Yesterday was a PSD (personal sewing day), but I ended up with this purple blob.

Well, it is not a blob. It is one of those fashionable mock-wrap tops. But the horizontal seam is nearly at my waist, and so loose that the effect is not so much a wrap as ... hmm...  I cannot think of any pieces of clothing that include such a thing as a design feature.

There is, doubtless, a way to fix this. I will be working on it. Until then, it does not deserve a picture any better than a purple blob.

I had intended to tell you how much I liked the fabric and how easy the pattern was and stuff like that, but I am not happy with this thing. And, yes, it is all the fault of the inanimate object.

Fortunately, Jasmine was behaving better than that purple thing. I finished the first sleeve and it fit into the space it belongs in, and started the second sleeve.

This made up for the bad behavior of the purple top.

Another thing that helped make up for that was the fact that the garage door is repaired. I went to buy replacements for the broken coffeepot and the broken toaster, and to do the grocery shopping, and when I returned home, the garage door repairman had been and fixed it, without my having to do anything.

If only that happened with the housework, too. I would come home from doing the errands, and all the house would be sparkling.

Well, I do know that this is possible, and in exactly the same way as the garage door repairman is possible -- you have to pay them.

But it was a nice fantasy.

#2 son assisted me in preparing this breakfast of sausage and cheese casserole and peach coffee cake. Do we detect the presence of saturated fats and simple carbohydrates here?

We do.

Today is a work day.

I have not even been to the farmer's market, and I will regret that later in the week, but at the moment I am talking to my kid on the IM and enjoying the peaches with their brown sugar, and not caring a bit.

Chez fibermom, we have to take these S&B books out of the library with the titles hidden, as though they were smutty books, because we don't use That Word.

But I have made a couple of things from the S&B knitting books, and I wanted to see this one, since I had admired the mohair fuzzy bunny slippers in the flesh, or at least in the fiber, at my local LYS.

So let me tell you about S&B Crochet: The Happy Hooker, in case you have been curious.

Nearly half of the book is basic instructions on how to crochet. Add in the rectangles and triangles masquerading as patterns (sorry, am I being a little querulous about this?) and half the book is useless for people who already know how to crochet. But quite useful for those who do not, and would like to.

In fact, since there are so few books on crochet around, this one is already my favorite for the beginner.

When I learned to knit, all knitters naturally learned how to crochet, since it was one of the skills you need for finishing, and all the crochet patterns I own are in knitting books, so that the crocheter has to feel like a red-headed stepchild. The Happy Hooker solves that problem without giving you patterns only for afghans, doilies, and things pretending to be knitted, which is what the average book on crocheting offers.

The Happy Hooker includes some afghans, but also has hats, purses, a skirt, tops for men and women, toys, and a couple of baby things. The clothes are stylish -- something you rarely see in crochet patterns -- and have in most cases both charts and written instructions. There is a clear section on how to read written instructions, too. Of course there is an ipod cozy, which you can easily adapt to fit your cell phone.

Uh-oh, getting querulous again.

My favorite use for crochet is lace, so it is not surprising that my favorite pattern in this book is Short'n'Sweet, which is a little lacy jacket. It is moose lace -- that is, lace done at an enormous gauge -- as are all the lacy things in this book. If you like crochet lace but hesitate to work with tiny hooks and thread, you could start with one of these lacy projects and work your way up (down?) to traditional crochet lace.

My mother is very good at crochet (one review of her work said she "could crochet a Volkswagen," which I take to be high praise), so I thought about her as I was reading The Happy Hooker. I think that a couple of the projects, including a fitted jacket and my other favorite pattern, the Fat-Bottomed Bag, would be new ideas for her.

Now, who do I know who would actually wear mohair bunny slippers?

I have the day off today, and will be working tomorrow. I know that, when I have a weekday off in lieu of a Saturday, that day off should become Saturday. That is, I need to clean house, do the grocery shopping, work in the garden -- all that.

