Terrible/Perfect

Light reading

It's time to throttle back on the intensity of the bedtime stories. The adventures of Harry Potter are fantastic, but at the end of the day, some six year-olds might find the ever-intensifying return to absolute power of a physically and spiritually mutilated, deathless and unstoppable sociopathic wizard a little less than soothing right before lights out, knowwhadduhmean? Maybe it even keeps them up past 10 p.m. scared witless some nights, who knows.

It's interesting, but if you want a charming and engaging but ultimately lighthearted and safe read, it seems like you have to go back to mid-century children's literature. What's up with that? It's fascinating, really. Harry Potter well and truly appears to have altered the entire landscape of children's publishing, and thereby what children regularly read and have read to them. That's not even counting the shift towards graphically depicted themes of harm and abuse in young adult fiction (you can read articulate opposing views on that particular issue here and here). Is this a good, bad, or neutral thing? I have not explored my own opinion, I just know my own kid needs something else right now.

Harry Potter and other dark fantasy may still have its place in the earlier light of day, but I'm working on a big ol' list of gentle titles to reserve for before bed. I haven't read most of them, so please give me a heads up if there's a glaring ommission, or if behind one of these titles hides disturbing themes or scenes (Betsy Tacy is out because I understand that Tacy's infant brother dies near the end; I'm not going there right now). We just finished The Borrowers by Mary Norton, and it was very well received.

Here's the list so far, in no particular order:

Pippi Longstocking

The Cricket in Times Square

The Moffats

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Strawberry Girl

The Melendy Quartet: The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two

Twig

That should probably carry us through the summer. There's a whole passel of that sort of old books to choose from, and thankfully the always helpful "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature on Amazon.com to point the way to similar fiction.

About that whole notion that you need a time machine to find a gentle and engaging story with relatively child-like child protagonists, feel free to read (and barf) a little bit about Kids Getting Older Younger (also called "age compression") from the mouths of advertising professionals. Gross.

Dealt with dance, now Dealing with Dragons

WHOOSH! And like that, we're out the other side of the late spring push. Recital costumes, for several weeks trollishly guarded in their garment bags in the front closet, are now in the dress-up box.

I've also pretty much locked down what the big kid's learning plan for the 2012-2013 year will be, and finally feel less worked up about it. I have a meeting with her consulting teacher this week, and then we're done and I can forget about it until September.

This summer she will continue to move along in math, and read independently, have read alouds and listen to audiobooks. We also have some family camping trips planned in national parks that offer Junior Ranger programs, and I hope to visit a few more close-by sites for a smackerel of very casual outdoor learning. Everything else will wait until fall.

I switched up her language arts plan to something much simpler. She's just entering first grade; simple is still the name of the game. We'll begin Language Lessons for the Very Young in the fall, but the bulk of her language arts hours will be devoted to independent reading. We'll also do some periodic responsive work (we'll have to come up with some projects, which shouldn't be too hard) but nothing complicated. A diorama or something similar every now and again should do it.

Right now she's reading the first book in the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series. I'm not sure if she'll want to read any more of those (there are twelve of them!; also, that Scholastic site is the most helpful thing ever in terms of finding books your kid might like and feel comfortable reading). If so, great, but if not I've checked out a bunch of books that feature dragons.

Here's the list I've pulled together so far:

Dragon Slippers by Jessica Day George

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Colville 

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede

I'm also throwing in The Neverending Story by Michael Ende because Falcor is a dragon and HELL YES.

We'll get through those and see where she's at interest-wise. It's really fun putting a list like this together. Just one unifying idea and a HUGE field of good-quality, appropriate chapter book choices.

Her "owls" list was much harder.

*Ironically, I never wanted to read most of these kinds of books as a kid, and still kind of feel my hackles go up when characters have names like Ayliannagwyyn Jaydahla Forsythiantaurine. "AT LEAST ONE MAIN CHARACTER IN THIS STORY IS GOING TO BE GINGER," I think. My sister is a book wizard and consumed (and I think maybe still consumes?**) novels about witty, sword-wielding maidens with auburn hair and the dragons they loved and/or slayed like they were going out of style, but I could never really hang with them. Either a book jams its fist into my soul or I'm closing it up***. True story: I couldn't sleep in a hotel one time and all there was to read was my mom's Kindle. She likes thrillers and that sort of thing, Stephen King and whatnot, and after trying two books I ended up reading the introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary. I take zero pride in that. It makes it difficult for me to find fiction that I enjoy, which sucks, and has had a much more serious impact on the books I'm willing to read to my kids than I care to admit. Not cool, but there it is.

