Roman shade success; Medicare-for-All politics; and a portal opens, maybe.

The Roman shade project is done, huzzah! I installed the shade for the bedroom window yesterday morning. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

As a reminder, this was the old, ugly shade. I think the new one is a vast improvement. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Now that I've done two of these, I'm putting this in the "projects to never do again" category*. The mechanics were straightforward enough, but hanging this shade by myself was a challenge because it was so wide. At one point I had thought about doing two shades, one for each windowpane; it would have been easier to hang two shorter ones by myself. But now that the single long shade is up, I'm not inclined to take it down and start over. At all.

I made this installation harder on myself by forgetting to take down the old shade before screwing the new one to the wall. I just got so excited to get the new shade up that I forgot. The old one used the same clip-in system as the shade in the office/craft room, but there's not a lot of clearance for a screwdriver because the clip tilts in toward the room, and having to keep the new shade out of the way didn't make the process any easier. I guess I could have tried using pliers to bend the clip back and out of the way, since I was going to throw the brackets away; too bad I didn't think of that until just now.

If you're thinking of sewing a Roman shade for yourself, I highly recommend getting this gadget or making one out of a nine-inch length of thin wire you happen to have around the house. Basically, it's a needle threader for blinds and shades. I wouldn't have bothered to get it except that I was ordering some other stuff from this vendor, and it was a cheap add-on. I ended up being very glad I had it. It made the process of threading the blind cord through the cord lock take seconds rather than minutes. 

I like the softness of the new shades much better than the industrial clunkiness of the old metal shades, and of course the new colors work better than that dirty beige. So all in all, I'm glad I made these shades.

And one thing I realized while making the shades is that I had fun figuring out all the steps. Life has gotten pretty repetitive for me -- dare I say boring -- lately. This provided me with a challenge, and I like challenges (within reason). 

So I might be scouting around the house for new challenges to take on. But I'm still going to pay somebody to convert the tub/shower combo to just a shower. I'm not completely crazy.

***

* I've posted several times over the years about various projects, often knitted ones: "It's done, and I'm never doing it again." Often, after some time has passed, I end up doing another project like the one I said I'd never do again. So feel free to take my claim above with a large grain of salt.

***

That's enough about Roman shades. On to part two.

I spotted this article from Vox in my Apple News feed earlier today: "Medicare-for-all has a doctor problem". The author, Eric Levitz, attempts to poke holes in Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's support of Medicare for All by saying we would have to make changes in our current healthcare payment system for it to be fair to doctors. Healthcare professionals in the US are much better paid than those in countries that have single-payer healthcare systems, and something would have to be done, he says, to make sure they wouldn't have to take a pay cut.

He cites a report in the Washington Free Beacon that claims El-Sayed's partner, a psychiatrist in private practice, doesn't accept Medicare, presumably because Medicare's reimbursement rates aren't high enough. And then he says:

According to a widely cited 2018 analysis by the economist Charles Blahous, if a single-payer system kept provider payments constant, national health spending would rise by $3.25 trillion over a decade, even with administrative savings taken into account. By contrast, if all providers were forced to accept Medicare's rates, health spending would actually fall by $2.05 trillion over the same period.

So I looked up Charles Blahous. He is a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; previously, he was deputy director of  the National Economic Council under President Bush the Younger and has also been associated with the Hoover Institution, a right-leaning think tank that's part of Stanford University (weirdly, as Stanford is pretty liberal). 

Then I looked up whether the Washington Free Beacon leans right or left. Sure enough, adfontesmedia.com says it has a strong right bias and rates it as mixed when it comes to reliability. 

I am all for examining both sides of an issue. But I also think it's important to be clear about where your sources fall on the political spectrum when you're reporting on political issues, especially in these times, and Levitz doesn't. I'm not inclined to take a libertarian-leaning economist's opinion that Medicare for All is unworkable, and I sure as hell would not reference a hit piece in a far-right publication if I were writing a supposedly even-handed report.

Levitz does suggest some incremental changes to make a single-payer system more palatable in the long run, including instituting state-level caps on healthcare payment rates and removing hurdles that prevent doctors trained abroad to easily set up shop in the US. But I think he too quickly dismisses the profound impact that doing away with private insurance would have on our healthcare system. And doctors may not have to take as much of a pay cut as right-leaning economists claim, once the financial barriers to healthcare are lifted and everyone can afford to go to the doctor when they need to. Plus the elimination of the byzantine system of today would not only be good for doctors, but for patients, too.

Yes, people's taxes would go up to support a single-payer system, but the increase would be offset by the loss of the premium/copay/coinsurance morass we're currently slogging through. Are there figures on how much of an offset? Levitz doesn't say.

A lot of doctors already support a single-payer system -- between 49% and 59%, depending on who's doing the survey and how the questions are asked.

Let's see a study from Medicare-for-All proponents that answers the Blahous analysis. Then we can make a better decision on whether to go forward.

EDITED TO ADD: Levitz wouldn't have had to look very far to find a response to Blahous from Medicare-for-All proponents. Mama Google found this one for me in just a few seconds.

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Finally: there's reportedly a seismic shift brewing this week due to an annual astrological phenomenon known as the Lion's Gate. It happens between this Tuesday and August 12th, with the big punch on August 8th. This year's is supposed to be especially intense due to Jupiter's conjunction with the Sun in Leo on the date of the full moon this Wednesday, and particulary auspicious because the date of the portal opening, 8/8/2026, reduces via numerology to 8, a number associated with abundance and with balance between the physical and the spiritual.

