mmm...Georges Bank scallops

When I first moved to the Boston area from landlocked central Texas, I expected to find delicious and cheap seafood everywhere. All they had to do was pull it out of the sea, right? I was a little surprised to find that while the seafood was good, it really wasn't any cheaper than what I could get in Texas.

Until yesterday. Fresh sea scallops from Georges Bank, off the Massachusetts coast. Cheaper than farm-raised salmon. Available for a limited time. Delicious, creamy, fresh-never-frozen sea scallops. Sauteed in butter with a smidge of garlic, just one minute per side. Could there possibly be a more perfect food?

the siren call of a sexy yarn

Oh, that hand-painted yarn is still calling to me, sitting right here next to me, next to the computer, just begging me to transform it into something luscious. But I can't just yet--the floors need mopping, the children need feeding, and all the general work of a Sunday 'round the house needs doing. Tim's outside wrestling with the Christmas lights, and though the work is frustrating now, it should pay off tonight with some cheery light in the darkness.

So, I'm going to resist temptation for now, and go mop the floors. I'll be good...for now.

zooming through the holidays

With Thanksgiving over (already!), we seem to be hurtling through the holidays at breakneck speed! Why, we haven't even finished the Halloween candy, and Christmas is just around the corner. My mother always said that time goes by faster the older you get, and I think she was right.

I'm making good progress on Aidan's cardigan. All the pieces are made, and I'm sewing up a few seams before doing the color and button band. I'm pleased with this sweater, and it's been fun to make. And I'm glad that it will be done in time for plenty of cold-weather wearing!






But I'm keen to get going on something with this luscious yarn I just couldn't resist. This is Mountain Colors hand-painted yarn from Corvallis, MT, in the color Ruby River. I saw this gorgeous yarn last week and had to buy it--couldn't afford more than one skein of it at the moment, but it was just SO beautiful I had to have it. Now, what to do with this bit of beauty...?

this says it all

from Bread and Roses to the Mensch of Malden Mills

I'm really drawn to places that are past their prime. For one thing, many towns that were once prosperous have been too down-at-the-heels to renovate, leaving more relics behind than their wealthier neighbors. I feel closer to history in places like that, because they haven't been obliterated in the name of progress.

Today I was in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an old mill town near the New Hampshire border. In its heyday, Lawrence was a mighty textile town, employing tens of thousands of immigrants and others in the mills. Of course, the laborers who worked 56-hour weeks didn't enjoy the prosperity of the boom years. When working on an American history book a few years ago, I first learned about the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912. Such a significant event in labor history--and such a testament to the courage of the workers to keep the strike going in dismal and often violent conditions. This part of labor history was never taught in the history classes I had in school. Back then, industrialization was taught from the vantage point of the wealthy factory owners. Industrialization was seen as the great salvation, bringing this nation from the backwardness of near-frontier conditions and catalpulting the United States to the forefront of the world economy. But we never learned about what it was like to be the ones running the machines.

I was in Lawrence today to visit Malden Mills, makers of Polartec fleeces. They have a wonderful outlet store there where you can get the real McCoy at good prices. I'm making a few Christmas presents, and fleece from the dreadful chain fabric stores just would not do. So I trekked north.

In some ways, Lawrence is much as it ever was. It's still a city of immigrants. Today, though, the immigrants speak Spanish instead of Italian. And though you still see the massive brick mills across town, most of them seem to have been converted to other uses. But Malden Mills is still going strong.

In 1995, it didn't look that way. The mill was devastated by fire, and everyone assumed it would be just one more mill to close up and send its work down south or overseas. But the owner, Aaron Feuerstein, vowed to rebuild. Not only that, he paid his workers while the rebuilding was taking place. It was an extraordinary thing for a businessman to do--I remember hearing about it on the news when I lived in Texas, long before I had any connection to Massachusetts. What other company can you imagine would consider its employees to be such an asset that it would protect them in that way? Feuerstein was lionized for his actions and given the nickname the "Mensch of Malden Mills."

I know things have changed since the rebuilding. Feuerstein no longer runs Malden Mills, because the high cost of rebuilding and safeguarding the workers cost him control over the mill. And I heard that the company went through bankruptcy proceedings a few years ago. But I'm still in awe of what happened, and to me, it's worth going out of my way to give them my business.

lullabies

Today, Douglas didn't have a nap. He's at that awkward stage--if he naps, he has a hard time getting to sleep at night, but if he doesn't nap, Mr. Cheerful generally loses his cool. Today, I thought he'd be fine without his nap, and he was, until about 6:30 when his world came unglued. So, on with the jim-jams, find Mickey and Minnie and Tigger, and off to bed.