However, a weekday off feels like an extra day. Like a snow day -- a gift of free time. I could watch movies, get some WIPs finished up to clear the decks for a new project, loll around, declare a PSD (personal sewing day)...

We'll see.

It is #2 daughter's birthday today. She is 22. We will be celebrating in a week or two when she comes home to visit. I can hardly wait.

The Baritone and I are singing a duet this Sunday. "In the Garden." A cappella. We will slay them.

I do not want to sound crass here. I actually like "In the Garden." There is nothing wrong with a nice sentimental Edwardian hymn, and our voices are suited to it. It is a favorite of The Baritone's mother's. I think that worship can be enhanced by low, popular songs just as much as by grander music. For many people, hearing an old song like this reminds them of attending church with their families or other happy times

We are also working on the amazing "Awakening Chorus," something I had never heard before. The Baritone kept saying "It's from The Pirates of Penzance!" It isn't, but it does have that Gilbert and Sullivan feel. Sullivan actually wrote hymn tunes, of course, most notably "Onward, Christian Soldiers." If you check out the link, and I hope you will, you have to scroll down to hear it, but it is sprightly enough to be worth a bit of scrolling.

If you know about church music, then you will suspect that we were, at last night's choir practice, playing around with The Cokesbury Worship Hymnal, one of the most dangerous and controversial books around. The doctrine of election? transubstantiation? the virgin birth? None of these issues gets people riled up the way The Cokesbury does.

This is because it contains all the controversial hymns that modern hymnals have thrown out: the sexist "Rise Up, O Men of God," the martial "Onward, Christian Soldiers," the insufferably sappy "Old Rugged Cross." No old song, however tacky or theologically unsound, has been excluded from this compendium.

People get sentimental about The Cokesbury in the same way that they get sentimental about Dick and Jane. Most churches have a few of them squirreled away somewhere, and the congregation loves them.

The music leaders shudder over them. We want Vaughn Williams and Sibelius, not Fanny Crosby and Chas Gabriel.

Give up this snobbishness. This kind of music makes people happy. Especially when they cry over it. And remember what the kids tell you about their gansta rap -- they're not listening to the lyrics.

Summer lassitude has set in. Our house is a mess, I am only getting to the gym twice a week, and when I come home and am met with "What's for dinner?" my reaction is something like "You guys want to eat?!"

Also, I have mislaid my glasses, my toaster is broken, the coffeepot is leaking, the garage door is still broken, and the air conditioning in my car does not work.

The first sleeve of the Silken Damask Jasmine sweater is almost finished.

It is a raglan sleeve, which means that the front and back and both sleeves are angled so that they will meet at the shoulders. The example at the right is knitted in one piece, with  increases that create that shape, while Jasmine, and also Brooklyn, shown below left, are made in separate pieces and sewn together to create the same effect.

The Raglan sleeve was named after Lord Raglan, a mate of Wellington's who did quite a lot of stuff in the Napoleonic wars and in the Crimean. Wellington also got some clothes named after him -- when you put on your Wellies, you have to think of him. Cardigans and spencers are also named after English guys. I think it is actually very likely that more people know about raglan sleeves than know about Lord Raglan.

The poor fellow died of dysentery and/or disappointment following an unsuccessful battle.

Nowadays, I don't think anyone will name a piece of clothing after you, no matter what. We are not making powell sweaters with rumsfeld sleeves, are we? Perhaps if they got out of their offices and had glorious victories, but really I think that opportunity has passed. None of us now can hope to be remember by posterity as a type of sleeve.

My book 2 for the eighth week of the Summer Reading Challenge is Popco,by Scarlett Thomas. The first layer is the story of an odd month in the life of Alice, a somewhat socially inept young toy designer. She spends a lot of time thinking about what other people think of her, and trying hard not to fit in -- while of course thinking a lot about whether other people think she fits in. At one point, a lot of the girls where she works are wearing a trendy and unusual hairdo I remember from one of #2 daughter's modeling jobs, and Alice has to steel herself against joining in. This sort of thing takes up way too much of her time.