I'm not an astrology stan, and I haven't dabbled in numerology for decades, but I thought I'd mention this thing since I keep hearing about it. You can find more info on the annual Lion's Gate here.

***

These moments of bloggy pros and cons have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, who hopes that good things will come through the Lion's Gate because honey, we are due.

Things in progress.

So the big news today, of course, is the death of South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. A medical examiner's report released this evening says he died of a tear in his aorta, likely caused by atherosclerosis, but we'll know more when the report is finalized in a couple of weeks. 

Republicans still control the Senate, even with Graham gone, but the math will be a titch harder until his replacement is named. There are still questions lingering about the condition of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, too, including about a photo released by his office today that looks like a retread from several years ago. If it turns out the worst is true about him, the GOP will be holding onto Senate control by just one seat until their replacements come on board. 

Both McConnell and Graham knew that Trump would be bad news for the country if elected, but when push came to shove, neither one stepped up to block his crazy ideas from becoming law. That's not the legacy I'd want to have.

***

Besides those news stories still in progress, I have not yet finished the Roman shades for my bedroom and office/craft room. Progress has been made: all the fabric for both is cut, and most of the sewing is done on the shade for the office/craft room. There's still a fair bit of work ahead on that shade, though, including all the hardware. I'd be farther along if I hadn't played hooky yesterday. But in my defense, I also went to the hardware store, bought the board for the hardware for both shades, and got the store to cut it to the lengths I need. 

I will not be doing a tutorial for this project; if you're after step-by-step directions, there are about a squintillion videos out there, some more useful than others. (I'm actually using one method for the office/craft room shade and a different one for the bedroom shade.)

If you've never bought any fabric from Spoonflower, I can tell you that it's different experience than going to the fabric store. First, there's no instant gratification; you put in your order and it takes them a week or two to print it on your preferred fabric and send it to you. Their selvedges are huge compared to fabric from a store, but the width of printed fabric they say you'll get is the size you get (I measured mine to be sure). And their order control system gave me a little thrill. 

Lynne Cantwell | July 2026

Both fabrics I received are excellent quality. The one in the photo above is a performance linen. The downside is that it's polyester, and it ravels like crazy. The lining fabric I bought (from a different online vendor) is also polyester, and it too ravels like crazy. That's making me ... crazy. Didn't seem to bother Tigs, though. 

Lynne Cantwell | July 2026

(Then he plopped his butt down on it and I had to chase him away. Then I stepped on his tail. Poor little guy.)

The other fabric I purchased is a cotton sateen, which should have been easier to manage than those slippery polyesters, except it's 116 inches wide. Cutting all of this stuff has been an adventure -- my dining room table is round and only 42 inches wide. I had to spend a lot of time shifting the fabric and the cutting mat and the fabric and the cutting mat and... I kept thinking how nice it would be to have one of those ginormous work tables that I saw in one how-to video. Just lay it all out flat and cut it, boom, done. Alas.

Once all the fabric was cut, I had to iron it. I usually don't bother with ironing fabric when I sew. I know you're supposed to, but you're also supposed to wash it before you cut it, and you're supposed to iron all your seams flat, and I don't do any of that stuff, either. But I was convinced by one of the tutorials that said if you don't get those creases out now, you'll be seeing them every time you look at your shade once it's done. So there I was, slaving over a steam iron in my 80-degree dining room. 

I used to laugh at my mother for spending summer afternoons sweating over a hot iron to press her sheets and dish towels. Dish towels, for godsakes! Ever since then, I've said that if God wanted us to iron, She wouldn't have invented permanent press. I'm sure that today both She and my mother were laughing at me.

Anyway, the fun continued as I played bobbin thread chicken on the last bit of sewing before dinner. This game is similar to yarn chicken, where you're sweating the amount of yarn you have left compared to the amount of knitting you still have to do -- although with the bobbin thread version, running out too soon usually comes as a surprise. Today, though, I finished with inches to spare!

Lynne Cantwell | July 2026

The next step is to attach the dowel rods to the shade, then turn the thing right-side-out and hem it, then attach the rings and the pull cord and sew velcro at the top and... yeah. It's a long way from being done. Maybe next weekend. 

Then I get to make the other shade.

And *then* I get to figure out how to get the old shades off the windows. Wish me luck!

***

These moments of bloggy craftiness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. It's summer! Do something fun!

Crafty baby (stair) steps.

Tonight's post is gonna be a quickie, because I want to get back to the loom before I lose my mojo again. Here's what I'm currently working on (read: sick of looking at): 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

The pattern is called the Stair Step Rug. I got it from Gist Yarn, but their yarn colors didn't really go with my decor, so I'm using Maurice Brassard yarn instead. The blue, which I'm using for both the warp (the long threads) and some of the weft (the back-and-forth threads), is a cotton/linen blend in the Peacock colorway. The other stuff is a cotton slub yarn, kind of like boucle, in the Turquoise colorway. Here's a photo of some of the photos in the pattern, so you can see what it's supposed to look like when it's done: 

I started it in October or November, I think, and I'd already be done if I hadn't decided to double the length and make it a runner. It's taking forever because this yarn is a whole lot skinnier than the Churro that I've been working with lately. The technique is called crackle weave; I won't bore you with too much technical lingo, but basically I'm alternating the colors -- one row blue, the next turquoise -- with the blue rows all in plain weave and the turquoise rows in a twill pattern. Warping the loom to make all that work was a joy, let me tell you. But it should be very cool looking, with a big Southwesterny diamond in the middle, when it's done. 

