Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey Knitting!

I just finished knitting this cowl! I'm so excited, and can't sleep...which is why I finished knitting it tonight. It's knit with Knitpick's Felici Self Striping Sock Yarn in Time Traveler (I don't believe the color is available anymore). The colorway is based off the iconic Doctor Who scarf. Made using the Wibbly Wobbly cowl pattern from Ravelry. (Sorry, you'll have to sign into Ravlery to see the pattern, it's all free though!)

Christmas and a feeling of accomplishment

I'm finally done with my Christmas knitting! By done I mean I've finished the gifts for my friends and family that I'll be seeing on Christmas. Everyone else that I'm knitting for I won't see until after the new year. Soo, I have another week to work on those. I'll be posting tons of pictures after Christmas of the stuff I knit and of some WIPs. It feels good to know that I won't be up until 3am Christmas Eve trying to finish that last gift!

Failidays

I can't seem to take a decent picture of my knitting lately, I think something might be wrong with my camera. So here's a picture someone else took of me knitting!

'Tis the holiday season, Christmas is a few days away and I'm still trying to finish knitting gifts. I think I'll start knitting for next year in January.

Knitting, World of Warcraft, and a bad cold

It's been a few weeks since my last post, I've been pretty ill for about a week now. I'm finally starting to feel better now. I've also started playing World of Warcraft again after not playing for over 2 years, which has taken up more time than it should.

Christmas is about two weeks away and I have a giant basket of knitting to finish as well as more gifts to buy. I think I've taken on more then I can finish and I'm still sick. I hate not having health insurance.

I apologize if this post makes no sense, I'm still in a bit of a haze from the cold medicine. Pictures of knitting to come next week!

Purple hat

I made this hat over a year ago, it was cold in my dormitory and I wanted something to keep me warm. I used the Couvercle pattern from Knitty. The yarn is Lion Brand Homespun in Barrington. In hind site my yarn choice was a mistake, the hat has a lovely moss stitch pattern, but the homespun yarn doesn't allow for much stitch definition.

Harry Potter Love

I knit these ages ago and my lovely friend was kind enough to model them for me. The Gryffindor one is about 10 feet long, and I can't wait to wear it when I go to see Deathly Hallows Part I. The Slytherin scarf was a commission for my Brit Lit prof's son.

Kink

This is a scarf I made for myself, the pattern is Kink from Knitty.com. I knit it with Stitch Nation's Bamboo Ewe in Eucalyptus. I had a lot of fun with this pattern, it's a great introduction into knitting wraps and turns. I love this yarn from Stitch Nation, I never thought bamboo could be so delightfully soft.

Lime Green Cowl

I made this cowl over a year ago. It was a custom commission, and one of the first things I designed on my own. I used Lion Brand's Wool Ease Thick & Quick yarn in Lemongrass. This was a very fast knit, only took me a few hours to make.

Basket Weave Scarf

I made this scarf back in August for my boyfriend's birthday. Design is my own, if anyone is interested let me know and I'll post it here.

Fingerless Gloves

This is a pair of fingerless gloves I made for a friend a few months ago. I used the Knucks pattern from Knitty.com. The yarn is Naturally Caron Country in Charcoal.

Knitting! Huzzah!

I want to start utilizing this blog again. Lately I've been knitting a lot, and slowly saving up for a knitting machine. I'd like to be able to mass produce some of my designs and sell them. I'm going to be posting all of my projects that I have pictures for, and maybe I'll throw in the random book or movie review.

I still don't have a steady paying job, though I am doing a bit of freelance writing online. It unfortunately does not pay as much as I wish it did.

Life, as usual, has been busy. Since I last posted I have moved in with my grandparents. I went from sharing a room with a my little sister to having the full two rooms of the attic to myself. I've set up my bedroom and knitting space in the larger room and made the smaller room into my library/den. I've got all my books, art supplies, and a TV with my video game consoles hooked up to it in the smaller room. I love it. Having a space to call my own is an amazing feeling. I've been living here since August and I feel like myself again. (I keep getting bored and moving furniture around though).

Also, if anyone knows a good place to get a cheap couch in the tri-state area, please leave a comment. ^_^

Romantic Nights

What is better than a picnic with your love? A picnic where you get to see a Shakespearean play while cuddling with your love. My wonderful boyfriend, Richard, took my to see Shakespeare on the Sound. A theater company in CT puts on an outdoor play every Summer. This Summer was Othello, one of my favorite Shakespearean tragedies. We picked up a wonderful dinner at Whole Foods, spread a blanket on the grass, and had the loveliest evening. We had a space right up front, and even got to interact with the actors. Cassio deposited his wine bottle right in front of us, and Iago pretended to hit Richard with it, along with a few other men in the row. I've never seen a live Shakespearean play before, and it's an experience I'd love to repeat many times over.

Wizarding Independence Day

I'm a day late, but Happy Wizarding Independence Day! Twelve years ago on May 2 1998 Harry Potter, along with his friends and supporters in the wizarding world, defeated Voldemort and his Death Eaters.

I would have loved to do something in celebration of this day, but I've been so busy with school that I didn't have any time to plan something. A lot of plans have fallen through over the past month. I was planning on having a tea party on the quad with a group of friends, but, alas, my plans fell through. I just haven't had the time or funds.

Thursday, April 29, was my 22 birthday. I feel mildly old. I'm 22, I'm graduating college in a couple of weeks, I'm moving out of my parents' house and in with my boyfriend. I need to go job hunting and do something productive with my life. I would really love to work in the city (I'd love to live there too). I want to go into publishing, but some day I'd really love to open my own store, a used bookstore/coffee shop where I also sell my custom knits. One of those hole- in-the wall places that is lovely and quaint and has a steady stream of loyal customers.

