Way past retro

That my friends is the amazing antique spinning wheel my lovely friend Melissa found, and that her equally lovely husband just dropped off to Brooklyn Generalfor me. She told me it was broken, and very very old. It actually only needs a new drive band, some serious CLR treatment on all the metal parts, and if I feel like it a new footman for one of the treadles. Though it works just fine as a single treadle. It even has a built in lazy kate in the top. It looks and feels like the kind of wheel people made really functional yarn/twine/rope on, back when it wasn't just a hobby for the fiber obsessed like myself.

I am hoping after A LOT of tlc that I might be able to convert it into a wheel to spin all the crazy beautiful stuff from the Pluck Fluff book that is not going to go as smoothly on Lucille

Here keeping my fingers crossed.

What the.....

While cleaning out my iphoto library today I found a photo from my friend Amy's surprise graduation party. I was being teased for having my knitting at the bar in my bag, so I pulled a Yarn Harlot and took a photo with my drink of choice (cough*schmirnoff ice*cough)



The only problem being that I have no idea what the hell I was knitting, when I bought that yarn or why I was carrying around wool in the summer in St Louis, MO (side note, if you've never been to STL, just imagine the most humid disgusting suffocating atmosphere imaginable and you have STL in the summertime). It appears that it was knitting on a circular and is that seed stitch perhaps? I’ve ruled out a sweater, a toy, or a scarf, and it is definitely not my normal color of choice, and it is no longer in my stash of unfinished knitting. For now I guess I will just blame it on the gremlins.

Summer: a photo essay, sorta

The summer is over and it feels like it was about 2.5 seconds long. That might have to do with the fact that we managed to travel across a good portion of the eastern half of the country in a little under 2 months.

There were family celebrations



We traveled to the amazing beautiful Smokey Mountains in TN for Gene’s Grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary. Being in the hillbilly version of Vegas, Gatlinburg TN it was of course a hillbilly themed celebration.



And I also procured an amazing airbrushed t-shirt from one of the ten million air brushed t-shirt places




There were weddings



That would be wedding dress two of three. It was my present to my wonderful friend Carrie who got married in August. She lives in the Midwest. I am in Brooklyn. Thankfully I didn't completely screw things up and the dress turned out lovely.

There was the Chicago Comic Con



We met up in Chicago for a weekend of all things dorky with some of our friends from St Louis. Wendy and I only went for the first day, while we can definitely get our geek-on, we aren’t quite at the same level as most of the attendee’s



But there were t-shirt boths galore, some video game Karaoke, and the always popular baby bottles of wine in the cafeteria



and my personal favorite, a freaking kntting convention going on next door



That was me before Wendy used her awesome powers of persuasion to get the door people to let us into the market place where I got this



From a women with some amazing fibers, that sadly doesn't have a website.

All in all it was a very nice, if sort of hectic summer. And now I can pretend that we don't ever have to travel again...yes I'm delusional, I like it that way.

Numbers

Today is September 11th and I am reminded that I should be able to see the twin towers from my living room window. I purposefully never looked at any information about the WTC tradgedies before today. When it happened I was still grieving for my mother and I couldn't handle trying to grieve for the nation. I made sure my friends in NYC were safe and I compartmentailzed the rest so I didn't have to feel that ache that I knew every single family member of somebody who died that day was going through. Today I finally saw the number of people who died.

2996 people.

2996 families that are still healing from the loss of that day, mothers, fathers, wifes, husbands, children, who are missing somebody so important in their life it that it will never be the same again.

Then I thought of Iraq. We have been "fightning the war on terror" since it happened. First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Trying to make sure that we keep something like that from ever happening again on US soil.

The body count in Iraq from March 20, 2003 to today

135,335

135,335 lives for 2996.

Violence will never make peace, it will never make us safe, it does no good at all. It only causes more pain in a world that has already had quite enough.