The only other project I've finished since my last crafty post is this shawl: 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

The pattern is the Moroccan Lantern Shawl. When I started it last fall, it had been quite a while since I'd knitted anything. I wish I knew what possessed me to pick a pattern with a lacy stitch for my first project after my knitting hiatus. It was kind of a slog. But it's now been done for a while, waiting for me to block it so the points on the bottom edge stand out more clearly. I might get to that here pretty soon. Or maybe not. We'll see.

Speaking of getting to things, I'm going to stop here and get back to weaving. I figured out that if I sit at the loom every night this week, I could have the weaving done by next Sunday. The rug wouldn't be done done, but at least I'll be able to take it off the loom. I'll let you know how it goes.

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These moments of crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Let's get crafty again.

I am fresh out of new ideas for a post this week, so maybe it's a good week for an old idea. How about a crafty post?

This one won't be as varied as the one I did in November, when I had refinished a table top, among other things. But I've finished a couple of projects since then, and I'm working on a couple more.

First up: weaving. You may recall that I made four matching cushions for my dining room chairs and that I had enough yarn left over to make a table runner. I did get the table runner done -- and as soon as it came off the loom, Tigs, claimed it. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

Don't worry -- I got it away from him and onto the table. And as you can see, it does match the cushions. 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

On to knitting. I'd had a scarf pattern called Gridlock in my Ravelry queue for more than ten years, so I figured it was time to make it. Except I don't wear scarves anymore; I prefer cowls these days -- they're just easier to deal with. So I converted the scarf pattern into a cowl pattern. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

I have enough yarn left over from this project to make a hat to match -- and I started it, but then realized I hadn't cast on enough stitches for the cable repeat, so I frogged the whole thing and started over. I've made progress since then, but it's been set aside for several weeks in favor of another knitting project: a holiday-themed afghan. Here's what that's supposed to look like when it's done: 

image stolen from favecrafts.com

This pattern has been around for approximately a million years. It was originally a free pattern from Bernat, but the yarn they developed it for has been discontinued, and the pattern itself is only showing up on random websites these days. I'll tell you more about this adventure when I'm done, which shouldn't be too much longer now -- I started the final rounds of green around the edge last night.

That brings us up-to-date. Hopefully I'll have something more scintillating to talk about next week.

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These moments of fibery blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

My crafty fall.

I have another topic I wouldn't mind writing about (actually, if I wanted to go all political again, I have a few topics I could write about), but I've been promising y'all a crafts post for the past several weeks. So here we go.

This is not just knitting this time, oh no, and it's not just weaving, either, although we'll get to both of those in a minute. First, let's talk about the table fail.

Maybe a year and a half ago, I bought a used equipale table from someone on Facebook Marketplace. Equipale furniture, by the way, is made in Jalisco State in Mexico; Mama Google says the name comes from ikpalli, the Nahuatl word for chair. (I'd post a link, but all the sites I've found so far look kinda sketchy. You're welcome.) It's characterized by thin cedar planks criss-crossed for the base, plus leather upholstery for chairs and either leather or copper for tabletops.

My tabletop was covered in leather, but it was worn out; I tried leather cleaner on it, but it was just too far gone. So I planned to rip it off and redo it, maybe making it look like copper. Here's what it looked like as I was pulling off the leather: 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

As you can see, it was pretty rugged underneath. I'd planned to fill in those cracks and things with wood filler, but it turns out that I suck at using wood filler. It ended up all lumpy bumpy. I painted it with metallic copper spray paint anyway, but it just looked terrible. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

So I purchased a random orbital sander, sanded off the mess I'd made, and repainted, this time with metallic copper spray paint that included primer. The result wasn't perfect, but it looked so much better! So I went ahead and put a few coats of polyurethane on it and called it done. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

Next up: weaving. Right after I moved into the condo, I'd purchased memory foam cushions for the dining room chairs. Here's the problem with memory foam cushions: if they're not very thick, they flatten out pretty fast. If you're just grabbing a bite, they're more or less fine. But if you want to sit at the table for a while, well. It's not the most pleasant experience. So I decided to make my own cushions. I have four chairs, so I'd be making four cushions total.

I bought the yarn last December. (It's churro wool from Tierra Wools here in New Mexico.) Then I spent several months dithering around with the design while my cataracts got worse. Finally, I got started on them several weeks ago.

The first step is to measure out the warp threads (the ones that go the long way on the loom). There are a few ways to do this, but for the table loom, indirect warping -- measuring out the warp on a warping board and then moving it to the loom -- seems to be the way to go. I needed each warp thread to be five yards long, so I could do two cushion covers at once. Here's how the warp threads looked on the board. Well, technically, this is how half of one warp looked. I had to do this a total of four times -- two warps for each set of two cushions.

Lynne Cantwell 2022

If anybody really wants an explanation of the difference between direct and indirect warping, I'll tackle it in a different post. For now, let's just move on. Here's the loom all warped and the first cushion cover about a quarter done: 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

Once the loom is warped, the weaving takes no time at all. But then I had to sew the covers together and stuff the polyurethane foam forms into them. I also braided some of the leftover yarn into ties for the cushions (those will probably get swapped out for something less stretchy later, once I figure out what to use instead). A few days after starting the project, the first two cushions were done, and Tigs put his stamp of approval on them shortly thereafter. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

The final two cushions are woven and nearly finished; I need to sew the second tie onto one of them and finish sewing the sides and ties on the other one. I'm hoping to finish that tonight, once I post this. And I have plenty of yarn left over, so I'm going to make a table runner to match -- although hopefully it won't take me another year to design and it. (It won't. I just need to the additional warp yarn I've ordered to get here.)