**My sister also reads excellent books, often, she just has a general sort of need to gorge herself on the printed word. 

***I will say unequivocally that good writing, soul-fist-jamming writing, is not confined to straight fiction. You know what Slaughterhouse-Five is? Science fiction. I am no genre-hater.

Better angels

Hello! I've been muscling through a bout of sick that made it's way through everyone in the nuclear family (almost everybody...I WON'T SAY WHO DIDN'T GET SICK BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW HOW THAT WORKS OUT), but things are on the uptick. I'm reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, which is fantastic. Mind-blowing, really. It makes me want to go back and do my college history over again with fresh eyes. I wish I could write a more thorough review, but I've not finished yet, and the thing is nearly 700 densely cited pages long. At this point in my life I'm simply not up to the task. I mean...we're watching a lot of Community right now. My critical faculties and ability to organize my ideas and express them coherently are not what they once were. Perhaps back in my college days, before I had kids and my brains deliquesced. But not now. Now, I just take the remaining brains for a slow turn about the nearest part of the grounds for some fresh air twice a day and then tuck them back into their chair next to the fire with a blanket around their legs and a cup of weak tea close at hand. They do a lot of napping. With their chin on their chest and their mouth hanging open.

Black and white and read all over

I had been holding out on these books; I still think they're more appropriate for older kids, but the big kid developed a huge interest to the point that she was asking other kids about the story. I figured that we probably ought to read it ourselves before there were no more secrets left for her to discover in the pages.

I haven't read this one since probably 2000. I was past the target audience at that point, 19 going on 20, and while I'm not an acloyte of the Church of Potter (what can I say, I was a Roald Dahl kid) it was a stay-up-all-nighter, for sure. I'm pleasantly surprised that after everything that has come since-films, merchandise, tribute bands, merchandise, an amusement park, merchandise-the story is still right here, just patiently waiting to be magical all over again. 

The kid is in love*. 

*She did add, after asking again what exactly the purpose is of a school house in which every member is bad, that the book is "rather black and white, isn't it?" Ha! Such a little UU. I tried to explain that the story takes on a bit of shading as the series goes on.

Pretend Soup

Mollie Katzen.

Where do I start.

When I was 20 years old and coming up for air from a rough, rough adolescence and really beginning to think about how to take care of myself, the very first cookbook I bought was Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. I believe I bought it because I was at a bookstore, in the cookbook section, for some reason vocalizing that I didn't know where to begin as a newly-minted vegetarian, and a young woman who was there with her mom buying her books her about-to-begin stint at The Culinary Institute of America just reached over, pulled it off the shelf and said "I've been a vegetarian my whole life, you want the Moosewood books". She was totally right. I also remember being absolutely shocked to realize in that moment that a person could go to trade school. And then I thought DAMMIT ALL TO HELL WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME THAT.

(Really I probably ought to have gone to Mount Holyoke as my high school English teacher rather enigmatically suggested I do, and studied English, and become a person who writes things. Why didn't I do that? Oh well.)

Anyway.

Katzen.

Mollie Katzen was a co-founder of the Moosewood Restaurant the author of a string of cookbooks geared towards a whole foods, plant-based diet, which is what I have been striving to eat for the last decade with varying degrees of success. I grew up eating possibly the worst mix of the Standard American Diet (SAD) at my dad's house (tons of meat, fluffy, buttery potatoes, snack foods, ice cream, soda...the whole nine yards) and the misguided "fat is bad" diet of the 1990s at my mom's house: margarine (hydrogenated, of course), lots of pasta, and highly processed fat-free foods. I don't mean to insult my parents, or to be ungrateful...they were busy, working people with picky children to feed and they were feeding us with the best knowledge they had at the time. Unfortunately, both the SAD and the Fat Free! craze are/were terrible.

