also do something with the idea. As it happens, I have done some soldering, building circuit boards in a student job.

The lady from Chicago had seen the idea somewhere, and sought out a stained glass artist, who helped her perfect the craft. She said she usually made jewelry, but had also seen wind chimes and all sorts of other things.

I am looking for a book on the subject. If you know of one, let me know, please.

Today I will be singing a solo in church and leading the hymns, and then bringing home some Texas choirboys to stay overnight. There will also be a Father's Day celebration in there somewhere, for which I must bake a cake. So the main thing between now and church is cleaning the house.

#2 daughter is studying the English Civil War, but they are calling it a revolution. This surprises me. I wrote about the death of King Charles once, as it relates to knitting. Here, in fact, if you click on it. The whole thing got me thinking about the difference between a Civil War and a revolution: the balance of power, maybe? the outcome?

And Jamie's opinion blog has an interesting post about Mr. Bush's intelligence, with a link to this interesting article, which suggests that being smart isn't all it's cracked up to be.

But enough about politics. On to the truly important topic of the day: the lure of the KAL.

The knitalong, or in some cases sewalong, is a sort of casual movement in which someone makes a cool button and then a bunch of other people join him or her in making a particular item or category of items. I was musing on the phenomenon because KaliMama has begun a new sewalong.

My first KAL was the DNA-along, a classic KAL in which we all made DNA scarves. I made three, in fact, for Christmas presents.

Knitting bloggers in general seem to love KALs, lining up their buttons like Girl Scout badges. But there were, even in those early days, dissenting voices. "Do the Things" suggested that KALs were a source of grave peer pressure, pressure to conform.

At the time, I had recently been in a discussion on peer pressure among adults, and determined that the only thing I do because of peer pressure is housework, so it seemed like a fairly positive force in my life.

The Witty Knitter wrote about knitting lemmings, all making the same thing. And it did seem at the time as though most knitting bloggers were making all the same things.

Knit the Classics, my most recent KAL, shows how the KAL has evolved. In this KAL, we all read the same thing and make anything we feel inspired by the book to make. This flexibility seems more in the current mode than the KALs in which everyone made a single project.

I am not much of a joiner in real life. I belong to a church and a book club, and that's it. But I like KALs. Here's why:

Information. By knitting DNA scarves along with a bunch of others, I could see that the pattern was just inclined to frill, that's all, and quit frogging and restarting it. By knitting Fuzzy Feet along with others, I could see how stripes and colorworks looked in the pattern. It's like having classmates.

If you have difficulties, you have people to ask for help. Better yet, you can see what difficulties people tend to have before you get to that point. You can ask questions out into the ether, and some more knowledgeable person will come along and answer them.

To me, this is the major benefit of the KAL.

But there is also encouragement. My current project for Knit the Classics is a tea cosy which I have been intending to make for years. I just hadn't gotten around to it. Now, if you like to make a pot of tea and have the second cup hot, you just have to have a tea cosy, and my old one disintegrated, so I need a new one. But without the deadline, I might never have gotten around to it. Sew? I Knit, also, has been great for encouraging me to get back to dressmaking, something I enjoy but had fallen out of the habit of working on since my kids no longer let me dress them up like little dolls.

The KALs are also fun. The Knitting Olympics was just a lark. I like my Olympics bag, but it wasn't as though I had either a great desire for a multicolored handbag or a desperate need to learn modular knitting. But it was fun. You get to know new people on a KAL, and even having a deadline is sometimes rather fun, since it doesn't really matter whether you meet it or not. I hardly ever want to make the thing that is really popular at any given moment, but when there is a KAL that fits with what I already plan to make, I'll join in.

So, yeah, I'm going to join KaliMama's sewalong. She has a really cool button.

Do you remember my Olympic bag?

I was carrying it one day when I went into my local LYS, and the nice lady there asked about it. I told her how I had made it, and she told me about her sweater, too.

It was a very enjoyable conversation -- I think I wrote about it in my xanga, in fact.

I was surprised, however, to open the latest newsletter from that LYS and find a picture which could very well have been my bag, identified as "Cynthia's Felted Drawstring Purse." You can take a class to get the pattern and learn how to make it.

Check it out and see whether it seems perhaps to have been inspired by mine. She used a zigzag stitch instead of modular knitting, but I think it would have been more honest of her to mention that hers was inspired by the one a customer had made up.

Never mind.

I am going to buy a Swiffer. This is a sort of modern mop with Velcro and jets of water and stuff. It may or may not be associated with a commercial featuring a handsome Australian who comes in and cleans the floors of total strangers.

You see, I am not good at cleaning floors. I can always come up with a theory for everything, so I can offer a few theories for why I am so bad at floors. They are, of course, big flat surfaces, which I hate. And then, I am nearsighted and rarely wear my glasses, so it may be that I just don't see them well enough. And -- while I am sure that my mother cleaned the floors when I was growing up -- I cannot actually remember any floor-cleaning going on, so I never learned how.