Finally, I completed the knitting project that's been the bane of my existence since last winter. On Ravelry, I called it the Spiral Sweater of 897,000 Ends to Weave In. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

It all started at Taos Wool Festival last fall, when I bought a couple of bundles of Fusion 800 yarn. Each bundle contained 100-yard lengths of eight yarns, all in the same colorway (mine is called Aurora Borealis), but each a different type. One was tweedy, one was spun with sparkly strands, one was a boucle, one was mohair-like -- you get the idea. Every time I ran out of a 100-yard length and joined the next one, it created two ends to weave in. And I switched yarns a lot. 

I knitted this sweater top-down, and it occurred to me last spring as I was about to finish the body of the sweater that the stitches I'd put on holders for the sleeves were in the boucle yarn. Which meant picking up stitches in boucle under the arms. Which wasn't going to be any fun. Plus I had to measure out and split the yarn I had left so that each sleeve would more or less match. And hope I had enough left of the yarn I'd used at the neckline and sweater bottom for the cuffs. And weave in all 897,000 ends. 

At that point I made an executive decision: It was getting to be too warm to knit with wool (not to mention the cataracts), so I set the project aside for the summer. This fall, I put on my big girl pants and dealt with the damn sleeves and all those ends. And as you can see, it turned out fine.

To think I could be writing a novel this month instead...

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These moments of all sorts of crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! And for my American readers, happy Thanksgiving!

Brace yourselves: it's another knitting and crafting post.

My apartment is in an uproar right now. The movers are coming in less than a week and I'm running out of places to put the boxes I've packed. So how about a knitting post?

The last time we chatted, it was in March and I was dressing up Flora. I've done a few other crafty things since then. Here we go.

First: I decided I needed to clean up the clutter on my desk. This desk has several drawers (and what's with the desks they make without drawers these days, anyway? Where are you supposed to put all your stuff?) but I had a bunch of little containers on my desktop, as well as two cups full of pens and scissors and things like that. The clutter was making me a teensy bit crazy. So I bought an unfinished box and decided to stain and varnish it, rather than paint it. I asked Mama Google about staining and she said you could use instant coffee. Well, I had some packets of instant Starbucks that were about to expire anyway, so that's what I used. It turned out okay. And now the top of my desk is a little bit less cluttered (although right now there's a pile of papers that need to be filed. Gonna do that tonight, I swears it.)

Lynne Cantwell 2021

I also decided to spin up some of the roving I've picked up here and there over the past few years. This stuff is Falkland wool and it came in a rolag, which is what you get when you put a bunch of dyed fiber on a blending board, mix it up, and roll it off into a tubular shape. These turned into lovely yarn. I have no earthly idea what I'll do with it -- it's not enough to make anything with. But it was fun.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

Less fun to spin is the silk top that my daughter Amy gave me a few years ago. Silk is more slippery than wool and it's been a challenge to keep it from breaking. I spun up part of it and put the rest aside. I might get back to it eventually. Or not.

Now, about the knitting. In the spring, I took a virtual class on brioche knitting from here in Santa Fe through fibre space in Alexandria, VA. I'd never done brioche before. It's, um, challenging. If you make a mistake, you're almost better off frogging the whole thing and starting over. There was one more issue: the cowl called for three coordinating colors of yarn. I had leftover yarn from another project and wanted to use it as one of the three colors, but that meant picking the other two while looking at photos of my options online. I was only kind of successful. But it's done, and now I have even more yarn left over, so I might eventually make a hat to go with the cowl.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

Next up: a pair of socks from this sock yarn I bought about a billion years ago and finally got tired of looking at in my stash. 

Lynne Cantwell 2021

The socks were sort of a palate cleanser after this next project. 

At one point this spring, I totally lost my mind and bought a shawl kit from an ad I saw on Facebook. The yarn was a nightmare to work with and some of the pattern directions were confusing, so I won't be doing that again. The result is stunning, though, so I guess all the cursing I did was worth it. I'm calling it my Sunrise shawl.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

If I have a Sunrise, then I need a Moon to go with it, right? As it happens, the Moon shawl is what I'm working on right now. I've included the cover of the instructions so you can see how it's supposed to look when it's done. 

Lynne Cantwell 2021

This pattern is a different nightmare. Like the Eden Prairie shawl, this designer is using a dark color to separate the sections of the shawl; unlike the Eden Prairie, which sensibly used garter stitch for everything, this pattern calls for knitting each section in stockinette with an I-cord bind-off, and then picking up stitches along the edge of the I-cord to start the next section. I'm currently about half done with binding off the 399 stitches of the third section. If you're not a knitter but that sounds like a lot of stitches, you're absolutely right. I have two more sections to knit, then an I-cord bindoff around the whole shawl, and I get to use duplicate stitch to make those cute little moon phases along the border. I keep thinking I'm making progress on this thing, and then I look ahead to the next section and despair. But eventually it will be done, I swears it. Just not before the movers come on Saturday.

***

Which reminds me: I'm going to take next week off from the blog due to the move. See you back here on the 22nd.

***

Which reminds me of something else: Our summer reading challenge is heading into the final few weeks. Check out the list and the prizes at the link, and good luck!

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These moments of crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Sometimes a craft project works and sometimes it doesn't.

Holy cats. You mean I haven't done a knitting post since August? I'd better rectify that.