There is a fair bit of controversy in the food-obsessed world right now that can basically be summed up as this: either a)saturated fats and red meat are bad or b)carbohydrates in the form of grain, legume and some tuber foods are bad. I won't dredge any of that up here, but fortunately ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE* agrees at this point that simple sugars and processed grains are the Antichrist, and a whole foods diet is the only way to go for long-term health. "Whole foods" means the stuff that you could quite easily go find living or growing outside: vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, cows, pigs, chickens, that kind of thing. It means not ingesting stuff that requires input from a person with an advanced degree in a hard science, or multiple-step processes in windowless factories involving large stainless steel vats and Latin names. It's really pretty simple, except for the whole Grains and Legumes v. LARD MEAT thing. (For the record I'm pretty sure Mollie Katzen is not on Team Lard Meat.)

I'm not a vegetarian anymore, having come around (and around and around) to something like "vegetable foods, plus sustainable fish and probably some poultry, no dairy", but I spent my 20s steeping myself in the whole foods, vegetarian food culture, much of my education happening at the figurative knee of Ms. Katzen. It was very much a beginner's journey. While my siblings and I were treated to a few cooking classes and encouraged to experiment in the kitchen (thanks, Mom!) I had no idea, at 20, how to cook dried beans. I suddenly found myself Not Eating Meat, scrambling to feed myself, and utterly at a loss. An early experiment in the college apartment-style housing had me tossing dried black beans in a pot and being dumbfounded when 20 minutes later they were still hard as rocks. It was the Moosewood book that corrected my folly, and, truly, taught me how to eat. I've strayed far, very far, from the mark over the years (both Coca Cola and potato chips are vegan, after all), I've often taken terrible care of my body, but all the while knowing that when I'm ready, I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.

And, thanks in large part to Mollie Katzen and the Moosewood Collective, despite my own issues with feeding myself right, I know how to feed my kids.

Big Kid is both a picky eater and an affirmed vegetarian. Will. Not. Eat. Animals. My husband is a firm vegetarian, it's how we raised her, and, for now, it's how she feels, so I've struggled with keeping the shitty vegetarian convenience foods out, and keeping fruits and vegetables front and center. Even after everything I've learned, I struggle to keep my family table in line with what I know to be best, not with how I grew up eating. Just because the frozen, boxed chikkin nuggets are meat-free doesn't mean they're not total crap.

I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of this earlier, but recently it occurred to me that the best way to give my kids a hand up with good eating habits is to have them cook family meals.

Enter the Katzen:

Mollie has written a series of cooking books for children: Pretend Soup, Salad People for preschoolers and up, and Honest Pretzels for ages 8 and up. They are brilliant.

I have investigated a number of cookbooks for children since realizing that my girls need, as they become old enough, to take a meaningful role in the household's eating, and often they are introductory lessons in SAD, having children don aprons and hats (cute!) to turn processed ingredients into nutritionally void garbage foods (less cute).

Katzen, on the other hand, has children cooking from scratch using real food ingredients to make meals and snacks that most parents would totally be stoked on them eating. There are hand-drawn, step-by-step pictorial instructions for each recipe that my five year-old can "read" with very little help from me. She can also tell what each recipe is, more or less, which lets her peruse and decide on her own what she wants to try her hand at. 

Our first foray to the market (yes, the girls will be menu planning, budgeting and marketing with me) we brought home ingredients for the first three recipes she wanted to make for HER dinner nights (Saturday and Sunday): pizza, Zucchini Moons, and Lemon Lime Soda.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit I hadn't cooked with my girl at all before this (it's been hard for me to trust her and be patient with the process) but damned if she didn't dive right in and nail it her first time out.

The following night she wanted to make Surprise Oatmeal and (not so surprising) Lemon Lime Soda again.

She was braver than she ever has been about trying the zucchini (one whole moon down the hatch!), didn't pick too many of the vegetables that she chose to put on the pizza off, and took several large bites of her nut-enriched oatmeal (we went with walnuts instead of sunflower seeds in the oatmeal, and steel cut instead of rolled oats). This was a Good Thing (did I mention that my girl is picky?). I'm incredibly grateful to have the Katzen books for her; I'm not willing to compromise on the whole foods aspect of our eating at home (although we're not super rigid, especially when it comes to social situations; we try not to make food a huge "thing"), but I want her to have some self-determination, and to have fun. Cooking is a great delight, after all.

It's amazing how much of a difference it has already made for her to be a driver in the process of meal making. She's so proud of HER food, of HER meal...what SHE did for her family. I'm thrilled to see how this evolves for her. I'm comforted by the knowledge that I will send her out into the world with a totally solid foundation in meal planning and cooking, which are absolutely essential life skills. Does it seem so far fetched that the food-related American health crises we hear so much about may be lessened if we all knew a bit better how to cook? I don't mean heat up, I mean: cook.

