i love finished objects

It is interesting to see how much time I have to knit when we homeschool!  It feels so good to finish a sweater.

He will have to wear it with a long sleeved shirt, since the yarn scratches.  That means it will have to be even colder when he wears it...  (I have a friend here who keeps on telling me that there is no point in knitting in Texas, it just never gets cold enough for a wool sweater.  I will just ignore her and keep on pretending that this year and the previous two were outliers.)

I wish I could pick up a book with a story and just read it, but my mind wanders when I try to do that.  Melva wanted another one of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's books, and I read it too.  I can read her books while knitting. Reading about knitting too much while you should perhaps be doing something else, while you are knitting and should actually be doing something else (like sleeping...)  It is a vicious cycle.

Melva has been going from strength to strength:

She finished the first sock, and is now knitting the second, while fitting other, smaller projects in-between:

In one of her books Stephanie Pearl-McPhee writes that she once visited with a woman who had knit for 65 years.  She thought that this woman would be a mentor, would be the ultimate expert who could answer her questions.  Instead, she knew only one way to cast on and only one way to bind off, and could only knit certain types of patterns (I am paraphrasing, of course).  It turned out that she was not an expert, she could do the few thing she did very well, but she was not an expert knitter.

Melva is the opposite.  She is 11 and has been knitting for about a year.  She investigates all the options energetically, she does not have to memorize the advantages to different methods of casting on, they are so relevant to her that she just remembers them.  She sits and calculates gauge for half an hour before she starts to knit a dishcloth that she could knit in an hour.  Her attention to detail is impeccable.  She can fix a cable that was turned the wrong way around three rows ago. (We do not unschool - she does math and Latin and history etc too :)

Apart from buying far too many books on knitting, I had very little to do with this.    Given time and access to information, and a nudge in the right direction (even something a simple as reading about Ginny's boys and what they can do), now and again, can work what appears to be miracles.

And that is just another reason I love Wednesdays, and Ginny' yarn along :)  Cannot wait to see what everyone else is knitting, and I might even spot a book - fiction, not knitting or cooking or organizing - that could hold my attention!

Ravelry notes: here

Making memories

In 2004 when my daughter turned three, she received a poster of Winnie the Pooh, mounted on hardboard.  Our best friends and neighbors at the time mounted it themselves using a method that involved a bathtub and a specific combination of glue and water.  We treasure that gift and it is still on the nursery wall, although she has moved out of the nursery and is now ten years old.

Ever since she received that gift I wanted to do something similar, but on a grander scale, such as mounting a whole picture storybook on hardboard and putting the entire book up on the bedroom walls.  That, when you stop to think about it, is a very big project.  (I still plan on doing it, even though I might have to have another baby to justify a picture book on the wall). In the mean time, three boys and seven years later, I have not managed to even start on it.

That is, until recently.  In search of the method, I stumbled upon this tutorial.

So, instead of making big posters to mount on a wall, I bought three Beatrix Potter books at a thrift store and made a memory game.  

My memory game makes me very happy.  I love the connection it creates between my family and my past, remembering the nights we played around the table with my parents and siblings, so many years ago, so far away.  And while very little that I do during the run of an ordinary day stays done, this game will stay.   

Besides, it is very pretty, don't you think?