Some projects work out the way you think they will, and some don't. So it is with the first project in this batch -- the Sun Glitter Shawl, which I completed last summer. A friend bought the yarn on a trip to Ireland and gave it to me. I carefully blocked the finished shawl so the lacy panels would have a concave curve along the bottom edge, just like the photo on the pattern -- and as soon as I wore it for ten minutes, the curves stretched out. Oh well. (Also, my photo is lousy. Sorry about that.)

Copyright Lynne Cantwell 2020

I'm not going to show you the next project I finished because it really didn't work out. The sweater is called the Dacite. It's long-sleeved, with an interestingly-shaped collar that comes all the way up under the chin. The problem is that the designer, bless her heart, didn't respace the knitted-in buttonholes for the larger sizes -- which is to say the neckline is too tight and the collar doesn't lay right. To make things even worse, I tried to do a fancy thing and add pockets, except the sweater is designed to be waist-length and the pockets ended up being girly pockets (i.e., too small to be of any use). In short, the sweater needs an overhaul. I have plenty of yarn left, so now that I am on sabbatical, I'm going to rip back the bottom edging and lengthen the sweater by several inches, then rework the pockets so they're a usable size. I'm also going to sew those knitted buttonholes shut and install snaps. Then I'll post a photo on the blog.

Next up was the Dotted Rays Shawl, designed by Stephen West and knitted with yarn I bought at his shop in Amsterdam last spring.

Copyright Lynne Cantwell 2020

Toward the end of February, I started working on a long, shawl-collared vest. The pattern is the Everyday Favorite Vest. It's written somewhat confusingly, but I've done enough sweater-type things by now to figure out what she was after. I finished it today.

Copyright Lynne Cantwell 2020

You're supposed to use a decorative hook-and-eye closure, but of course I had a better idea. Since I was knitting it in Silky Wool, which has kind of a rustic vibe, I decided to make ties from some latigo leather lacing I bought years ago. How to attach the ties to the knitted fabric, though?

At first I planned to loop the lacing around the shanks of some buttons I already had, but the shanks were too short. Then I remembered I had used some interesting metal closures with screw backs on a shawl several years ago. I went searching for the manufacturer and learned the closures were called conchos. Now conchos are used in leatherwork. Moreover, if you look for conchos on Etsy, you can find approximately a billion designs in all sorts of sizes -- plus they're about a third of the price I paid for the ones I bought at a yarn shop.

The vest took me longer to knit than normal because I stopped partway through it to make masks. And then when those didn't suit (I'd essentially glued the two pieces of fabric together, so I couldn't breathe through them at all), I used a better mask pattern to make a couple more.

Having powered through all of that, plus the kimono-style jacket I wove... Wait. Did I not post about that here, either? Well! Here is the kimono-style jacket I wove. It took four loom warpings, a fair amount of cursing at my sewing machine, and Fun With Tear-Away Fabric Stabilizer, but I'm happy with the way it turned out.

Copyright Lynne Cantwell 2020

Now then. Where was I? Right. Having powered through all that, I picked up a quickie embroidery project and finished that today, as well. This requires some explanation: Sometime last year, as a way to help mark the passage of #escapevelocity time, I bought myself a bunch of trinkets and stuck them in paper bags, one for each week I had left, with a piece of chocolate in each bag. The idea was to give me something to look forward to on Mondays (by the way, it worked really well). Among the things I picked up were oversized safety pins with three little loops on one straight side, one each in gold, silver, and bronze finishes, plus charms to hang from the loops. Once assembled, they would be shawl pins. I made sure I opened the bag containing the card of safety pins fairly early on, but I mixed the charms in with the rest of the trinkets.

Fast-forward to last week and the start of my sabbatical. I have opened all but the bags intended for my three post-sabbatical, pre-retirement Mondays. The silver pin has been completed long since. I have a gold pin, a bronze pin, two gold charms, and two wooden circles that are meant to be cross-stitched. (Looks like they've been discontinued. Sorry if I got you excited.) I remembered having trouble finding bronze charms, but I couldn't remember if I'd meant to use one or both of the earring blanks on the bronze pin. So...I peeked. And in two of the three remaining bags I found one more gold charm...and one more silver charm.

I don't know what the hell I was on.

Anyway, I stitched up the earring blanks today and ordered a bronze charm from Etsy. Here's where we are.

Copyright Lynne Cantwell 2020

Anybody want a silver Celtic knot charm? It'll be available to ship in early July.

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These moments of crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Practice physical distancing! Keep washing those hands!

Weaving, or: another crafty distraction.

For starters, I want to reassure you all that I am making steady progress on this year's NaNo novel. In fact, I'm right where the NaNo folks say I should be -- 30,000 words today. Together with the 12,000-ish words I wrote for this book prior to the start of NaNo, I'm basically at the point in the narrative where things should begin hurtling toward the denouement -- and they have.

Neither the book nor the series has a title yet, but I'm sure that will fix itself by and by. It always has before.

I'm saying this upfront because I didn't want to scare y'all by telling you I'm picking up another hobby: weaving.

The term "fiber arts" encompasses a multitude of disciplines, and aside from creating my own fiber from scratch (as in raising sheep or cotton or something), I've tried nearly all of them at one point or another. As I kid, I learned sewing and embroidery. Crewel work was a natural outgrowth of embroidery, as it uses the same stitches. I picked up needlepoint when I was in college. Most of that stuff went by the wayside when I started raising kids. But then some years ago, I decided I wanted to learn to knit, so I got a book and taught myself. 