We're on the right road. The next step is to get a copy of Get Cooking for my poor, dear Mr. Terrible, who is about as cooking illiterate as they come.

After eight years of marriage in which he managed to still not learn to cook, he is now on the hook for Friday night dinners.

Baby's still free to just eat.

*Except for soft drink and junk food producers. I'm guessing they will be cleaving intensely to the "eat responsibly" line in the coming years, suggesting that their foods can be enjoyed as an occasional treat in an otherwise healthy diet, never mind that their bottom line entirely depends on people not eating responsibly.

Twight club

Last night my husband and I did something we said we would never do.

We watched Twilight. On purpose.

I realize that this is a dead horse at this point, and as criticism goes about as stinging as a handful of shots from an X-wing across the bow of a continent-sized Imperial Star Destroyer (Pew! Pew pew! Pewpewpew!) I also really, really don't want to be mean and cynical and petty, here or anywhere else, so please place a great big grain of salt in your cheek ahead of the bitter draught I'm about to spoon into you.

But Twilight.

It was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD. So. Bad.

So bad.

I'm not going to discount the fact that the Twilight series has an unbelievably huge fan following (can we look forward to a Twilight theme park in Forks someday?) and that clearly many millions of people have connected with the story. I would also never begrudge anyone who is so inclined the enjoyment(?) of a vampire romance novel. I know that the correct response when I don't share enthusiasm for something otherwise popular, like Snuggies, is to quietly not give a shit.

But I need your help here. I need you to make these two facts fit in the same universe:

1)Stephenie Meyer is making $40 million dollars a year off of her books and related hoo haw. 40 MILLION A YEAR. She has more money than God. She's on all kinds of important cultural movers and shakers lists. She is a demigod grown to the size of a small world and she has come to Earth to lay fiery waste to the fertile grasses and suck the riverbeds dry and choke the mouths of the cattle with dust. 

2)Stephenie Meyer's books suck balls.

This is not writer envy speaking, it's pure infantile bewilderment. I don't know where my mother is and I need someone to hold me.

Once the film ended and I stopped staring gape-mouthed at the screen, I got to thinking. I was thinking about writing, and storytelling, and what, precisely, went wrong here, and what glistening fecund kernel of truth that a grovelling beetle larva of a storyteller like me might pull from the salted earth of Twilight.

What struck me most powerfully, besides the vampire baseball (Re: Vampire baseball: WHAT THE HOLY LIVING HELL?) was that her story is centered on an absolute nonentity. There is no such thing as Bella Swan. There is more character in a deflated beach ball, or a used Kleenex. I mean that. 

Character traits that we know of Bella Swan:

1)She is clumsy.

2)

3)She is a sad panda.

I do understand that a movie is not the same as a book, but I refuse to spend the hours it would take to read the novel so I can compare the two. I have read excerpts from the novels, though, and the characters seem to hold true across media, which is to say their hollow shells do not crack when pressed from paper to celluloid.

I won't even go into the dynamics of the Edward/Bella imbalance of power, or the fatalistic obsessiveness, or his stalking and physically threatening behaviors, but for two hours I watched a girl with no definable character traits exercise no agency whatsoever (this is a cultural touchstone for a generation of teenage girls: discuss) and I will say that it helped me understand one fundamental truth about storytelling more deeply.

I will now share it with you in seventh grade level metaphor.

In the jewelry of a story, characters are the gems. Those gems are given their depth and brilliance by having many facets, only a few of which you can see at a given time. It is the job of the storyteller to skilfully hack the diamond out of the rock and present it in its proper setting; you don't just hand over the stone out of the riverbed and call it an engagement ring. Or worse, you don't give someone an empty set of prongs. And then jam it in their eye.

That is an incredibly important writing lesson, and for that I have Stephenie Meyer to thank.

Watching the film wasn't a total wash. The moment when Bella enters the biology lab and Edward acts as though she has stashed three day-old roadkill in her knickers and he's going to vomit from the stench is the gift that keeps on giving. Vampires in ill-fitting striped baseball caps is a glorious treasure. The paper-thin abstinence metaphor that casts teenage boys as barely-contained powder kegs of raw sexual need (I won't be able to stop myself!) and girls as their unwitting, doe-eyed tempters (her "blood" smells like heroin dewdrops on the glittering vanilla hide of a magical candy unicorn! He wants to eat it) has kept me smiling all day.