I never really thought about how unorthodox my lullabies were until we had a babysitter last weekend. Nancy, a colleague of mine with two boys of her own, graciously offered to look after my two so Tim and I could attend a gallery opening. Aidan very seriously reported the next morning that he had a lot of fun with Nancy, but..."she didn't know all the songs."

We always start off with "London Bridge." Pretty normal there.

Then "Alexander Beetle," a song from 1970 that my sister used to play for me. A folk singer named Melanie recorded it (A.A. Milne wrote it), and it's just a simple tale about a girl whose friend accidentally lets her pet beetle out of the matchbox she kept it in. Somewhere in Texas there is a reel-to-reel tape of me singing the song when I was about 6 or 7.

Next, if time permits, come two Texas songs: "San Antonio Rose" and "Roly Poly." Gotta love Bob Wills. I didn't realize until very recently that Bob Wills isn't one of the American "standards" like I'd thought he was when I was growing up. His music is a little cheesy, but you'll find your toes tapping as you listen to "San Antonio Rose" and you'll sit on the edge of your seat waiting, just waiting for...."ahhhhhhhhhhh-HA!"

And we always end with "Sleepy Eye Town." You won't find that one anywhere online because it's a song my great-grandmother wrote and sang to her babies. My family didn't have much to pass from one generation to the next--no great properties, no fabulous antiques, certainly no money. But this song has been sung to five generations of babies in our family. (Just in case you think my math is off, my kids are the 4th generation, but my niece has babies of her own in the 5th generation). It pleases me to think that after all the decades of change---from radio to 78s to 33s to reel-to-reel to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to my iPod--- "Sleepy Eye Town" lives in the same place it's always been--in the hearts and voices of the mamas in my family.

impatience

The sleeves of Aidan's cardigan are growing again. I finally worked my way through my frustration, frogged a few rows, then got it going again. The annoying thing is that the pattern is seriously wrong. If I'd followed the pattern as written, the sleeves would have been about six inches too short!

I'm so tempted to set it down and get going on something new. I've become a knitting blog addict, and watching what other people are doing makes me crave something fresh and new. I want to try knitting lace! Socks! More sweaters! Toys! More more more!!!

Of course, what I really need to do is to frog two half-started projects that I put down and never finished (a too-basic ribbed pullover in bulky denim yarn and a delicate cardigan for myself with a pattern too fussy for my modern, streamlined, sophisticated taste... ;)

But the saddest of all sad WIPs is my Starmore Cromarty. Ah, Cromarty, she is beautiful. She is exquisite. She nearly made me pull my hair out until I finally figured out the pattern. I made my Cromarty with a lovely rich blue yarn I found in Ireland in the summer of 1999, and she was going to be an absolute work of art.

That is, until I realized I didn't have enough yarn.

I was about halfway done with the front, and I calculated that I probably had enough to do the back, but not the sleeves. What now? No hope of finding more of the yarn. I think it was discontinued when I bought it, and it was so long ago it's impossible to find the same dye lot. But I couldn't frog it, not after all that work! So there it has been sitting since January 2000, stunted, waiting for a brilliant brainstorm of mine so it can see the light of day...

on being called "miss"

I've mellowed in my old age.

After I had my feminist awakening in my early 20s, I cringed whenever someone called me "miss." I felt smaller somehow, as if the speaker thought of me as a child. I felt belittled, as if I weren't considered worthy of being spoken to with dignity. And I felt singled out, annoyed that someone would presume to know my marital status--and angered that they felt the need to define me by it.

I lived in the South until my early 30s, so I was called "miss" a lot.

Today, I went to my local package store (as they call liquor stores here) to buy beer. And the salesclerk said "I'll need to see your ID, miss." How charming, I thought. I've been legal to buy alcohol since Ronald Reagan was president, and this delightful (and presumably BLIND) saleclerk called me "miss" and wanted to see my ID. You should have seen the look on his face when he realized I was born smack in the middle of the swinging sixties.

I'm going to savor this one.

swanning about

We had a good visit with the swan family yesterday. Aidan, Douglas, and I took bags of stale pita bread to the pond to feed the ducks. Then the geese realized that supper was on. Then came the swans from the completely opposite end of the pond. I always imagine Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyrie" when I see them heading our way. Very dramatic.

As graceful as swans are in the water, they're pretty clumsy-looking when they're on shore. And big. And pushy! They wanted our bread. All of our bread. NOW. I actually had to get in between the Big Daddy Swan and Douglas for fear that the swan would snatch the bag of bread right out of Douglas's hand. The bird was bigger than HE was!