Some fiber arts I've taken to more than others. Crochet and I have never gotten along, despite my mother's best efforts to teach me. Then there's spinning. A couple of years ago, I learned how to spin yarn with a drop spindle, and managed to spin a whole skein of yarn myself -- but while I like collecting pretty spindles, that's probably as far as I'll go with it.

So with some trepidation, I signed up for a two-day, pre-Halloween "weaving retreat" at fibre space, our local yarn shop in Alexandria. It was an intense couple of days; our instructor, Liz Gipson, confessed on day two that she called it a retreat because if she called it "Weaving Bootcamp," nobody would come. But there was a method to her madness. On day one, we worked in pairs to warp our looms. Warping is the process of putting the long threads on the loom so that you can weave the cross threads (called the weft) through them. It's also the thing that gives most new weavers fits, so doing it twice on the first day was a genius move. Also, we started with a small project -- a 24-inch-long table runner -- which we easily finished in a day. Here's mine. I hadn't yet washed it or trimmed the fringe when I took this photo, but you get the idea.

On day two, we warped our looms again and started a new project: a scarf that incorporates colorwork in the design. The pattern called for a light main color and a contrasting accent color; I had to be different, of course, so I used a dark variegated yarn for my main color and a light gray for the contrasting color. Here's the project in progress on the loom. I'd tucked the shuttles in between the warp strings so I could take the loom home.

Both of these yarns were leftovers from earlier projects, and the scarf turned out so well that it's giving me ideas for all the leftover yarn I have from all my other projects. Plus my enthusiasm for knitting has been waning a bit lately, and weaving has the same kind of Zen appeal while using up yarn a lot faster. And you can weave more than just long, thin things; this little loom won't do rugs or tablecloths in one piece, but there's nothing saying you can't weave a bunch of strips and sew them together. Or weave your own cloth and use it to make clothing.

I haven't yet warped the loom for project number three, but that's only because of NaNo. Come the New Year, I see placemats in my future. And maybe a handwoven kimono-style jacket -- possibly even featuring that yarn I handspun.

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These moments of warped blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Hey, it's a knitting post.

I know y'all are all about the big sportsball match this evening, so here's a post that has nothing at all to do with it.

It looks like the last time I did a knitting post was in September. I've been busy since then with several projects -- including the Main Street shawl, which was partly done then. Here's what it looks like, all finished.

I moved on then to the Architexture shawl. This pattern caught my eye months ago, but I'd put off knitting it until I found the right yarn. Then it occurred to me that I'd picked up a suitable yarn at Maryland Sheep and Wool last spring and hadn't even realized it would work for this pattern. Here's a shot of the finished project.

Please excuse my sour expression. I really do like the way the shawl turned out. I was concentrating on a new photography technique -- grabbing a frame from a video to use as a still photo -- and forgot to smile.

The Architexture worked up pretty fast, but I had to put it on hiatus for a few weeks in December to work on another project -- that Craftvent Calendar shawl I mentioned here at the end of November.

The back story for the Craftvent shawl is this: My daughter Amy found the product online and decided to buy one for herself. It didn't take much urging for me to get one, too. She ordered the "jewel tone" colorway and I got the "wintergreen" one.

Mine turned out fine. I liked most of the colors but -- as usual -- I ran out of yarn in the first lace section. I finally figured out that I'm too generous with yarn when I do a yarnover; once I tamed my tendency to make those extra stitches REALLY BIG, I did okay. Amy, however, disliked her colors -- she was expecting a range of saturated colors and, well, did not get them. Plus she ran out of yarn, too. In fact, a lot of people ran out of yarn. The place we ordered the kits from had to ship packets of extra yarn to a lot of folks.

When I got to my last ball of yarn, it turned out to be the precise shade of neon green that I actively avoid. So Amy, bless her heart, went spelunking in her stash and found a bright blue-green that worked just fine. Here's mine. If Amy ever finishes hers, I'll post a photo of it, too.

To be honest, I'm impressed that I got so many projects done, considering I spent a huge chunk of the fall working on a shawl called the Find Your Fade. I'd picked up the kit at Maryland Sheep and Wool in the spring, and did not fully understand how big a shawl 1,500 yards of fingering weight yarn would make. To give you an idea of how massive this thing is, the piece of furniture with the drawers in the photo below is 44 inches wide.

It's wonderful to wrap up in, but it's impractical to wear to work. I've been leaving it next to my desk at home to wear while I write.

Right now I'm working on some little stuff. I used up some of the leftover yarn from the Architexture and Main Street shawls by making a pair of fingerless gloves. I also knitted myself a new hat and am working on a gaiter-style cowl to go with it. The pattern has a bunch of yarnovers in it. We'll see if I have enough yarn to finish the cowl. Fingers crossed...

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I'm also working on a memoir. I can't remember whether I've mentioned this project before, but it's something I've been working on for probably 15 years, off and on, as the story unfolded. Events have recently reached a denouement, so I feel like it's time to wrap up the book. This weekend, I started the process of cutting, pasting, and rewriting the original material. It's gonna be a ton of work, but it will be rewarding in the end -- to me, anyway.

Have a great week, everyone, and may the best sportsball team win.

Here comes Advent -- and it's gonna be expensive.

Today, I spent $150 on an Advent calendar.

Not the mittens. I made those several years ago -- knitted them out of 100% acrylic yarn that I happened to have on hand. Those tiny mittens will still be around when the sun goes supernova. And they were cheap!

No, the thing I bought today is a cleverly-packaged knitting project called a Craftvent Calendar. The box has 24 drawers, and each drawer holds a thing I will need to create a knitted shawl: needles, notions, yarn, and the directions. I'm hoping the directions are in drawer number 1 -- although since the project is billed as a knit-along, the pattern will probably be parceled out in chunks over the course of the month.

