Balls.

If I haven't posted anything on this blog for like eight days, it's been because I've just been too busy, not because I haven't been productive enough! I've been knitting and knitting, wrapping presents, and making calendars, being musical, and listening to books on tape. I've been up until some ungodly hours, and it's been really great!

So first off, merry Christmas! I hope all of you had a wonderful day of celebrating or not celebrating, or just existing.

Second off, projects! Here are some highlights:

Laura's leg-warmers ended up coming out pretty great. The last couple of days I've been typing up the pattern so I can post in on Ravelry. It's more complex than what I usually knit, so it's been a challenge to write everything down and make sure it's correct. I kept Laura waiting for these until the last present on Christmas, and it was really exciting to give them to her. : )

I finished Laura's leg-warmers around 11:30 PM on December 23. Around 11:30 AM on December 24, I started working on Momo's ear-flap hat. Because I had less than a day, I decided I should probably not use size 2 needles and fingering-weight yarn. So I dug out some dark green and some really pretty multicolored sparkly yarn I don't know where it came from! Anyway, I'm really happy with how this turned out!


During this time, I engaged in some serious literary adventures via the CD player. I listened to the books-on-tape for Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, and a really bizarre CD called The Best of Shel Silverstein.

I'd been kind of hankering to read this Beowulf translation since I'd come across it in the BU bookstore a couple of weeks ago. I'd picked it up because of course Seamus Heaney is amazing, and I'd read about thirty pages, which made me eager to continue. Listening to the audiobook was, of course, very different. I think in some ways it made the story easier to follow for me. Beowulf uses several large-scale digressions, which were easy for me to be confused by. But if I just zoned for a couple of minutes, we got back to the main story and I didn't totally lose the thread. I'm hopefully going to listen to this again before returning it to the library and focus more on the significance of the digressions.

At first, it was hard for me to really feel too chuffed about Beowulf. Beowulf is one of those macho, brilliant fighter-heros who keeps going for glory and riches and carnage. I guess that's not quite my cup of tea. But I've been working to think about Beowulf as he fits into his culture as a whole, and of course he's a good person. Of course it's good to kill monsters that are attacking innocent civilians, to help out neighboring kingdoms, and to be a good and just king. But it's also a factor for me that his motives for killing the monsters seemed as much about self-pride and glory as they did about protecting "the people" who are mentioned just a few times and are usually portrayed as helpless, pagan, and without meaningful occupation. It just felt so painstakingly aristocratic.

Maybe this is not a big deal, and I should just accept that that's how this poet thought about things, and that's fine.. I mean yes, as a literary work, as something to study to learn about historical context and old English literature.. yeah but as a work of literature that's going to change my life and inspire me? I wish I could have related better to Beowulf and that he was a character I really admired. Maybe on a second listening. : )

The Best of Shel Silverstein was a pretty insane thing to listen to. It's got several poems read by Shel Silverstein but also a bunch of classic country songs by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, etc. Then there are a bunch of songs by this band Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show and a couple by Shel Silverstein himself! I had no idea that Shel Silverstein did country music.. especially songs with titles like "I Got Stoned And I Missed It!" Anyway, it's really fun. You should listen to it.


For Christmas, I received a drop spindle!! I learned what a drop spindle was this summer in Ireland when Anna and I went to a stitch n' bitch. I didn't realize you could spin without a spinning wheel, and ever since I've been sort of itching to try it out. So Momo found a lady in Maplewood who sells spindles, and last night I got started!

Spinning is actually a fairly straightforward process. My mom gave me this great book called Spin It, and it walked me through this: You tease apart the fibers of raw wool, hook them with the spindle's hook, and twist. When it's been twisted enough, you tease out more fibers and twist those. When you get enough yarn, you wrap what you've spun onto the spindle's shaft, hook the yarn, and keep going, wrapping as you go.

So last night, I gave it a go. It didn't go marvelously. My yarn was super thick and super uneven. Here's the ball I made:
But around 2 AM last night I called it quits and got some good sleep. This morning I tried it again. I think the sleep helped me reprocess the process, because it felt a lot smoother, and my yarn became correspondingly smoother too! I'm still breaking the yarn sometimes, and it's still not quite even, but I'm definitely making progress and am having a really good time.

What I'm loving is, this process is unfamiliarly organic. With knitting I'm used to rigid counting, stitches in neat rows and columns, measurements, and pattern charts. Spinning is just so totally unlike this. There's no "hook 14 fibers and twist 30 times." It's just not measured, because how could you measure raw wool, except maybe my weight? So I'm just spinning, trying not to pull the fibers too thin and break it but also not leave them too thick and slub it.

I suppose this organicness makes sense, that maybe I shouldn't feel so surprised. Because this is really the stage where you're imposing some kind of order on the wool. You're dividing and twisting it and saying, "Stay here," so then you can knit it in patterns. It's sort of new to me to think about textiles as an imposition of order. I don't know how much I like thinking about it this way, but maybe it is.


Tonight, Momo and I made peanut butter balls. That's what the picture is of, at the beginning of this entry. They're covered in chocolate but full of peanut butter and rice crispies. My grandma used to make them at Christmas when we visited, and I ate them a ton. On Monday, Momo, Dad, and I are driving down to Kansas where I'm going to visit Carrie, and then go to visit my grandma. She's living in an assisted living facility now, and apparently she likes it there.

love, Jimmy