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Sunday, June 04, 2006

Ahhh...

After last weekend during which the city of Chicago was approximately the temperature of one of the rings of hell (okay, not quite, but we, the nearly 100-year-old-house-dwelling-un-air-conditioned-types thought so) this week and this weekend have been perfect.

I hit a roadblock on the sock, so I waited until Friday night when I could get some assistance at Loopy Yarns. I sat down, told them I was having an issue and began ripping back to where I knew I should start. As I was tinking, I realized immediately what I had been doing wrong. That's my favorite part about knitting. I have always felt that the ability to knit has been in my brain and in my hands and I just have to find the way to release it. It seems like something I was always supposed to do. (Wow, that reads SO new age-y.)

Yesterday, the husband and I took a walk around the neighborhood and it was lovely. We live in a historic little pocket of Chicago where most of the houses range from the late 1800s to the mid-1920s. Ours was built in 1909. We are soon going to be undertaking some significant renovations on the house--all new windows and electric, the kitchen, turning the upstairs kitchen into a bathroom/laundry, etc. We'll see how far we get before the money runs out...As much as I would love a house with rooms with better "flow", typical Chicago two- and three-flats tend to be a little chopped up. Ours is a little better because we are on a bigger lot, so our house is about three feet wider than the normal two-flat. Doesn't sound like much, but it actually makes a huge difference. In order to get that flow, we'd have to gut the house which doesn't feel right. We bought it for its vintage details like the wood and stained glass, so we will live with the quirks, too--with a few improvements. Hopefully A/C will be one of them! But I digress...

Our neighborhood feminist bookstore, Women and Children First, surprised me by having a small but nice little selection of knitting books. I have always thought highly of the store. They have really impressive author events and it has plenty of non-feminist titles to keep even the husband browsing for some time. I am going to commit to buying at least a few more books a year at W&CF.

Two friends recently returned from a trip to Florida. They informed me that their very first "junking" purchase was for me. It was this:

It is a bag crocheted out of...bags. Specifically Wal-Mart bags. (It even has a cell phone pocket inside.) Hey, I'm all about the recycling, and one cannot underestimate the appeal of doing handcrafts, but I personally could not give up a life of fiber for a life of plastic, no matter how low the stash ran.* Kudos to this happy hooker, though. Recycle on!

*There is no danger of that. Last weekend I calculated the stash. Not counting items on the frog pile as well as a few other things that got missed, I have 58 miles of yarn. FIFTY. EIGHT. Yikes. I joined the Summer of Stash pronto. It's the first step to recovery.

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