These may be theories, but they are no excuse. I learned later how to clean floors properly. In the summer between my undergrad and grad school, I needed a completely mindless job, and a friend hooked me up with a job as a maid at a luxury apartment building in La Jolla.

Oddly enough, the people I cleaned for mistook me for a maid. They gave me old shoes and magazines to take to my mother. One man, a physicist, used to shake his head and mutter about the waste of a fine mind when he paid me. And one woman kindly explained about Social Security and showed me how to scrub floors with two buckets, two cloths, and a brush. "We'll make a housekeeper of you yet!" she said grimly as I struggled with this entirely foreign set of tools.

So that is the only way to clean a floor that I know, and obviously I'm not going to do that very often.

I do know how to vacuum, by the way. I vacuumed as a child. However, my husband comes from a foreign country, where they do not have electricity, let alone vacuum cleaners, and he got the impression that a vacuum was like a lawnmower, a machine which men would use, not women. He has lived here a long time now, and knows that American women use vacuums and even lawnmowers, but we have already established that vacuuming is a man's job. Our vacuum cleaner is large and black and labeled "The Boss." So I am speaking here of hard floors.

The Empress had given us permission to clean the appalling pit which is the kitchen at the store. All of us use the kitchen, at least to set our purses in, but The Empress and That Man own all the stuff in it, so the rest of us do not feel free to throw things away without permission. This we achieve about twice a year.

So the new girl was doing a slap-up cleaning job (she carries Clorox wipes in her car), and The Empress was inspired to go out and buy her a Swiffer to use on the nasty floor.

Both The Empress and the new girl have these things at home, though they both hastened to assure me that they preferred to clean hard floors on their hands and knees. Of course.

Me, I am hoping that the Swiffer will look to my boys like a tool or weapon of some kind, something a man would use.

Leonidas has an interesting post about time, work, and parenting. One of the things he's saying is that the bad parenting for which we in Hamburger-a-go-go-land are famous isn't our fault. We're just working too hard. Or, rather, he is posing the question of whether that might be the case. Can we blame the feckless mom we see in the grocery store, if perhaps she has just gotten off work and hardly has the energy to stand up, let alone make good choices?

This is sort of like the mothers in industrial England who fed their babies laudanum to keep them quiet while they worked. It was a societal problem, not an individual lack of responsibility, right?

I don't think we have it that hard. I have four children and I work hard, and I never negelected my kids. In fact, I feel that bringing up my children is my main job, and I take pride in doing good work with that, just as much as with the things I get paid for.

But do we actually work too hard? Some of us do -- Leonidas wrote his post after a 14-hour work day, and I am working 50 hours a week and still just anticipating the really hard part of my work year. There are also people who work at minimum wage jobs, and must have two jobs to make ends meet, and students who work to pay for school in addition to the really hard work of being a good student, and single parents who do all the work at home as well as doing one or more paid jobs.

But yesterday I did nothing, really, apart from working at my paid job, and my job is quite a pleasant one. I didn't go to the gym, clean house, or even do any major projects.

I did finish the front of the tea cosy.

And the point is that I have that option. No one is making me stay down at t'mill for 16 hours, and I don't even have to go home and boil my laundry. If I can tolerate a day's worth of mess and a bit of processed food, I can skip the housework and call out for pizza.

To the extent that we work too hard -- and I am not at all sure that we do; in addition to being known for bad parenting, we are also becoming known as slackers -- we choose to do so. My choir director Bigsax has the summer off from his teaching job, but he says that he feels guilty if he's not doing yard work or something. I know what he means. I enjoy lolling around, but it takes a certain amount of discipline to do it when the weeds are growing. Or there are dishes in the sink. Or absolutely anything else that needs doing, and heaven knows there is always something that needs doing. We must be courageous and steadfast about getting some leisure in.

I think we need to have some down time, some time when we are only knitting or reading or walking or playing with the kids and dogs or otherwise enjoying creation.

So here, for the Summer Reading Challenge, is where I was reading yesterday. I made all the things you can see in the picture, except the books, and it is reasonable and right that I should take time to enjoy them once I've taken the time to make them.

As for ignoring our kids because we work too hard, if we do that, then it's because we choose to -- most of us. Certainly those of us who have time to read blogs.

Having said that, I have to catch up today. The gym, the bill-paying, cleaning and preparing for this weekend's houseguests and the solo I am singing in church as soon as I decide what it is -- all these things must be done.

But I was pointing out to The Empress yesterday (since she and That Man are showing signs of exhaustion) that we all have to enter Back to School in a relaxed condition. We can't listen sympathetically to all those tanned teachers complaining about how they have just come back from a cruise and now "everything is picked over", unless we ourselves are feeling pretty calm and healthy.

