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May 31, 2006
afghan of love
For the last six months I have been working on a massive knitting project. See, my little brother is getting married on Saturday and he and his future wife (!) are big on personalized gifts. Plus, I'm me. I didn't want to shop off no stinking registry. Instead I made them a highly personalized wool afghan that should last as long as their marriage (and I'm betting on that whole "till death do us part thing" so I mean forever). Not only did I want to give them something that would remember as really super special, I wanted to make something that was really super special to me. I started with the idea of a blanket my Grammy Jane made for my parents (and my aunt and uncle, and her sister, and her best friends) many years ago. I have loved this blanket since childhood, and I know my brother has too. I didn't want to make something identical, but definitely something inspired by Grammy's beautiful afghans. I started by using a different color and weight of yarn. Grammy's are cream colored, and I think made out of a worsted weight wool. Mine is a rusty orange--the newlyweds are big fans of all things orange--and a bulky weight yarn. Not only did this knit up superfast (larger needles=less stitches) but it gave the afghan a more rustic and earthy feel, which is totally right for it's intended recipients.
The blanket is constructed in seven panels, each of which has an equal number of rows, and a two-stich garter boarder. 
The boarders make for matching up the panels for seaming a fairly easy task, which is a good thing. There is nothing I despise more than finish work on a knitting project that is knitted but essentially not done. [Aside: my first ever knitting project, a sampler afghan, has never been pieced together and just takes up space in a storage box.] Four of the panels are identical--the garter boarder and a horsehoe cable running up the center on a reverse stockinette background.
The other three panels are similar, but not identical (though I made a mistake on one of them--don't tell Jon & Alicia!). They all have the garter boarder and an additional border of bobbles spaced every six rows running up each side. The middle section of each panel are seed stitch diamonds atop a stockinette backdrop. Two of them have offset half diamonds, creating a stockinette zig-zag up the center. These two panels should be mirror images with the offset pieces reversed on the two panels so the zig-zag points toward the center (the panels are placed one on each side). I made them identical, but I don't think anyone will mind. The center panel has a full seed-stich diamond running up the center and half-diamonds on either side, with zig-zags running in-between. Basically, it is the other two similar panels squeezed together without the borders (duh).
I started work on this on Christmas day (as soon as the holiday knitting was completed), and finished the knitting portion of the process in late March or early April. 
Next up was to block all of the pieces to size and get them stitched together. At the time, I was living in a TINY apartment and had no space for blocking. I had also been asked by my landlord to leave because she wanted to sell my house. Amidst trying to find a place to live and packing up my life, I did the blocking at my parents house. For about a month I took up some rarely used floor space in their guest room. With the aid of a giant t-square I masking-taped out a 6' x 6" rectangle on the narrow strip of floor between the bed and the wall. One at a time I wetted and pinned out the four identical strips. Each of them rested for a week on the floor, in part because the process took about an hour I was able to eek out only on weekends, and in part because that's how long they took to completely dry. I moved into my new (much larger) apartment at the beginning of May, and as soon as I found the floor in my office/sewing/craft/guest room, I taped out three more boxes, two 6' x 1' and one 6' x about 21" and got the last three pieces pinned down. Even with a fan blowing on them (gently, my friends, gently) they took a little over a week to completely dry. Finally I had all the sections ready to piece together! On May 21st. The afghan's ride to California (the newlyweds live in San Francisco) was leaving early on the morning of May 28th.
I don't know if you are aware of this or not, but seaming always takes much longer than you expect it to. I spent every extra moment I could find (and many I wish I had spent sleeping) of last week seaming what I took to calling "the damn blanket" together. Now that I have had a nap, I'm happy with it again. Last week? I wanted it to die. 
Saturday morning I wove in the last yarn-end and wrote some care instructions on the back of one of the skein's label. Last night it was delivered to Jon & Alicia's home. Hopefully my Pop got a picture of their faces when they opened up the wrapping. It makes me really happy to know that our family's tradition of beautiful handknits will carry on to a new generation of young marrieds, and I'm also happy to know that Jonathan and Alicia will have a little piece of me to keep them warm.