But the overall experience of the book is what you might get if you were reading the sort of magazine that starts stories on one page and continues them later, but you read straight through. You get part of the main story, and then a bit about Alice's childhood, and then a story set in 1605, and then an essay on marketing, and then a long explanation of codes, and then a bit more of the story.

I keep thinking that The Da Vinci Code would have been better if this woman had written it. Not as popular, though, probably.

The other book I have been looking at is Handknit Holidays by Melanie Falick. I say "looking at," because I haven't made anything from this book and therefore cannot tell you anything useful like "don't believe the yarn estimates" or how well the patterns are written.

Since this book is a compilation of patterns from many different designers, you do not find a consistent look throughout. I have mixed feelings about this. When I buy a book by Debbie Bliss, I know that all the directions will be correct and that I will probably like all the designs. A book by Elsebeth Lavold pretty much guarantees that the designs will be striking and beautiful -- and that some will be way too striking for me, and that there will be some "huh?" moments in the directions.

A book with designs by a number of different people is more like a knitting magazine. Handknit Holidays includes garter stitch rectangles and an idiot cord garland -- but also these lovely and complicated socks, and the menorah-design pillow below.

This variety of levels of projects makes sense in a magazine -- you are trying to have something for all the subscribers, after all -- but in a book, it doesn't seem reasonable to me.

Those of us who need a pattern to make a garter stitch rectangle -- or four different patterns for essentially the same hat -- are not going to make those socks. Those who will enjoy the fancy cabling will find the utter-beginner patterns a waste of space.

The variety extends to the type of pattern as well, and this can be a good thing, especially if you are making gifts for different people. You will find stockings and tree skirts, table linens, sweaters, toys, hats and mittens, scarves and wraps, and even a dog sweater. There are a couple of children's sweaters, one of which also shows a unisex adult version, and two women's sweaters with a wide range of sizes. There are a few clearly Christmas items and one clearly for Chanukah, but most are presents, without holiday themes. The brief holiday discussion focuses on the Solstice.

Some of the patterns strike me as impractical -- there is a pair of very pretty long hose, for example, which a lot of people on the web are making. Ladies, those are not going to stay up by themselves. You will be reaching up under your skirt all day to pull them up, unless you attach them to a garter belt. They are also heavy enough that you will not be able to wear them under delicate shoes. So there you will be with your lacy stockings and your hiking boots and your garter belt -- well, the heroine of Popco might wear them.

There is also a peculiar shrug made of two separate pieces, each having a sort of sling and a cuff. I can just see the lucky recipient trying to take this off upon arrival at a warm house, and then to put it back on before heading back out into the cold. It won't hang up in the coat closet, either, so you will have to sling the two pieces over your arm, or just never take it off, though it will dangle into the guacamole. Wear this along with the stockings, hitching them up throughout the party, and your reputation as an eccentric will be cemented.

The pictures are attractive, but you cannot always tell what the items look like. Shawls are not shown open (and I for one would not make a complex lace shawl having seen only a hint of the design), the poncho is never shown full length (you see the bottom of it worn as a skirt and the top as a poncho with the rest of it rucked up), the cover hood is shown several times but always straight on so that the shape is a mystery.

There is no "how to knit" section, so this shouldn't be your only knitting book, but there is a section that clearly explains all the terminology and special techniques called for.

This was a free book for me, and there are three designs of the fifty that I will probably make some day. There are thirteen that I might conceivably make some day. A quilter friend of mine claims that a craft book is worth buying if it so much as inspires you, even if you never make anything from it. With individual knitting patterns selling for $6 apiece and knitting magazines approaching $10, this book might be worth buying for a couple of designs. If it inspires you to make your holiday gifts, it could be worthwhile even if you don't care to make any of these particular items.