So a good balance is what we need. Enough work to keep our homes in order and our bank balances healthy, enough time with our kids, and enough time for ourselves. Good luck achieving that, everyone!

Yesterday began with a walk in the park. Lovely.

And then I went to work, where I took down the stuff on the south wall and put it back up in such a way as to make it look lush and tempting. I also trained our new worker, who is smart and hardworking and understands math. Much easier than most workers.

But most of the day was filled with good conversation. La Bella had printed out some deep questions for Book Club, on the nature of good and evil, the reliability of memory and how it shapes our personalities, stuff like that. She also explained to us why she hates cold sandwiches, even to this day.

The new worker and I (she doesn't yet have a nickname) discussed different ways of dying. I have a good plan for my death, as you know, but her family tends toward long, lingering illnesses. She is hoping for a quick heart attack. We were chatting about this while rearranging the math manipulatives. I don't want you to think that we were slacking.

An old friend from my former church brought me up to date on the continued horrible happenings there. It is much worse than when I left, she says, but she is hopeful, because it is now so bad that people will just have to do something. Kind of an apres le deluge approach. Me, I like to be gone before the flooding begins. The rats start leaving the ship, that's my cue.

#1 daughter explained why Navy wives ought not to give naked pictures of themselves to their husbands. She has a meeting with the Squadron today. That is not connected with the naked pictures question. However, if you are considering becoming a Navy wife, you might want to consider these things. Do you want a marriage that involves meetings with the Squadron?

My boys were not much on conversation yesterday, although they did break into my talk with #1 daughter quite a bit to give their opinions. They have created an altar to boyhood right in front of the fireplace. They brought my pretty porch bench in to use as a weightlifting bench, lined up the barbells on the hearth, and have gathered plenty of games near at hand. I like the way they put down a cloth to protect the barbells from scratches, don't you?

So my husband was on the sofa watching Thai boxing and explaining the finer points to me, and the boys came in nice and sweaty from basketball and plopped down with their box of Cheez-its. #1 daughter knows how this is. She does not have sons, but she has her husband and his shipmates.

I do not dwell on this lack of civilization around my house. There may be houses full of guys in which the custom is to dress nattily and converse like Lord Peter Wimsey, but there are also households where they scratch and spit and swear and refuse to use the indoor plumbing, so I am content.

Here is my Knit the Classics project, making slow progress because I have too much else going on to knit much. It is almost ready for its shaping.

Yes, this is the back. The back is more interesting at the moment than the front. I'll show you the front again when it becomes more interesting.

 

 

 

In this third week of the Summer Reading Challenge, I am still reading Leann Sweeney's Yellow Rose series. It is fun, with a spunky girl heroine who, having lots of money and leisure time, is unhindered in her pursuit of criminals by any inconveniences of daily life. There is a little bit of romance and there are some eccentric family members, but neither is a distraction, and there is no gratuitous violence. The series is set in Texas, so it is just as hot in the books as it is here in real life.

But it is Book Club day, and we are to discuss Mr. White's Confession. I hope I will be able to go. It is always uncertain in the summer, whether I will be able to leave the store for Book Club, but we really haven't been overrun by customers yet, so I am hopeful.

I gave a state history workshop yesterday at a local school.

Here is where I stopped for lunch and a bit of a read, a couple of miles from the school where I gave the workshop.

It was practical to have my sandwich on the way back to work, and much nicer than waiting and having it in the windowless back room of the store.

 

This was the pleasant view from the picnic table.

We took my friend M here when she visited us a couple of years ago. There is a beautiful, easy hiking trail of about a mile and half. We had not considered that the climate difference would make a woman from California feel as though we had stuck her in a steam room and expected her to walk a mile and a half on a treadmill in there.

It is a battlefield park. You can, if you like, see the cannons (there's one in the background on the left), handle cannonballs, look at houses that were overrun by soldiers during the battle, admire a diorama of the action, and of course tour the battlefield with a pamphlet explaining just where the people were killed and so forth.

It struck me as I drove over to the school that they were probably sick of the Civil War, so I offered to skip that part, and they took me up on it eagerly. If your school is practically on the spot where a Civil War battle took place, you are probably fed up with the Civil War and ready to think about the Trail of Tears, or the only battle of the Revolutionary War fought west of the Mississippi, or smallpox even.

It also struck me, though I am through reading Wuthering Heights, that novelists of that time period had a great advantage in that they could kill off their characters quite casually. In a modern novel, you could not have an entire household die of excessive emotional volatility without arousing the notice of the police.

But in the Victorian era (WH was published in 1847, which puts it a couple of decades ahead of our Civil War, but in the same era, certainly), people were quite willing to believe that a person could lose her temper or be sad or nonspecifically weak, and just die, just like that. A broken heart was plenty of reason. Victorian songs often have people dying -- or, of course, planning to die, since they are still singing away and trying to make the faithless sweetheart feel bad -- because of an unsatisfactory sweetheart.

