Milton's Birthday

Today is John Milton's birthday. 400th, to be exact. Down at the lower right I keep a copy of his poem "On His Blindness," the source of the title of my blog "They Also Serve."

In honor of this 400th birthday though I'm reprinting it here.

The way I read it, Milton would like to serve God better but feels prevented by his blindness from doing so as vigorously as sighted people might. He realizes that God does not perhaps see this as preventing service.

To better understand it, think of the word "light" as meaning "sight."

On His Blindness

WHEN I consider how my light is spent
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

They also snob

The only person who likes a snob is either the snob herself or a fellow snob. At my circle we're pretty much all snobs so we tend to get along pretty well in the main.

My subject today is a "craft store" whose name, other than to tell you it's Michaels, shall remain nameless.

I refer principally to an incident that happened about a year ago, when my daughter, whom I'd just taught to knit, came home for Thanksgiving during her sophomore year in college up in Yankeeland (where, I admit, they often have a deeper appreciation for knitting, or at least for wool) with a newly made, apparently errorless scarf. I even mentioned it in a previous story here.


What I didn't mention was that I asked her, as you would have, what the yarn was and where she got it. It was, I think, a blend of mostly acrylic. Fine. I have no beef with acrylic. I don't use it usually except for things that are going to get frequent use by someone under 18 months, but that's just a matter of my personal wool worship. I understand this to be a matter of taste.

But then she told me she got the yarn at Michaels. (Pardon the absence of the apostrophe but so it appears to be in the original. I cannot help but think that several Michaels own the store. It is patently untrue that the store's only inventory is people named Michael.)

When she said the word, I wrinkled my nose. I protest that I did so not out of pure personal snobbery, but out of something of a collective judgment. For the people I knit with, the action is part of the pronunciation of the name. It's like this: "Michaels" -- half pause -- nose wrinkle.

This could be because I knit with these people in a yarn store, whose livelihood depends in some respects on customers' judgment that their favorite yarn is in some way superior to Caron® One Pound®. Whatever the reason, we consider ourselves too good for the likes of a concern that sells mediocre greeting cards and plastic giraffes among other "TONS OF GIFTS UNDER $5." In fact, I don't think most knitters like to think in terms of tons of anything, unless it is perhaps tons of musk oxen with their annual output of .08 ounces of qiviut.

So yes, we are smugly satisfied that our yarn is better than that. I imagine we secretly believe that if we bought a mass of Red Heart Designer Sport at our home store it would acquire a patina of elegance compared to the same yarn at Michaels. But my store doesn't sell Red Heart, so I'll never know.

Right now I'm on a Shetland kick. In the last few months I've been trying to convince some folks in Scotland to send me a yarn sample card. They promised me they'd do it about three months ago, and again about three weeks ago, but, you know, they just haven't yet. They may just be over there wrinkling up their collective Scotts noses when they hear I'm an American.

It's disgusting how some people can be such snobs.

I'm Away From My Desk Right Now . . .

but yeah, your call is very important to me.

This is a busy time of year, in the sense of being away from home a bunch. Missing two meetings of the knitting group. That sort of thing. Once for Thanksgiving and once for the Clergy Spouses' Retreat.

Fortunately, I have this Einstein Coat thing to keep me company. This is what it isn't going to look like:

The image calls it a "jacket" and the picture looks like its given name -- a coat. The way it knits up is mostly jacket-like, because it's not as long as in the picture.

I ignored the specific directions and am knitting a coat for Ann. The problem is that I've ripped out the bottom half once and the top half at least twice. I've tried to improve on the directions and I keep forgetting things. I want it done by Christmas, so I can give it to Ann as a present.

Then I'll start my second Aran sweater. Or ALO (Aran-like object). I can't wait to do it and I will be doing it, with any luck, while at the knitting (and quilting)retreat, while taking, that is, a class on Aran Knitting, taught by Varian Brandon.

I recently realized that I didn't exactly start doing Aran knitting with the sweater. I kind of waded into it with hats and scarves and the like, getting a little more Aran-like with each one. Suffering, I suppose, from acute Aranoia.

Perhaps after all it isn't a coincidence that my firstborn is named Aaron.

What, again?

I haven't posted for very nearly a year. Oh well, enough of that.

I have been very busy knitting. Did a whole bunch of stuff, but mostly finished a sweater recently, of the Aran variety. I did a typo on that last sentence the first time through. What do you suppose an Arab sweater is?

So here it is. My first sweater.

It's really hard to see the detail so I took some closeups. So here they are. Front and back.

The overall pattern is mine, but the big knot is from Janet Szabo, who has become something of the center of my knitting world in the past few months. One day I suppose I'll grow up and do fair isle sweaters, but for the moment I'm doing cables and more cables.