Peach butter, and peach pie. I put pastry cutouts on the top of the pie, something I like to do to make a pie pretty. I have tiny cutters: a couple of different leaves, a star, a heart. This pie has leaves. Southern Living suggests painting your pastry cutouts with food coloring, and I have done that for Thanksgiving dinner, but this was enough fooling around in the kitchen for a summer day.

I ended up sneaking into the choir room halfway through the run-through of this week's anthem. Rehearsal had been canceled this week because the organist's mother was having surgery, and the attendance at rehearsals has been pretty low anyway. The director had picked an anthem out of a hat, I guess, imagining that everyone would remember it from some earlier performance.

He chose the one that they think either I or #2 daughter sang the solo on. The one that I do not remember at all. I walked directly into a hideous squawking rendition of it, and got to sing along on the ending. There were lots of disgruntled murmurings in the choir room, but it was too late to do anything about it. I snuck surreptitious looks at the music all through the service, hoping to learn it before we sang. When it came to it, I sang out with gusto, because it was too late to do anything else.

It was also too hot to do anything at all yesterday. We had a heat advisory, an "extreme" rating on whatever they're rating. So I got the first Jasmine sleeve almost finished while reading Christopher Buckley's Little Green Men.

Buckley is a favorite author of mine. This book's premise is that the government is faking all signs of UFOs, in order to distract people from what is really going on. The book mentions several kinds of alien encounters, including the kind that I have experienced.

Have I ever told you about my alien encounter? I was driving down an unlighted dirt road with a car full of kids, when all of a sudden some odd lights appeared in the sky. I stopped the car -- the road was entirely deserted, so there was no need to pull over, I just stopped so we could watch the weird lights.

As we were watching -- "goofily," Buckley said, in describing this kind of encounter -- the radio and headlights went out. I had to drive the rest of the way home (we lived in the country then, with no streetlights or pavement or anything) in complete darkness with no lights.

I took the car to be fixed, but the electric bits were never really good again, and the mechanics couldn't figure out why. We refer to that event as "the time the aliens sucked all the electricity out of the car."

Just for the record, I do not believe that alien beings used their spaceship to suck the electricity out of my car. I would be willing to believe in the existence of creatures from other planets if I were ever presented with evidence, but until then Buckley's story seems just as likely.

The new Sew?IKnit project is quilting, which may encourage me to get back to my quilt, a WIP that has been being ignored for so long that it is almost a UFO (unfinished object) at this point. The SewRetro and Knit the Classics projects are still swirling around in my mind. I obviously have too many WIPs, and too many on the verge of being UFOs, too.

By the time I got down to the Farmers Market yesterday, it was already in the 90s. I bought half a peck of peaches first, and trundled around the square carrying them, adding bitter melon, cucumber, and green beans. The salad line was way too long again, and the peaches were too heavy, so I quit after that and went back to my car.

I got up with the sun this morning to turn some of those peaches into peach butter and pie before it gets too hot, but I have to drink my tea first.

So, with a trunk full of fresh produce, I went to buy a handbag for #2 daughter's birthday.

I went first to Target, because I had to go to the pharmacy anyway, and get a top-up card for #2 son's phone. After that, I went to the mall. The mall is only a medium-sized aversion for me, but this is still an extremely rare event, one that could only be undertaken for the sake of my kids.

I know the exact size of this aversion, because in the Overcoming Agoraphobia program, one of the first things you do is make a list of your top ten aversions, in order of dreadfulness. Mine range from making phone calls, which is just slightly worse than normal dislike, and merely something I put off for a few days before I force myself to do it(admittedly, it used to be a few weeks or months, but I have improved), to driving on scary roads, which is of course a nightmarish experience. The mall is not frightening to me, but I do find that I am soon seized with a feeling that I absolutely have to get out of there. I ignore it, of course, since I have Overcome Agoraphobia, but I tend to become disoriented and confused after a bit. I didn't buy anything there, but I did look at a lot of handbags.