Our civil war was characterized by enormous numbers of deaths -- we have never managed to match it -- from poor hygiene and disease as well as those pesky wounds. In our part of the country, boys who had been isolated in the hills met up with boys from other isolated spots and a third of them fell sick before they even got a chance to see a battle. Measles was an absolute scourge. You couldn't hide your camp from the enemy because the sound of coughing as the boys woke up in the morning was so loud. And then the foul water and terrible food got any remaining fellows.

It was probably just as well to skip it, although I do have some cool lesson plans for the Civil War, stuffed with math and science and music.

I had to go to the grocery after work, and there was a threatening memo posted describing a new procedure. If the procedure were not followed, the memo said, "Affirmative Action will be taken!"

I laughed at the memo. The checker avoided my eyes and said she didn't know what they had meant. I felt bad. Bad enough that she should have to work in a place where they not only send threatening memos to the staff, but then post them so that every passerby knows someone got in trouble, but then to have one of the passersby find it funny -- well, I regretted having laughed. But it is funny, isn't it?

Sunday went as planned. I read, knitted, baked, and relaxed. Went to church and enjoyed it. I am singing a solo for the anthem next week, and can't make up my mind what to sing. The director has assured me that he doesn't care what I sing, and I believe him. He is not very familiar with the solo literature for sacred music, since he is actually a band man. The accompanist, who is very knowledgeable, won't talk at all. Maybe he is desperately shy, although he has known some of the people there for years, and scuttles away whenever they speak to him, too. I am also supposed to lead the hymns. Our director conducts them, but he says I should just wave my arms around, and the choir points out that they don't watch anyway, so it won't matter what I do.

  #2 daughter has a couple of job prospects and is having fun. #1 daughter was out shopping with friends, which means she is not home moping because her husband is on -- or, in fact, in, since he is a submarine guy -- the briny deep.

I think I said that I wouldn't start anything new till I finished something, but it seemed as though all my WIPs are either long-term projects or stuck at hard bits (buttons, darts... my standard for "hard" is pretty low right now). So I started a new sewing project.

At least I also finished the project in question, rather than adding to my WIP collection.

I made a summer blouse in blue gauze.

I was using Butterick pattern 3383, a really simple woven T. But perhaps I chose too large a size -- I ended up with a totally flashdance neckline. 

So I turned to my old friend, the pleat, and made a pretty new neckline.

I wanted to do tucks, and I suppose I still may-- it would be simple enough to sew the pleats down for an inch or two. I do not, however, want to end up drawing too much attention to the bosom, so I may leave it as it is, even though I have a bit of a peasant blouse effect. This particularly true because of the gauze, which is flimsy and gypsy-esque anyway.

I remember peasant blouses fondly, actually. They were in style when I was a teenager. In those days, I never considered whether my blouses brought unnecessary attention to my bosom. Ah, youth!

You may or may not be able to see the detail of the neckline below right. I can't -- a combination, I guess, of the color and my ineptitude with the photographing of fabric. Oh, and my monitor. Is there anything else I haven't already blamed it on? Anyway, I hope you can, because I am inordinately proud of the fact that I actually measured those tucks -- 2 cm each. At first, of course, I just stood there and pinned until it wasn't off-the-shoulder any more, but then it struck me that many people would measure, and I did. Then I just sewed across the careful tucks with tiny hand stitches.

In aesthetic terms, I shouldn't really be making tops like this, however swooningly lovely the color. This is what the books I have been reading (in my efforts toward my goal of becoming a well-groomed old lady, a project which I am beginning early because it may take me 20 years or more to accomplish) -- those books call this kind of  garment a "shapeless sack" and say that it makes the wearer look shapeless, too.

But I remember what Peg Bracken said. She said that, while fashion writers always assume that you have an audience, sometimes you don't. Sometimes, she said, you have painting to do -- or, in my case, boxes to unpack or a garden to weed.

The top will be cool and comfortable for summer, and fits into my SWAP. So I declare this my official Sew? I Knit-along top for June.

It was also an "interview" for the two-piece print dress (a central part of the whole SWAP process). The sewing bloggers talk about interviewing patterns. They make trial ones in muslin, and alter them repeatedly until they are perfect, and then make it in real fabric. Once they have it perfect, they call it "TNT" -- that stands for "tried and true." You are only supposed to use TNT patterns for your SWAP. I doubt I will get to that point. I am not up to the standard of the sewing bloggers, and probably shouldn't even attempt to use their terminology. My boys have warned me not to use the term "peeps" or to call the Methodist ladies' circle my "posse," and it may be that I cannot toss off the sewing bloggers' terminology, either. I'll stick to WIPs and frogging.