I received some wonderful birthday gifts, and treated myself to some as well with the money I received. I have five new books to read, and two Doctor Who novel-length comic books.

I spent a delightful weekend with my boyfriend, Richard. He came up to my college to visit, and stayed for the weekend, we went out to dinner and hung out at the nearby outdoor mall, spending most of our time curled up in two comfy armchairs at the bookstore reading. On Saturday some of my best friends from home came out to visit and we went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. It was a great weekend.

I can't wait to graduate and have some time to relax, read, and knit.

National Poetry Month Celebration

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in a crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

National Poetry Month Celebration

In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

National Poetry Month Celebration

Two poems today to make up for not posting yesterday!

Poetry by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
  all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
  discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
  Hands that can grasp, eyes
  that can dilate, hair that can rise
     if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
  they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
  unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
  do not admire what
  we cannot understand: the bat
     holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
  wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
  that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
  nor is it valid
     to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
  a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
  result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
 "literalists of
  the imagination"--above
     insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
  shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
  all its rawness and
  that which is on the other hand
     genuine, you are interested in poetry.



Believing in Iron by Yusef Komunyakaa

The hills my brothers & I created
Never balanced, & it took years
To discover how the world worked.
We could look at a tree of blackbirds
& tell you how many were there,
But with the scrap dealer
Our math was always off.
Weeks of lifting & grunting
Never added up to much,
But we couldn't stop
Believing in iron.
Abandoned trucks & cars
Were held to the ground
By thick, nostalgic fingers of vines
Strong as a dozen sharecroppers.
We'd return with our wheelbarrow
Groaning under a new load,
Yet tiger lilies lived better
In their languid, August domain.
Among paper & Coke bottles
Foundry smoke erased sunsets,
& we couldn't believe iron
Left men bent so close to the earth
As if the ore under their breath
Weighed down the gray sky.
Sometimes I dreamt how our hills
Washed into a sea of metal,
How it all became an anchor
For a warship or bomber
Out over trees with blooms
Too red to look at.

Death

Styrofoam Plates by Death Cab for Cutie

There's a saltwater film on the jar of your ashes... i threw them to sea but a gust blew them backwards and the sting in my eyes
That you then inflicted was par for the course just as when you were living.

It's no stretch to say you were not quite a father but a donor of seeds to a poor single mother that would raise us alone, we never saw the money that went down your throat
Through the hole in your belly.

Thirteen years old in the suburbs of denver
Standing in line for Thanksgiving dinner at the catholic church. the servers wore crosses
To shield from the sufferance plauging the others. styrofoam plates, cafateria tables charity reeks of cheap wine and pity
And i'm thinking of you. i do every year
When we count all our blessings
And wonder what we're doing here.

You're a disgrace to the concept of family
The priest won't divulge that fact in his homily and i'll stand up and scream
If the mourning remain quiet, you can deck out a lie in a suit but i won't buy it.
I won't join in the procession that's speaking their peace. using five dollar words while praising his integrity. and just cause he's gone it doesn't change the fact... he was a bastard in life thus a bastard in death.


This song made me think about how we talk about the dead. I don't see the point in talking kindly about someone that is dead if they were a horrible person when they were alive. A shining example of this are celebrity deaths. No one cared much about Michael Jackson when he was alive, the man was a pedophile and all around creeper, yet when he died the media went on this tirade of how amazing he was and misunderstood, and ill, and so on. His music was good, I'll give him that, but he was a horrible person that no one thought anything good about until he died. If I did not like someone in life, I won't act like they were a good person when they die. I feel that if someone did not earn my respect while they were alive dying does not automatically entitle them to that.

National Poetry Month Celebration

Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

National Poetry Month Celebration

Her Kind by Anne Sexton
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

National Poetry Month Celebration

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Canada?

I had the strangest conversation today. My mom called and asked if I had plans to take my Nana to Canada for a couple weeks. Apparently Nana made a comment that she needed to get a passport so she could go with me. The strange thing is...I have no plans to go to Canada, I have never spoken to her about Canada, I don't even have a passport. I have no idea what she is talking about. I'm so confused.

National Poetry Month Celebration

by William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
    And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
    As any she belied with false compare.

National Poetry Month Celebration

The Song of Aragorn by J.R.R. Tolkien

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Knitting and Reading

I always have several knitting projects going. I can't wait to graduate and possibly have more time to knit. Which is a bit of a fantasy, I admit, because when I graduate I'll be moving, hopefully have a job, and settling into my new life in the outside world.

Anyway, as for my knitting right now I am knitting a Gryffindor scarf (for those not familiar with Harry Potter, it is a red and gold striped scarf). It is a paid commission, so I'm hoping to finish it quickly. I'm also working on a baby blanket based off of this pattern from knitty.com. It's slightly altered, the stripes are rainbow colors and in roygbiv order, with a green with white polka dots fabric for the backing. There are three other girls working on the blanket with me, we switch off every so often.

I just finished reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood for the second time, except this time I read the "Historical Notes" which I never realized are part of the narrative before. They greatly changed my thoughts on the book, and I'm excited to talk about it in class Tuesday morning. I also just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for my English Seminar class. For such a small book it contains an immense amount of meaning, with allusions from other literature, Freudian psychanalysis, Pavlov, and Henry Ford. I switched the topic of my research paper to this book, though I don't have a focus yet. I'm currently reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and am almost done with it. I love the author's writing style, so detailed you can almost feel the texture of the silk saris, the taste of the food, I plan to pick up anyhing else Lahiri has written after school ends.

National Poetry Month Celebration

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

National Poetry Month

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I'll be posting a new poem each day, from various different poets and time periods.

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Salutations!

My first entry on a new blog. Welcome, I'm Lynne, your average knitting bibliophile. I'm an English major, graduating from undergraduate school in May.