But what about the knitting? Oh, I've hit a wall with the knitting. I've been working on Aidan's cardi for so long that I've internalized the pattern. Or so I thought. Made a big goof a few rows after the main pattern begins, and I just don't want to take the time to fix it. I'm so close to being done! But I can't let it stay there, because it will drive me nuts. So, the sleeves remain abandoned on the coffee table until I have the strength and fortitude to face them once more.

my next project

This may be it. Last night, I hauled out all my knitting books and had my husband take his pick. I think this may be the one. I love it and I think it'll be a fun knit. It's from The Best of Knitter's: Arans & Celtics.

how I became a knitter

It all began on a hot, dusty Texas prairie about 30 years ago...

Well, actually, it was in the suburbs of a major north Texas city. My mother, who had been knitting since the Great Depression, since the time when you had to knitif you actually wanted a sweater, taught me the basics of knitting. Mom liked the practical yarns--those tough, hard-wearing acrylics that could be washed and dried without shrinking or fading. She taught me to knit the English way, where you keep dropping and picking up the yarn. I learned, clumsily, and made a couple of truly hideous sweaters. An argyle vest big enough for me and my whole family to wear. A red-and-white boucle short-sleeved sweater that bagged around the neck. Each project uglier than the first. Needless to say, I just gave up.

Which was just as well, because at that time (late 1970s/early 1980s), knitting shops were going the way of the dinosaurs. First the fabric and yarn departments of major departments stores disappeared. Then the local yarn shops. Pretty soon, all you could find in my town was a bunch of squeaky, petroleum-based, plastic-feeling yarns from the local branch of a national craft store. Who wanted to knit anyway?

And then I went to Austria.

I was an exchange student in Graz, Austria, for a year after I graduated from high school. From the very beginning, I was charmed by the old-fashioned traditions that many Austrians still practiced. All the teens I knew took ballroom dance lessons in preparation for ball season. All the kids in my host family (all six of them--it's a Catholic country!) were musical and played classical music the way most American teens played the radio. And they knit. Even the boys. They all knit.

On Saturday nights, the kids (from 13 to 20) would gather around the kitchen table with their friends and boyfriends and girlfriends. They'd drink coffee and some would smoke cigarettes and talk about politics and philosophy and life--and they knit. When they knit, though, they flew--none of that time-wasting pick-up-the-yarn, drop-the-yarn, pick-up-the-yarn business. No, their hands looked like parts of a machine, click click click, as they made stitches and rows and whole garments. I had to learn myself.

So my host mother, whom I called Mutti ("Mom" in German) taught me how to knit continental style. She took me to a yarn shop at the Hauptplatz that was full of amazing wools. Big bulky wools, delicate lace-weight wools. Not a squeaky artificial fiber in sight!

And I was hooked.

My mother was amazed when I came back from Austria--not only was I drinking coffee and speaking German, but what the heck was I doing with the yarn? I tried to show her how I'd learned, but she had about 40 years of knitting behind her at that point, so continental knitting was something that just wasn't going to take. But she was so pleased that at last I was a confirmed knitter.

Then there was the infamous American Airlines incident.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s. My career as an editor had finally taken off (after years of making coffee and answering telephones), and I was off to a conference in New York City. Wow--the Big Apple! I was going to eat in fabulous restaurants, visit world-class museums, shop in all the right places, and be as urban and sophisticated as a girl from Cowtown could be. And of course, I had to look the part, so I took all my best clothes--including the hand-knit Aran sweater my mother had given me for Christmas just a few weeks before.

You know the rest of the story. The airlines lost my luggage on the return flight. Never to be seen again.

I was mortified. How could that have happened? I'd never lost luggage before! How could I have been so stupid as to put my favorite sweater--the one that my mom had just finished--in a suitcase??

Well, I couldn't tell Mom. She had worked for the better part of a year making that sweater. By that point, I was living three hours away from her, so she'd probably never know about the sweater, right?

But I couldn't take any chances. I'd have to duplicate the sweater myself.

I tracked down the pattern she'd used. I found the same yarn. And I taught myself how to knit an Aran sweater. It took so long to finish, I couldn't even remember when I'd started it. But at last, after months and months, I could be proud of what I had accomplished.

And then I told my mom my deep dark secret. I admitted I'd lost the sweater in a suitcase, and her response was....

"WHAT sweater?"

quiet days

One of the things I love about autumn is the way that the world--at least, my little corner of it--seems to slow down from the frantic pace of summer. No one seems to use the park across the street from my house after baseball season is over, so I get the feeling that the land and the pond are mine until the next April. In spring and early summer, the park is swarming with Little Leaguers and their parents, and the land next to the pond becomes a parking lot filled with SUVs and minivans. But by July 4th, the baseball players seem to vanish and the park and pond are mine.

