Scary Places to Knit & Boy Could I Use a Sauna...

I never watch Grey's Anatomy reruns but I was channel surfing and I stopped because there was knitting going on.

Patrick Dempsey: "You're knitting in a bar."

Chick: " I'm making a sweater."

Bartender: "You can't knit in a bar, you're scaring the customers!"

It made me think about taking classes this fall. I was almost afraid to take knitting needles with me. Would they be banned? When classes were just about over, I took my sustainable hardwoods with me. Only good to do battle with vampires!

Recently I read a piece and the author stated that knitting began about seven hundred years ago. My understanding is that archeologists have found linen socks knitted in Egypt that go back several thousand years. Also, I once found a picture of a sweater dug up somewhere in France that was dated to arounf 700 A.D.! I have read some fairly recent publications that state that sweaters "as we know them" did not exist until the late part of the nineteenth century; again, seamen wore sweaters long before they became a fashion statement. Since this textile form existed in many societies in slightly different forms, I think it will be hard to say where it actually began. Wouldn't it be fascinating to know the exact moment when someone said " we'll tie knots in this and make a garment"?

I haven't been posting because my neck and shouldrs have "tightened" up; I'm guessing it has to do with the weather changes...

More talk later...!

Woke Up to Visions (c) of Italy-Southern Style...! Vintage Patterns...

I was up very early and could not sleep. When I finally started dozing, I had on the Public Broadcasting Station and they we showing a video that I had seen before...although I never knew what it was called. It is Visions (c) of Italy-Southern Style, which is sold as part of a two DVD set and can be bought with Visions (c) of Sicily. Breathtaking!

I have wanted to visit Tuscany and the Amalfi coast for many years and a while ago I realized that my fascination likely relates to almost two years spent in the Azores Islands as a child. I understand that although the political climate has changed (Portugal, the parent country, was Socialist for more than thirty years) and financially things are much better, the Islands are still a quiet destination for vacationers and little has changed in the more than fifty years since we lived there.

I recall picking fresh peas from our house-helper's garden at their cottage by the beach (one bedroom with a large dining-living area and a lean-to kitchen) and speaking in Portugese to the peddlers, bullfights (the Portugese do not kill the bulls), festivals, puppies, beef roasts on a spit, riding around the island and stopping at a bar and getting chocolate shaped like closed parasols with a plastic covering printed like lace and foil underneath and a plastic handle sticking out. Chocolate is a BIG deal over there! I remember more often we got long dark bars of it in different shades of bright foil.

I will finish this post when I have more thoughts...anyway, the Visions (C) series is nice to relax or sleep to...according to the folks at PBS I'm not alone in doing that!

By the way I scored about five jumper patterns and two blouse patterns on line very inexpensively...gotta love Ebay and Etsy! Spring clothes are coming...hopefully my sewing machine is okay or I will need to borrow one. Someone was mean to mine!

Talk more later...

Valerie

After Days...My Mind on The Down-Low

I was going to title this submission " After Days of Overstimulation..." but it sounded so wierd!

My mind has been going 100 miles per hour and I have been designing a spring wardrobe in my head (SEWN, of course!) AND house projects all the while trying to give away, donate and declutter for SPRING-I do believe it is coming!

This is typical of me, especially when I have been cooped up too long with bad weather and without somewhere to go on a daily basis. This is the personality trait that makes me a dynamo in the workplace. I am a creature of order, after all!

I am getting all sorts of creative ideas but I feel downed from all of the snow, etc. I did add a new blog to follow--check them out: "Young House Love" which is a site that a young couple with a new bungalow put up. They share their crafty ideas and such. The submission I ran into shows their conversions of a worn mid-century modern dresser into a shaker-look dresser in their new nursery. They made it "funner" by adding colorful papers to the inner drawers (Modge-Pogge-d in) as they just over-stained the outside and painted the top white. If a pad was added it would double as a dressing table!
By the way, the pic is of my grandkid #1.

I will talk later since someone needs the PC now...

Valerie

Some VERY Bad Things & PCs That are Ded and Dedder

Okay. So it seems the "web problems" that I was having were because I either: picked up a virus while surfing the web OR because I attempted to shut down malware/virus and it had started downloading (according to my bro, who is my resident web-tech).

Fortunately, other than my now dedder (deader) PC...well, it's dying, we have another PC that's pretty old,the ded one (dead). The issue with the dedder one is that it is nearly impossible to download anything but small files (he managed to save my word-related files) and my music, which I've had for years, is now GONE. He is now trying to figure out how he will clean of the hard drive to reload it and says possibly the drive, and old one he'd given me, is damaged as well. (UPDATE: 3/4/2010: the "saved files" are damaged, too!)

I haven't been knitting for two days as I am preoccupied with other things and right now I am in Regency Mode. Yesterday I watched the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen's heroines always have such complicated un-love lives...they don't know how the hero feels, they aren't sure whom they want, or they have more than one failed liason, or more than one of them has a scandal, and there are always busybodies in the pot. I just love the scene where Elinor Dashwood's skanky sister-in-law physically attacks Lucy Steele when she realizes that the monetarily poor girl has been secretly engaged to her brother Edward Ferrars for five years! Feathers actually fly!

I personally would like to attend a Jane Austen week at least once. I am confident that I can save a bundle by making my own clothes as I used to do a lot of sewing. I am just less patient than I used to be. Plus I have a 20-yard bolt of brown polyester grosgrain fabric bought for $1.00 a yard that is waiting for a life as something else!

Here is a good Regency costume/pattern link: http://www.lostcoasthistpatterns.com/seandseregop.html

More talk later!

Valerie