My specifications for this handbag were not that complicated. It had to be good leather with good construction, naturally. I wanted a reputable maker, but without any vulgar designer advertising on the outside. It needed to be stylish and a bit dramatic, but classic enough to be carried for a long time. And it couldn't be black. After I read that in the book I wrote about earlier in the week, #1 daughter confirmed it. Carrying a black bag with everything is Simply Not Done any more.

So the first hour of my handbag shopping involved looking at row after row of purses, all of which were made of poor-quality materials and badly constructed. Most of them were festooned with excessive embellishments, which seemed to me to make them look cheap even if they were made in acceptable materials.

I left the mall and went to a smaller, more familiar shop, where I found better choices.

At this store I ran into a friend and asked her about my choices. She said she thought I needed something smaller and softer. Something, she said, like this one -- and she grabbed my own bag, an olive suede number with a rounded shape and chocolate brown leather trim.

I realized that she was looking at a shorter, curvier woman with a casual style, while I was buying a bag for a taller, more dramatic girl, and felt confirmed in my choices.

I am proud to say that I steeled myself after this and went and did the grocery shopping. I was not, however, able to force myself also to go buy purple thread, so I did not do any sewing on my last summer top. I am halfway through the first Jasmine sleeve, however.

Okay, those peaches are calling my name.

I find that on this day in both 2004 and 2005 I wrote snide things about the homeland defense site. I must tell you, in fairness, that they have improved a lot. Their site looks way better, and they -- perhaps because of the lessons they learned from Katrina -- have updated to suggest a phone card as well as plenty of quarters. They also link to the Red Cross and recommend having plenty of water on hand.

No, it isn't actually useful, exactly. If you have, say, snowstorms or earthquakes in your area, then you already know everything they suggest. But at least they don't sound like complete idiots any more. They have expanded it a bit, and aren't still trying to come up with some kind of suggested plan for how to cope with terrorist attacks. By including the possibility of natural disasters, they have managed to sound reasonable. This was a good strategy, I think.

I don't like to think of the amount of taxpayer dollars involved in this. I can imagine the conversation, though.

"Gee, Scooter, I just can't think of anything to tell them to do for an Orange Day. We already had them check their duct tape on Amber Days."
"Yeah, I see your point. Hmm...." taps teeth with pencil... "Hey, didn't those guys in New Orleans have trouble evacuating? Maybe we could put in something about evacuating!"
"Sure! Hey, I found a list of clothes to take to camp. We could adapt that!"
"Yeah! And, hey, put in something for pets!"
"Pets? What are you gonna pack for pets?"
"I don't know, but they were on the TV a lot. Would buying an extra bag of dog food for the emergency closet work?"
"Oh, I like that!" Gets back to work....

Obviously, it is too hot to do anything serious. And I am easily amused.

Yesterday morning, having seen my husband off to work and settled in to catch up on the doings of the xangans, I heard a horrible noise from the garage. I ran to see what was wrong, saw nothing, and went back to my morning.

As fate would have it, I had decided I could have a lazy Friday morning and did not go to the gym. Thus, it was not until I went to leave for work that I discovered that the garage door would not open and my car was trapped inside.

I roused the troops (well, my sons, actually) and we all tried in vain to open that door. I commandeered #1 son's car and got to work late.

That Man and The Empress had been waiting for an air conditioning repair man since 6:30 that morning. The fellow eventually showed up -- at 9:30. The Empress admitted that she had not been as nice to him as she ordinarily would have been.

She was nice to me. She gave me a piece of her home-made peach cobbler.

Fortified by cobbler, she and I tackled the third technical malfunction of the day. I had been thinking of calling my husband to come fix it, but it seemed to me that the demise of the garage door might be enough excitement for him for one day.

The blade of the cutter on the laminator had been removed.

Never mind how this happened. We will draw a veil over that. It was, as The Empress summed it up, "user error."