(Click here for more photos on my flickr.)
Posted by amy at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Tags: afghan, knitting, presents, wedding
May 30, 2006
The Long, Hot Summer
I feel like a Puritan with this idea that art must be instructive. I'm not saying that movies should teach us lessons about how to be good Christians (à la 7th Heaven or some such nonesense), I'm not expecting (nor do I want) a morality play. But I do want to come out of the theater with new ideas, to have witnessed a glimpse into another way of being, of thinking, of living.
Posted by amy at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
May 25, 2006
camping with fern
This past weekend, I engaged in an outdoor adventure. I went camping with my dear friend Fern up north of Crouch, Idaho. It was fun. I have been working on writing a blow-by-blow accounting of this adventure, but I got about 5 paragraphs in and was still on Friday night. While I do tell very long stories and feel that it is important to share each moment as if you were there camping with us, most of the time, today I am going to refrain and only give you the camping highlights (in no particular order).
In summation, we had an awesome time. I'd love to revisit our campsite again real soon, camping with Fern is big fun, my sleeping bag is very comfy, and I like feeling less limited by my stupid broken knee.
Posted by amy at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Tags: bikes, camping, fern
May 18, 2006
curse you, laundrymat, curse you!
Recently I moved into a new home. Overall I am pretty pleased with my apartment selection. It is much different than most of the places I have lived--new construction (and by this I mean built since 1960), designed to be an apartment (rather than a cute old house oddly divided into multiple apartments), devoid of character but rich in space and storage. I even have off-street parking! The one thing this place is missing is a laundry room. And a certain je ne sais quoi. I may have rented some crazy, poorly designed and horrifically inefficient places in the past but for at least a decade I have had an in-house washer and dryer. And personality. No longer. My baskets of soiled garments and I are back to schlepping to the laundrymat, and I just want to call foul. Laundrymats, I tell you, are a very bad idea. While I would rather have a laundrymat than scrub my unnerwears on a rock down by the river, the laundrymat only wins out by a sliver.
Let's talk a little, my friends, about the costs of laundry. For in-home laundry, you've got the initial investment in the machines. This can be a pretty hefty expense, but it doesn't have to be. There's always deals to be had. Then there's the energy expense. 
If you look at this handy chart you will note that annual energy costs for a washer and dryer hovers around $80/year (washer + dryer = $160ish every year). According to the DOE, these numbers can be improved by washing in cold, using less water, cleaning that dratted lint trap, and investing in Energy Star appliances. Wise words, DOE, wise words. Okay, let's recap. The annual expense of running your own washer and dryer is about $160 a year, plus an initial expense of whatever you paid for the machines (let's say $350 for some used but still Energy Star certified units). Total expense for the first year? $510. Every year after that? $160. Over a 5 year period (60 months), that works out to just under $20 a month for clean clothes galore, with the added bonus of no schlepping. Instead, all this laundry can be done while you are comfortably ensconced on the sofa knitting and watching reruns of Trading Spaces on TLC. (Not that I would ever be found doing just that, not me.)
There is a sizable portion of the population that does not have the opportunity to have an in-home laundry experience. While the 'rents house is often a good choice, some people's mothers feel that by the time her kids have reached their 30's, schlepping laundry home just isn't appropriate. More importantly, some people's fathers feel that by the time his kids have reached age 18 they should be 100% self-sufficient. If the kids can't take care of themselves, the armed forces are always an option. Uncle Sam is a great caregiver! The aforementioned rock down by the river remains an option, but even with some Dr. Bronner's, I feel that environmentally this isn't the way ahead--not to mention the labor involved! The remaining option seems to be to visit a local laundrymat, which is what I did last weekend after reaching the bottom of my underpants pile. Near my home is a perfectly serviceable neighborhood laundrymat, the 12th Street Laundry. Also, this is the place I regularly did my laundry 10+ years ago when I last had no washer and lived a block away. I have to say, the 12th Street Laundry has quite a racket going on.