The thing is, I have no business buying an Advent calendar of any sort. I'm Neopagan, as you may recall, and Advent calendars are a Christian thing. The practice began among Lutherans in the 19th century, according to Wikipedia, and the idea was to mark the passage of time between the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day and the day itself. The first commercial Advent calendars, though, marked the days from December 1 to Christmas Eve. They were cardboard and had little numbered doors that you opened each day to see a scene; the door number 24 would reveal either Jesus in the manger or Santa Claus.

Since then, the idea has morphed. Mutated. Grown into a monster. Oh sure, you can still get the cardboard variety, as well as the kind with a little piece of not-very-good chocolate behind each door. But there's more -- oh, so much more!

For less than $50, you can get a Lego Advent calendar -- and as every parent who has ever stepped on a Lego knows, they are the gift that keeps on giving. But adults have lots of less painful options. For example, the Body Shop sells an Advent calendar for $105 that features not only cosmetics, but "a feel-good action to complete every day" and, inexplicably, a bunny-eared headband. On a more serious note, Anthropologie offers a box of 24 little bottles of personal care products for $170. And booze sellers have also gotten in on the act. The Master of Malt website has been selling a Very Old & Rare Whisky Advent Calendar (in walnut or ebony -- your choice) for upwards of $11,000. I say "has been" because, alas, they are sold out.

It's gotten so bad that clergy in the U.K. are warning about the dangers of consumerism -- not just on Christmas, but while counting the days leading up to the Big Day, too.

I feel like Exhibit A. We observe Yule, which falls on the winter solstice, anywhere from the 20th to the 22nd of December. Traditional Advent calendars overshoot our holiday. In fact, I made the mittens so that we could easily adjust the countdown for the year in question.

But after the mini-tour of excess I just undertook to write this post, I'm feeling better about that Craftvent Calendar. I'd rather have a new shawl in January than a bunny-eared headband anyhow.

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These moments of bloggy excess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Stitching memories.

You may recall that I was out of town a couple of weeks ago. One of the things I did was to stop by the house where I grew up, and pick up my mother's old sewing machine.

Here it is, ensconced temporarily in my daughter Amy's room. It's a Kenmore Imperial, model number 117.591, manufactured by the White Sewing Machine Company (which also manufactured sewing machines under its own brand) and sold by Sears only in 1942. Which means my mother bought it when she was single; she and my father didn't get married until 1947.

These machines were all steel, and they were workhorses. I found this video where a guy demonstrates a restored one. He got it to sew through four layers of khaki, and even two layers of garment leather. Mom never would have tried sewing leather on this machine, but I'm pretty sure she sewed vinyl upholstery material on it at least once. It doesn't do zigzag or any other fancy stitches, but it can make buttonholes with a massive contraption that you hook up in place of the presser foot.

It's in the original cabinet, and I had never realized how small that cabinet was because Mom always had the leaves folded out like this. The cabinet is only about 32 inches wide when closed. To close it up, you drop the sewing machine on its hinges and then fold the tabletop extensions in. It looks like a small desk, and I suppose you could use it as one if you didn't want your sewing machine on display all the time.

The machine has no foot pedal. Instead, there's a switch that you control with your knee. Another unusual thing about it is that the hand wheel -- which on this machine is the bulbous extension on the left -- turns the opposite way from most machines. So instead of pulling it toward you to start stitching, you push it away from you.

I have a lot of fond memories of this machine. My mother sewed most of her own clothes and mine, too, and I would often stand next to her while she worked. I don't think I learned how to sew on her machine -- I'm pretty sure I learned in home economics in junior high -- but I made my share of stuff on it before Mom bought me a sewing machine of my own. She continued to sew for herself as she got older, but she suffered from dementia in her later years and eventually gave everything up. After she died, I was the kid who sorted through all of her stuff, and I held it together pretty well until I saw cobwebs on this sewing machine. To me, that was the true measure of how far she had slipped away, even before her death. The machine would never have been still long enough to gather cobwebs in the old days.

Anyway, it's here now. I'm tempted to have someone restore it, even though I don't really have a place for it and I rarely sew anything anymore. I'll let you know what I decide to do.

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Three bits of news:

1. The second edition of  A Billion Gods and Goddesses is out! You can get a free copy at Smashwords with coupon code NA58R. The coupon expires Sunday, September 11th, so don't wait too long to use it.
2. I'm honored to have been featured on The Heroine's Journey today. The organizer, Peter de Kuster, has featured more than 125,000 professionals in his Hero's Journey and Heroine's Journey project to date.
3. Yesterday, I was live on Facebook! The opportunity to be the guinea pig for the Authors Live! group popped up midweek, so I didn't have a chance to blog about it until now. Here's the video, in case you missed it. (I hope the link works. Technology: It's here to help us...) Enjoy, and I'll see you next week.

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These moments of seamy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Happy "Seized" Monday! Happy Midsummer!

I am happy to announce that Seized is now available on Smashwords!  Following a successful run as a Kindle-only e-book, I uploaded the book to Smashwords.com and it's available there today.  The even better news is that with this coupon code -- QF73A -- you can get Seized in all of the formats Smashwords supports (which is, well, all of them) for 99 cents. 

The coupon will be good all week (expires 6/25/12).  Think of it as a Midsummer gift.  (The solstice is Wednesday at 6:08pm eastern time, or 11:08pm UTC.)  Or a Midwinter gift, I guess, if you're in the southern hemisphere.