The cutter of a laminator is about 2" square. It has this minuscule razor blade held to it with a teensy tiny screw and nut. In order to put the blade back on the cutter, you simply insert the blade into the cutter, push down the lever, line up the holes in the lever and the blade, insert the screw from the back, and tighten the nut.

Do not forget that the cutter is attached to the laminator, so you have to do this whole thing on your knees at the back of a machine. The blade will fall out if you let go of it for an instant, and there is an opening in back of it about 1 inch tall, into which you have to put your fingers in order to put the screw into the cutter. You also have to hold down that lever the entire time. So you hold the screw with one hand, the blade with another, the lever with the third, and the nut with the fourth hand.

I'm making it sound easier than it is.

So there we were, me holding the blade as carefully as possible, since blood would just complicate matters, and the lever, while The Empress attempted to put the screw in. We were contorting ourselves into various odd positions while on our knees by the machine, trying to keep out of one another's way as we worked together on this 2" square device.

I thought how helpful it would be to have a knitting needle with which to line up the holes. I could then hold the lever down with one hand and keep the blade in place at a distance with the knitting needle while holding a position like the kneeling port-a-bras popular in the 19th century ballet --- Well, I did not have a knitting needle.

At this point the phone rang. I kept the blade in place while The Empress answered it, and she came back with some wire. The phone rang again. I used the wire and a magnet to get the blade into position without having my hands in front of the spot where The Empress needed to be working. By the time she returned, I had the blade in place at a bit of a distance, and a horrible cramp in my shoulder.

The process of getting the screw into the hole was lengthy but the feeling of triumph was delicious.

Then I set down the magnet and -- still depressing the lever -- picked up the needle-nose pliers and put the minuscule nut onto the wee little screw. The smallness of the space meant that the nut had to be turned one-fourth of a rotation at a time, at which point the pliers would hit the edges of the available space and have to be moved. One-handedly. While The Empress held onto the screw.

When we finished, she said, "Who needs men?"

The entire process was enlivened by our customers' enjoyment of the spectacle. We weren't laughing much, though, because laughing caused dropping of the screw (that's why we had the magnet -- to fish it out of the trough when it fell) and dangerous joggling of the blade.

Meanwhile, my husband was able to get the garage door open. It is still broken -- the gigantic spring snapped, and I guess after 40-some years of service it had a right to -- but my car is no longer trapped.

I do not have to work today. If my car had been trapped, I might have had to spend the entire day at home, reading and knitting. Fortunately, I am able to get my car out, and therefore can do the eight hundred errands that have piled up since I've been working on Saturdays.

I may be exaggerating slightly when I say "eight hundred." But only slightly.

It is the last day of the Sew?IKnit summer top sewalong. I have made a bunch of tops during this time, but I have also fallen prey to peer pressure. All the girls over at Sew?IKnit have been making this type of top, and I have been looking at their pictures all month, and , well, you know how it is. You begin to think that you want one too. Never mind that the pattern requires double seams and topstitching on knits and that my sewing machine doesn't have any of the features normally used for that and that I am not really good enough with a sewing machine to do this kind of thing with a plain straight stitch. Never mind that Chanthaboune has told me straight out that I am simply too old to wear this kind of thing (but I have seen older women than I in them, so she may be wrong). Even knowing that I will probably be unsuccessful did not prevent me from cutting this out last night, as I watched detective programs with my boys. Today is the Sew?IKnit deadline, so I probably will not even finish this in time for that deadline, but I am still using it as an excuse. The fabric is a remnant from which I cut a top for Chanthaboune, and still had a lot left over. Enough in fact for this top, so I can think of it as being made from scraps.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

I am not being amusing at all in my real post for the day (below -- and Xanga won't let me show you my book, either), but Crazy Aunt Purl is being quite funny about men and policemen in particular, so you could go over there if you were hoping for amusement when you came here. She doesn't have any knitting content either, though.