And now that I've thoroughly offended and alienated any Twilight fans that may happen by here (truly, I'm glad you enjoy the books and/or films; things are about 75% witz und vielfalt, 20% sleep deprivation, 3% piss and vinegar and 2% thoughtful analysis around here), I'd like to add that I don't know that I could do any better. It's easy, as a novice, to think you could. For a long time I used to disparage what Joanne Rowling did with Harry Potter, because her writing, the actual, technical, word-by-word writing, wasn't stellar. But, like Stephenie Meyer, Rowling started out spring green; over the course of her seven novels you saw a tremendous progression. I have serious issues with her finale, but she created a world that you inhabited, and characters that you genuinely loved (what would we all have done if she'd killed off Ron?). The story she told, through the characters she brought to life, bounded and soared. It was a true feat of imaginative power.

As I'm learning more about writing, as I'm doing more of it, I'm coming to appreciate just how hard it is to tell a story.

It's a minor miracle when you can tell one that other people want to hear.

DIY

We need to talk about this:

Design-it-Yourself Clothes by Cal Patch is freaking amazing.

Unlike the current crop of sewing books, which are in the main lovely and helpful and, in the words of Maude Lebowski how proud we are of all of them, this is a totally different breed of craft book.

I'll be honest here: I am kind of in love with Cal Patch now, who I hadn't really even been more than obliquely aware of until yesterday when I picked up her book from the library (I know I heard about her book through Angry Chicken, although looking at that post I have no recollection of reading it), mostly because of her kick-ass book but also because she seems so committed to independent craft (also, she's going to be teaching at Squam, along with Jared Flood and Stephanie Pearl-McPhee and I am so ungodly jealous I could spit. West Coast, you are officially on notice until you produce something that badass).

The book, as you may have deduced from its no-nonsense title, is not a book of clothing patterns (although her designs are in there for you to make), but a book on how to draft your own patterns. There is no thick cache of tissue paper inside the jacket of this book. She walks you through how to measure your body, gives you detailed instruction on how to draft a pattern onto paper for a number of basic clothing styles based on your measurements, and then offers you a paragraph or two of actual sewing instruction. It is, I think, a sort of contemporary sewers' equivalent to an Elizabeth Zimmermann knitting book: she is showing you how to do for yourself what you think you need others to do for you.

I'm realizing that clothing design (of all things...you should see how I dress) might be exactly suited for my particular set of natural strengths (attention to detail, the ability to translate a 2D vision into a 3D object, etc.) and I've been kind of haphazardly "designing" clothes a bit here and there, but this gives me the tools I need to not only design patterns for myself and my family, but also to alter commercial patterns to better fit all of us and to draft patterns of my own designs in different sizes for production, should I get to that point. There are certainly other books on pattern making out there, but most of them look like textbooks (and are priced accordingly). I may need one of those eventually, but for now this book covers enough of the basic types of casual garments most people wear to keep me busy for a very long time.

Most thrillingly, it gives me the chance as a large person to build a wardrobe of the kind of clothes I actually want to wear instead of the handful of commercially produced garments that fit me comfortably and are minimally acceptable in terms of style. That's really not saying much...clothing design for larger bodies is just dismal. I don't know why that is, but designers seem to be under the impression that everyone above a size 14 (even those of us just barely dipping our toes in the "plus" sizes) is shaped like Spongebob Squarepants and shares his level of sartorial taste. Truly: if you have big boobs, like I do, you are forced into shirts and dresses that fit you in that one measurement only, and are inevitably enormous everywhere else, cut like a wide, squat rectangle. Clothes for big people are fugly. If I want a pup tent, I can go buy one of those. I need clothes. I'm going to have clothes!!

This may not be the best thing to admit, but I am going to order a bunch of catalogs from places like Anthropologie, whose clothes don't come big enough (or cheap enough) for me, and collect some of those mind-blowing Japanese style magazines, and crib from them shamelessly. For personal use, of course. Geez. 

To start, though, I'm going to draft some patterns for my kiddo. She's littler than me, and easier to fit, and she doesn't need bust darts (sadly omitted from the book, I'm sure I'll figure it out).

For practice, I took her measurements. All 24 of them.

 

For the record, never try to make a four year-old stand still for 24 measurements. It's not pretty. I really don't want to talk about trying to measure the baby. That rise-over-diaper-butt had better be worth it.