It's been a year, as I've said, and I have done a lot of knitting, and mostly knitting it seems, in between job and family. I've been to SAFF and Rhinebeck, knitted scarves and hats and mittens and this sweater. A baby blanket or two. Three really, and almost finished with Ann's coat. And a knitting retreat with Varian and the others. I've done a lot but no blogging.

Well, as I said, I have a lot to blog about. But as one who was certainly wiser than I once said, "All in good time."

May the blogging deities assist me.

As Fast as You Can

Every year the Grove Park Inn in Asheville has a gingerbread house contest. We try to get there if we can. We went tonight. We didn't see as many houses as we usually see, but there were some pretty spectacular ones.











The best I can tell these are basically 100% edible ingredients, though many of them are only a little gingerbread.










The dentist changed his mind. He's taking out my infected wisdom tooth tomorrow. I think this is what Jim Henson died of. Or maybe not. Anyway, if you don't hear from me again, and you find this little out-of the way blog, remember me kindly.

Instruction headaches

My problem is that when I work from a pattern there are terms i don't understand. I have been knitting for about thee quarters of a year and I am getting some techniques but these terms that people just toss into the instructions are killing me. They may not mean anything.

My proposal, and I bet I'm not the first to have this idea, is that anyone putting instructions out into the public domain run the instructions by a person at the lowest level of familiarity with the operation. This goes for assembling tricycles, for cooking perhaps, but definitely for knitting.

My specific problem at the moment is Eunny Jang's anemoi mittens. They are really splendid. I am knitting them and, as usual, am learning a lot. My problem is that I keep coming across expressions I am unfamiliar with. They are not defined in the glossary.

1. "Begin working mitten body chart (first four chart rows should be worked as slip-stitch rounds; use only one strand of specified yarn)."

The first five words I understand perfectly. The term "slip-stitch round" I am unfamiliar with. I put it out at the circle on Saturday and no one had the slightest idea what it meant. Yes we all know what slip stitches are. What is a slip stitch round? One of the knitters suggested I ignore the term and just knit. "Use only one strand of specified yarn." What? What is she saying? I'd feel stupider I hadn't asked all the knitters what she meant. I just ignored this and kept knitting.

Fine. I got past it and knitted a couple of dozen rows. Now:

2. "Slip 25 thumb gore sts between markers to scrap yarn."

Sorry. I think I know how to slip stitches, and yes I have 25 between the markers and if she really wants me to slip them I will, but what does "to scrap yarn"mean?

This is not a pattern reserved for 10-year veterans, at least according to the terms of the pattern. "This pattern is a good project for knitters comfortable with colorwork in the round."


Comfortable with colorwork in the round describes me to a T.


Google pretty much gives me all these references to scrap yarn and what to do with my scrap yarn. I don't think that's what this pattern has in mind; if it does I'm even more in the dark.


I'll put it aside again until Saturday and see if anyone else can figure this out.


In the meantime I'm just making some slippers on a little nothing cable thing of my own devising. I pull them out whet I get to a wall.

Wisdom Literature

I went to the clergy spouses' retreat this weekend. It was pretty fabulous. Yoga, massage, meals, a little night theater, and whatever else we felt like doing. Fortunately, and I say this in complete modesty, we had me along.

I never ever like to talk people into doing things, exactly, but I was ready for anyone to knit who wanted to. When I get excited about something I think I just get infectious about it. My friend Cheri, who is a clergy spouse but was at the same center for a different retreat, remarked that I was always pleased to find myself the center of attention. I replied that she had certainly nailed that aspect of it, although I said (and she agreed) that I really did want to knit and the knitting aspect of it was what I wanted to do, and I would have been there knitting even if I were the only one. But yeah, that other thing too.

Eventually, anyway, there were lots of knitters doing their stuff, and, although they had brought their projects just in case, I don't know that everybody expected to knit when they came. It all turned out well. There were more knitters than hikers even, which proves my theory that good sense will always prevail.

Unfortunately I lost a pretty massive filling in my molar, and I think the molar or the jaw or something is getting infected, and the lymph node is swollen, and it feels as though there is a hard-boiled egg lodged in my neck. I called the dentist and he prescribed some penicillin and I hope he will see me on Monday and probably take this stupid molar out, which he has been wanting to do for 15 years.

The great news is that I finally, after 15 or 16 false starts, have my daughter's mittens underway. It is by far the most times I have ever started a project, and of course it's not through yet, even the first mitten, in fact it's just past the cuff ribbing, but I feel as though this time it's going to take. It was mostly a matter if the right needles and the right tension.

Here's what it looks like at the moment:

So that was the first annual clergy spouses' retreat and I think everybody had a really great time, and I'm expecting it went well enough that there will at least be a second one. One of the cool things about being with clergy spouses is that they don't take the priests and bishops and deacons nearly as seriously as their congregations do, and, in many cases (I suspect) as seriously as the clergy take themselves.

I have a photo I took of a bunch of the group in the dining hall.