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DEADLINE: MONDAY, JUNE 29

This post is not about Knitting or Travel. It's about my real life. If you don't live in Ohio, you may not care about this post; if you do, please read it and, if you will, act on it.

I've worked for ten years at the Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Stow, OH. We're a small stand-alone library, but even with our small size we provide excellent service to our community.

This week we received news that Governor Strickland proposes to cut library funding drastically - more than $200 MILLION over the next two years. This would force many libraries to close.

I urge anyone who has a stake in Ohio's libraries to contact your state senators and state reps and urge them to vote against this cut, which strikes hardest at the Ohioans in most need. If you can help, please do.

Here is a link to my library's press release and contact forms for the reps.

Here is a link to where you can find out who your state senator is and who your state representative is, if you don't know.

And here is the letter I wrote to Governor Strickland. He didn't get to see it in its full glory; his contact form only gives you 1000 characters so I had to trim it a lot. However, I think somebody should see it!

Dear Governor Strickland,

I am writing on behalf of Ohio Libraries to ask you to reconsider the severe library funding cuts you have proposed for the next biennium budget. Ohio’s libraries have been enduring a steady decrease in state funding over the past decade, and we have coped with this change very well – to the extent that Ohio’s libraries are still the best in the nation. However, no organization is equipped to cope with a 50% drop in income, and the proposed budget would devastate the library system, forcing many closures and losses of service.

Ohio libraries preferentially serve the sector of our population who need the most help: job seekers, our children, especially students, and our senior citizens. I am employed at the Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Stow, Ohio, and our small library alone sends outreach librarians to day care facilities, senior citizen homes and homebound individuals to bring these people materials they need as well as human contact. We teach 15 to 20 computer classes per month, helping jobless Ohio workers upgrade their technical skills to improve their chances of finding employment, and enabling formerly computer-illiterate people to navigate the Web well enough to accomplish many necessary tasks. (Such as filing for unemployment benefits.) We assist students on everything from locating summer reading books to solving algebra equations to filling out FAFSA forms online, and we proctor college exams for the students taking classes online.

Ohio needs a balanced budget. But she also needs her library system to continue to function. I urge you to find another solution for the best interests of Ohio’s citizens.

Diana Parker

FO

I finished up my "Vanilla Socks" today, though going by the colorway they'd be more like grape/lime/blueberry socks.

I love, love, love this yarn. Knitpicks Imagination, fine merino wool blended with alpaca and a bit of nylon, gorgeous colors on my needles doing a cool little rhythmic quasi-striping thing.

I've been knitting these at every opportunity for the last week. Why?

I needed the needles back for this!

I'm FINALLY casting on with some of my beloved Sundara Sock yarn. This colorway is called "Basil over Buttercup". I have this idea for a cool pair of socks... we'll see how it works with the yarn. With luck, more soon!

Adult Surprise Jacket Calculator

Several people have asked me to share my ASJ calculator to help do the math for Elizabeth Zimmermann's Adult Surprise Jacket pattern. I emailed it to a bunch of people, but now I think it's easier just to post it.

Feel free to download this calculator and put in your own measurements and gauge. You will still need to get the pattern itself (you can order it from Schoolhouse Press, or it's in the book The Opinionated Knitter) but this will do the calculations for you.

Click this link to go to a page where you can download the spreadsheet. Let me know if there are any problems!

Feeding the Habit

Five reasons why this doesn't count as going off my yarn diet:
1. It's sooooo pretty! Who could resist?

2. It's only a little bit of yarn.

3. It's from my very favoritest indie dyer, Sundara. She puts up several colors each month, and then - vamos, muchachos - those colors are GONE for at least 24 months. So buy them or live in regret, eating your heart out for two whole years.

4. It's sock yarn! Sock yarn is methadone for hard-core yarn junkies. You get just enough to take the edge off. Heck, I could probably get a prescription for it! "Take 100 grams of sock yarn PRN; call the office if you need more than three doses per month."

5. I ordered it BEFORE I went on the diet. So there! Nyah, nyah! It was bought and paid for long ago and just arrived this weekend. Hah!

PS - there's more in the pipeline, too (*wink*)!

Bald and Blacked Out

Last night my friend Christina and I (click here for her take on the evening) had a fabulous time at the Spinal Tap 25th Anniversary Tour concert at Playhouse Square in Cleveland, subtitled "Unwigged and Unplugged". (Interested parties may want to click over to the Myspace tour page where they can see a thirteen-minute Youtube video of concert footage. Edited to add: oh duh, or I could embed it!) 

I am here to tell you that at least one of those adjectives is a lie; some of those instruments were plugged in. 

Actually the concert was a twofer; not only did Spinal Tap play, but they were joined by the world-famous Folksmen and their close-harmony folk stylings. It was an evening beyond compare. 