The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!

I finally finished my Monkeys:

Here's some pattern detail:

I love this pattern. Nevermind that at least a dozen people have already posted their own new November Monkeys on Ravelry, these socks are classic. The lace pattern is very easy to memorize,so you can tuck a sock into your bag and pull it out at the bus stop, or at a restaurant, or while you're sitting next to the bathtub making sure your kids don't hydrate themselves too much. These took me forever, mostly because I kept getting to them in tiny snatches of moments, and I was often very, very tired in those moments. I ripped back the second-to-last pattern repeat (the whole thing) twice because in my exhausted stupor I kept making simple mistakes (I kept yo-ing at the wrong moment).

Still, the night before last I finally found myself with face scrunched up in unflatteringly keen concentration grafting the toe closed with kitchener. I wound in the last two ends and there they were, my first socks for grown-up feet (I know I seem possibly over-confident about knitting for someone who had never completed adult socks, but regardless of how thin my portfolio of finished objects may actually be, I am significantly more technically proficient than I was a couple of months ago. Also I am significantly more addicted. It's true. Knitting, and taking pictures of stuff: it's where it's at.).

They are, of course, not for me. They are for my grandmother. I suspect they may be too big for her, because they fit me and my feet are one to one and a half sizes larger than hers and mine are also wide, like boats, or shoe boxes for shoes made for people with wide feet. But in actual foot length, sizes aren't all that different, so there is a pretty good chance they'll be fine. The yarn is Araucania Ranco Sock in colorway 119 (maroon, wine, whatever you want to call it) and after washing it has a nice feel and drape. During knitting I sort of complained in y mind about its stiffness, but upon reflection I think that is a real virtue. It was much easier to work with than the Malabrigo Sock I'm working with (trying to work with?) right now, which is draping all over the damn place.

my first thought when beginning to post about Monkey was Sprockets (Touch my monkey! TOUCH HIM!) I would like you to think about Monkey Magic: 

...and now that you're thinking about Journey to the West, go and read American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. You're welcome.

Pattern language

Why, hello there! Again, I am not dead (yet). I have been curled up in the warm decolletage of wool yarn and great English literature. Having discovered that audio books can be listened to while knitting or sewing or what-have-you, I can now die content: only my sad little writing practice here has suffered, and no one much suffers from that particular neglect.

SO!

Let me show you what I've been up to:

Exhibit A: Baby hat

 

Again, an uncooperative model, but you get the drift. This pixie hat pattern is suuuuuper simple and quick (I think 3 discs of Wuthering Heights) and I knit it up in the gorgeous, goth-y Malabrigo Silky Merino in the Vigo colorway. NOM. Nom nom nom. I want to eat it and absorb its supernatural powers.

The bitch about this hat is that I FREAKING LOST IT. Like 2 days after I knit most of it. I hadn't even knit on the tie band yet. 

So:

 

If you see the above hat on a baby that isn't mine, snatch it off its head and make a run for it. I really want it back.

Moving on.

Exhibit B: Oo la la!

 

It's a dinner plate cozy!

Just kidding. It's a beret that I'm blocking on a dinner plate.

My mom was just in town and requested that I knit her a beret, to which I said "What the hell? You live in Arizona." She claims that it gets very cold at night down there and she will wear it five months out of the year, to which I say "You crazy." But who am I to turn down a knitting project?

This was another very quick knit, done over about four discs of Jane Eyre (for the rest of these books on CD was knitting various other projects that I ended up frogging, either because they were practice pieces or because I've grown quite picky about my results). This is Berroco Ultra Alpaca which is just lovely. Fortunately I'm not really a dinner plate cozy person or I'd want to keep it.

I'm a bit skeptical about the pattern, which at guage results in a rather small beret. I do have a massive head, and the piece wasn't blocked yet, but it's more like a skull cap:

You like my attempt at self-portraiture? Well, neither do I.

Anyway, there you have it. I'm wondering if it might be time to ease up on the audio books, because this morning my 4 year-old got up and asked me to put on "Annana Karenina". After she gave her father a detailed account of Jane Eyre's three days as a penniless vagrant I figured my daytime snatches of knitting should probably be narrated by somewhat more juvenile material, with less house fires, dashing of brains on the pavement and men with eye patches and hooks for hands. That's how Mr. Rochester ended up, right? Or maybe that's just me...