Lately, I feel surrounded by the almost finished. The nearly there. The not quite. I suspect that this feeling is largely due to confirmation bias: a large event in my non-knitting life has been so close to done for weeks, and many other tasks must hang fire until this thing is over, which colours how I see everything else. It’s not as though I haven’t finished anything lately, it’s just that the unfinished things loom large, and are niggling at me like an itch I can’t quite reach. For instance:
A brand new day
This will be a quick post, (apparently I don’t know how to do a quick post) because there is Deadline Knitting to be done and with the last couple of months of chaos finally over (knock on wood), I have ten whole days to focus on that and that alone. Ahhhhhh.
This past weekend we had an estate sale. In case you haven’t done this, it involves two to three weeks of a few total strangers running rampant through your home pricing everything that isn’t nailed down and throwing out everything that can’t be priced, followed by three days of a horde of total strangers tromping through, poking at everything, and trying to buy it all for even less than the sticker indicates (which is already less than you’d think, because it all has to go in a weekend).
Mawata Colossus
It all started with the Yarn Harlot.
You see, I had never heard of mawata until I stumbled upon Stephanie’s post proclaiming the glories of her hand-knit mawata mittens. Like eleventy billion knitters before me, I was intrigued by the idea that these stretched silk cocoons, stacked in layer upon gauzy layer, could be pulled apart and just…knit. And the fabric! So nubbly and colourful, humble yet elegant. I had to make such a fabric. It was an aesthetic imperative. Continue reading
Necessity is a mother
Remember the cardboard lazy kate? This one here:
Well, despite the fine craftsmanship and minutes of work that went into it, this kate has not held up well. Continue reading
No pressure
Oh, dear. It’s been a while again, hasn’t it? It has been an…interesting month over here at Casa de Cusser, and to be honest, I haven’t felt like I had much to say (or at least, not much that was suitable for this blog. Or children. Or those with sensitive ears. Despite the nickname, I try not to swear on this blog, and there was a lot of swearing going on.) However, it looks like the worst is over (touch every piece of wood in the house), and things don’t seem so bad, and I do have something to write about: the healing properties of stash-diving in times of trouble.
The Cusser’s Honey Oat Bread
I won’t be posting over the holiday weekend — and I’m sure many of you will have better things to do, anyway — so I thought I’d share my favourite bread recipe today. It makes great turkey sandwiches, in case you needed a bread for such a thing. Though I can’t imagine why you would.
The start of an(other) obsession
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about sock yarn. More precisely, I’ve been thinking about spinning sock yarn: how best to spin it, what fibres to use, how to put it all together into The Perfect Sock Yarn. Continue reading
A letter to Future Me
It’s December — well into December, as I realized with horror yesterday — and my idiotic resolution to knit ALL the presents has become a resigned determination to knit some of the presents and hope against hope that the mail moves at supersonic speed. In case I should get this idea again, I shall set a reminder for next October to look at this post, in which I now write the following message:
Lulu, oh Lulu
I’ve fallen in love with deep cowls: cowls that you can pull up over your ears if the need arises; even better if they’ll cover your head. These are what I envision when I think ‘cowl’: the things that monks wore; the things that non-knitters think of as a cowl. Continue reading
E. Elliott Knits 