I walked in with two baskets of washing, a jug of Tide, a box of Bounce, and a roll of quarters. In the recent past, my washing would have been divided into 4-5 medium loads separated by color and fabric weight. After discovering that the cost to run each washer through one load would take $1.50, I quickly dumped my stuff into 3 washers, filling them to the brim. The cost for the dryers was even more horrifying. At a steep 25¢ for each 7 minutes, my quarters rapidly filled the laundry's coffers. By the time my roll was empty, my towels were still damp and even a couple tee shirts yearned for another hot-aired spin. If I don't find a better option soon, I'm going to have to reintroduce another decade-old trend--ramen noodles as a diet staple. Even if I keep my laundry to a minimum and push my love of hot fluffy towels into a deep and dark forgotten place, that is still $10/week for laundry. That's $40/month, double the cost of laundry at home! Over a 5 year period, that's an additional $1200. I don't know about you, but I feel like I would like to spend that $1200 on something other than LAUNDRY!
In summation I am going to attempt to make this laundrymat assessment not all about me, even though it really is all about how I want to sit on the sofa and knit and watch something off the Tivo while the laundry does its thing in the other room. And I want my twenty bucks a month back. [Insert rant about The Man and The Poor and Who Has A Washing Machine and Distribution of Wealth.] Thank you and goodnight. I've got to go scrub my socks in the sink. Somebody needs lunch money.
Posted by amy at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Tags: laundry, rants
May 17, 2006
Empress Orchid
That said, our last selection, Anchee Min's Empress Orchid was not my favorite read. The novel is a fictionalization of the life of Tsu Hsi, mother of China's last emperor. While the story is compelling and rich, I felt that Min was unable to pare down the massive history of this woman's life into a cohesive novel. She was seemingly distracted by all the forces that surrounded Orchid--from the whole of Chinese history to the power struggles inherent in royal family relationships to one woman's desire to find love. Overall the novel is unfocused and meanders from one key moment to another without the meaning and importance of those moments being fully portrayed. For a plot-driven story, the novel never seems to truly define the plotline beyond "this big thing happened and then another big thing happened." That said, Min uses language as a paintbrush portraying the beauty of Imperial China's Forbidden City and the life of a Chiang Dynasty concubine who went on to rule China for 49 years.
From what I can tell, the rest of the book club agreed with me. We were happy to learn more about this amazing woman (even in fiction) and we enjoyed the read, but overall it just wasn't a great book. Thumbs decidedly to the side.
Posted by amy at 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
May 16, 2006
new beginnings
Welcome to the restart of my quelle surprise weblog. This spring has been all about new beginnings in nearly every part of my life, and giving a new life to my online presence seems like a good manifestation of that change. So here we go!
The thing I'm finding about new beginnings is that more than anything I am having these vivid memory flashes of what used to be, before it all went poo. I am remembering all sorts of moments from a time when I was enjoying my day to day life. Maybe that is because recently I'm getting some confidence back, some glow. Sitting at the laundrymat Sunday evening, reading a trashy novel at the end of a hot sunny day, I was temporarily struck by how fun it can be to sit outside reading a trashy novel at the end of a hot sunny day. Then I rememberd that laundrymats are from the devil and no one should ever have to wash clothes there ever. (Obviously, my thoughts on laundrymats don't really go with the lovey-dovey la la la of this entry. I will move on.) I also, for the first time in nearly a year and a half, have remembered why I enjoy outdoor activities. There is nothing like the feeling miles of dirt pass beneath some rugged sneakers and the hint of a sunburn on your shoulders and cheeks. It is like zen or something. Maybe my brain will start working properly, now that I can reset it's broken patterns during some lengthy walks. There is an old adage that goes something like life is what you make of it. Well, look out life, I'm making something new outta you.