On Sunday I took Aidan to the pond to see if the swan family were out. A few days before, we saw them--two grown parents, and four nearly-grown cygnets. The cygnets had been hiding all summer, it seems, because I hadn't seen them all season. The day we saw them, they seemed eager for company, for as soon as they saw us from the other side of the pond, they headed straight for our shore. I couldn't help but think they looked like a flotilla of pre-industrial sailing ships.

Anyway, this time, the swans kept to the other side of the pond, but the water was so still I had to take a picture of it anyway. It's hard to believe that the bustling city of Boston is just a 15-minute drive away.

Now I thought I should show you a work in progress, as opposed to hauling out the old relics. Here is a sleeve from a cardigan I'm making for Aidan. The design is by Debbie Bliss, and the yarn is Cleckheaton Country 8 ply in a bright blue. The back and both fronts are done now, and for the first time ever, I'm working both sleeves at the same time (I put the other sleeve on the other needle off-camera so you could see the pattern a bit better). I thought that would help me make sure that the sleeves are the same, but boy, it sure is slow going! I sometimes feel like I'm making no progress at all, but I am.

a new old tradition

Tim had a hankering for a Sunday roast yesterday, and I was willing--home-cooked comfort food? That I don't have to cook? Terrific! But this was a roast with a twist--he roasted the chicken on the barbeque instead of in the oven. Wow, what a beautiful bird, and so delicious too. And the roast potatoes--roasted in the English way so they got really crispy on the outside and fluffy inside. Wish I could share the deliciousness through cyberspace, it was that good.



All the talk about the Sunday roast got us talking about traditions--what he grew up with in England and what I knew in Texas. As it turned out, we both had the Sunday roast tradition as kids but it had fallen to the wayside over the years. In my case, it was my mother making a pot roast with carrots and potatoes cooked around the beef, with my sister, her husband, and their kids filling the house with noise and activity. But over the years, the Sunday gathering fell by the wayside--my niece and nephew grew up and found their own activities, I went to college, and eventually I left Texas. And Sundays became just another day to get things done.

But I've missed those slow, lazy Sundays where we just putter around the house, with the high point of the day being the magnificent Sunday dinner. So we're talking about reinstating the tradition ourselves. Neither of us has extended family here, but we can make this a tradition for the kids. In an age where families rarely eat together--where TV stations run public service announcements urging families to have one meal a week together (one?!), I'd love the kids to grow up with the warm, cozy memory of our family meals--and the weekly Sunday roast.

Remember remember the 5th of November

This morning, Aidan asked me if today were a special day. Apart from the fact it's a weekend and we don't have to work (hurrah!), I told Aidan about Guy Fawkes Day and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (after I brushed up myself on some of the details), and he asked if we were going to England tonight to see a bonfire. Alas, not this year....

One more set of hats to show, then I'll move onto something new. The first two designs I created are these two berets. The first beret I designed about five years ago, knit in Alice Starmore's Campion yarn. This was my favorite winter hat, worn day in and day out. Then one day in the cold, snowy winter of 2003, it disappeared. I thought I'd left it behind in a restaurant. Wasn't there. Checked the parking lot of all the places I'd been that day. No luck. I felt just sick to my stomach. I truly mourned the loss of that hat.

Then months later, in the spring, one of my coworkers said she'd seen something colorful in the parking lot, where the mountains of plowed-up snow was finally melting. There, in the salt and sand and dirty slush, was my hat! It had a few tears where it must have had a brutal encounter with a snowplow, but it was back! A good bath and a few skillful repairs later, I had my old faithful hat back again.

I designed the second hat to have a colorway reminiscent of the woods in late autumn. As much as I adore the colors of a New England autumn at its peak, I also love the earthy colors and the last shades of autumn are fading and winter is fast approaching.

boys' hats

More from the pile of relics.... Here are a couple of hats I've made for the boys. The first I made for my youngest last year. It's a Sherlock Holmes hat (designed by ? Debbie Bliss, maybe?). We get comments on this one all the time—people love it!

The second hat is a very plain stocking cap that I made for my oldest. He was only two when I made it; now he's four and still loves this hat. Very warm and cozy...

beginning with a few relics

I thought I'd start with a few pictures of completed projects. This first one is a picture of my younger son wearing a hat and sweater set I made from yarn I bought in a shop in Waterford, Ireland, years and years before I ever had children. I can't remember which yarn it was—I didn't keep track of that information until quite recently—but it's a soft, non-scratchy wool with flecks of color mixed in with the brown. Enough color to be interesting without detracting from the cables.

I used a vintage pattern from my mother's stash, with a few alterations. The original called for a zipper closure, but I wanted a more traditional look, so I used buttons instead.

Good morning!

Just a quick post to say hello. I have lots to say. Be prepared.