It was such fun to see Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer in person! We had seats very close to the front of the balcony so we had a good view, although we don't have any original photos - we got frisked on the way in and Christina had to go back to the car to ditch her camera. I was a good girl - I restrained my concert participation to lip-synching and sway/bob/toetapping. I did sing aloud along with "Old Joe's Place" but that is because they gave us permission! 

The concert opened with a medley of "Celtic Blues" (new to me) and "Hellhole", followed by songs such as "Never Did No Wandering", "Corn Wine", and "A Mighty Wind". They were always careful to attribute the various songs to their proper composers (Nigel Tufnel, Alan Barrows, David St. Hubbins, whoever) and shifted "attitudes" from group to group, as well as breaking character to themselves. At one point they got great laughs from a deadpan reading of NBC's 1984 Standards and Practices notes on what would have to be cut from the movie This Is Spinal Tap in order to broadcast it on late-nite TV ("Forty-seven minutes thirty seconds - Lyrics to the song "Sex Farm": Unacceptable.") There was also the inexplicable Cheese Rolling interlude...

High points were Spinal Tap's famous "Stonehenge" number (one guy on the ground floor kept screaming "Stonehenge!" at each break between songs; Michael McKean finally told him, "Why don't you just come back when we do Stonehenge; it'll be about an hour ten"), a jazz/blues arrangement of "Big Bottom", the extra verse in "The Good Book Song" - it involved Moses - and the moment Annette O'Toole came out to perform "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" with her husband. (McKean, if you didn't know. I didn't.) We also got the privilege of downloading a free single: "Saucy Jack", from Spinal Tap's unfinished musical about Jack the Ripper. 

Now, anybody who knows me knows of my devotion to musical humor; I know all the words to more than a few parody songs of which I barely know the titles of the originals, and that due only to Weird Al's liner notes. But I am not indiscriminate in my love. I love the guys who build their scaffolding of humor on the firm foundation of skill and musicianship and these men, whatever they call themselves, have done that. 

Now I have to go re-watch  This Is Spinal Tap. And Waiting for Guffman, and for sure A Mighty Wind. While I'm at it, I'd better drag Best in Show off the shelf - yeah, the only music is the Norwich terrier song, but while I'm revisiting Guest's oeuvre, I might as well go all the way...

Yarn Spree

I read blogs like the Yarn Harlot's, and I sympathize when she goes to the yarn store and suffers what she calls "a little accident". The intoxication of wool fumes overcomes her and she falls down and her credit card falls through the scanner, and she ends up with more yarn.

I wish I had her excuse.

I am perfectly capable of "falling down" while seated in perfect comfort and safety in my own home. Curse you, Knitpicks! Curse you and your kind! Curse the Internet that causes this unhappiness!

Well, it all has a purpose, more or less. All the black and the variegated pink is my Classic Lines Cardi

the cobalt blue is a Laminaria

(I may have to work up to that one a bit...) BTW, this blue is a lot more intense and shimmery in person!

And then - well, then it all breaks down. The turquoise and the semi solid pink are just bought on spec. I love them and I have lots of lace related ideas, but no specific plans. Kiwassa? Ishbel? EZ's Stonington Shawl? Break out of the box and design a shawl myself?

Anything could happen!

However, I am now OFFICIALLY on a YARN DIET until at least MY BIRTHDAY. In November.

Anyone taking odds?

Lace Magic

This is the thing that keeps lace knitters coming back. The best single moment in knitting, in my oh-so-humble opinion. It's like crack.

I refer, of course, to blocking.

There you are, with a crumpled mass of Ramen noodles hanging from your needles.

You patiently work through the 864-stitch sewn bindoff, but the shawl still cannot be worn.

You give it the gentlest of baths in a sink full of warm water, then place it tenderly on a towel and roll it up to squish out most of the water. You're being so sweet with it because you don't want it to felt. Good Godfrey, no. You did not spend a month knitting this thing to end up with an orange spiral pot holder.

You vacuum the carpet to within an inch of its life, so it will be a fit resting place for your dainty wool confection.

Then, in a personality transformation worthy of Jack Nicholson, you become a ruthless wool torturer, stretching your shawl as if on the rack and PINNING each point firmly to the rug.

You go around and around, measuring across the center and repositioning pins until the shawl is as close to perfectly shaped (mine is round, but the process is the same for other shapes) as is possible.

I'm a fan of what's called "severe blocking". That means I pull it so taut that by the time it dries the shawl is typically hovering over the carpet in the middle, rising into the air under its own tension.

The result is truly Lace Magic. The lace holes have opened out, and each pinned spot on the edging has dried into a cute little point which will stay that way.

The entire shawl is crisp, smooth and beautiful,

with a wonderful drape.

Oh, and I cut my hair!

PS: what do you do when you finish a lace project?

Cast on a lace headband with the leftovers!