I'm also in the process of publishing a separate NOOK edition of Seized.  It should be available in a day or two, and I promise to tweet as soon as it's for sale in the NOOK Store.  However, you won't be able to use the Smashwords coupon at the NOOK Store, and Smashwords does offer the book in .epub format, which you can then sideload to your NOOK.  Sideloading is not hard (happy to advise -- just post a comment), but it's not the most seamless process in the world.  So you may want to wait for the NOOK edition.  Up to you.

In other Pipe Woman Chronicles-related news, editing on Fissured is progressing nicely.  And I spent part of the weekend drafting a rough outline for the third book, which looks like it will be titled Tapped.  No publication date yet for that one, but I expect it will be next spring.

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I had a rant all ready for this week's post, but time got away from me yesterday.  I spent the afternoon on a project that will likely fuel my knitting obsession -- I attended a class in which we made dress forms for ourselves out of t-shirts and duct tape, then stuffed the result with newspaper.  There's now a mini-me (well, in my case it's a maxi-me) sitting on my living room floor.  Not only will it allow for better fitting of my knitted garments, but I expect to get a fair amount of use out of it for blocking (i.e., wetting and then shaping to fit) my finished projects.

I may yet post that rant this week.  Watch this space...

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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.

Greetings, OMG more yarn, and pet peeves.

Kind of a hodgepodge this week. 

First, thanks and welcome to the nearly 700 people who downloaded Seized during last weekend's Beltane Blowout.  I gave away a few copies of "Lulie" as well.  Hope you enjoy them! 

Second, I've been off the grid for pretty much the whole weekend.  I spent Friday night and all day yesterday knitting, mainly to finish a top for my daughter so that I could start on one for me.  :)  Then today, I went with a friend to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.  It's the first time I've ever been to this festival and it was pretty much mind-blowing.  Who knew there were so many yarn shops and yarn makers out there?  It takes place at a county fairgrounds.  The shops filled stalls in the Main Exhibition Hall and four or five other buildings, and were also set up in tents for several more blocks.  Needless to say, we did a lot of walking, and I am pretty well tuckered out.

I didn't fully realize how tired I was until I cast on for a sweater for myself tonight, managed to twist the work when I joined it to knit in the round, and didn't realize I'd done it until I had almost finished the seventh round of knitting.  If I'd kept going, I would have had a lovely Moebius strip, but the sweater would have been quite impractical to wear.  So I've ripped it all out and have promised myself that I will try again once I've gotten some sleep.

I also got another knitting book while I was at the festival.  Looking over it while eating dinner tonight, I was reminded of one of my pet peeves.  Granted, English is a living language, usage changes, and all that good stuff.  But where was I when we did away with the word "knitted"?  Because at some point when I wasn't looking, people dropped the "-ed".  Knitters are no longer making "knitted fabric," we make "knit fabric."  "She had knitted" has turned into "She had knit."  It's crazy-making, I tell you.

In the same vein, why is Microsoft Word insistent that I conjoin the words "any more"?  And the words "some time" too.  Okay, "sometime" is a legitimate word, if you're talking about, say, a guy who occasionally drives racing cars ("a sometime race car driver").  But there are also circumstances in which "some time" ought to be two words -- for instance, in the phrase, "some time later."  "Sometime" means "occasionally"; "some time" means "some vague or uncertain amount of time". 

But "anymore"?  That just looks wrong to me.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Microsoft Word would not accept "awhile" as a legitimate word until added it to the dictionary.  That's despite the fact that "awhile" has been in common usage for at least a thousand years.

Anybody else got any other examples?  Or an explanation for why we haven't knitted in awhile?

Have a good week!

Summer is icumen in.

GUENEVERE:
Tra la! It's May!
The lusty month of May!
That lovely month when ev'ryone goes
Blissfully astray.
Tra la! It's here!
That shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts
Merrily appear!
It's May! It's May!
That gorgeous holiday
When ev'ry maiden prays that her lad
Will be a cad!
It's mad! It's gay!
A libelous display!
Those dreary vows that ev'ryone takes,
Ev'ryone breaks.
Ev'ryone makes divine mistakes
The lusty month of May!

-- from the musical "Camelot"

I know y'all are going to think that I'm rushing the seasons here, but honest to goodness, the ancient folks in the British Isles considered May 1st -- also known as Beltane -- to be the first day of summer.  (That's why the summer solstice is also known as Midsummer's Day -- it's halfway between Beltane and Lughnasa, the first harvest, which is August 1st or 2nd.)

There are many charming customs associated with Beltane -- among them, dancing around a Maypole, burning a wicker man (with people inside, if Julius Caesar is to be believed) to symbolize the end of winter, weaving flower garlands, driving the livestock between two bonfires before taking them out to summer pastures, washing one's face with the dew (it's supposed to make you beautiful), and/or sneaking off with a special someone for some afternoon delight.

I can't help you with most of those, sorry.  But I did find directions here for how to make your own tabletop Maypole.  I modified the directions a little bit for mine because I am useless with a glue gun: I used a thinner dowel and drilled a hole in the wooden base, then used carpenter's glue to set the dowel in the hole. Then I used a nail to anchor the ribbons to the top of the pole, and put a candle ring at the base.

One other thing I can help you with is some free summer reading.  As I posted a couple of days ago, Seized and "Lulie" are both free at Amazon starting today and through Tuesday.  Enjoy, and happy Beltane.

Knitting, or: my other creative outlet.

I'm letting the NaNo novel "ripen" (take that how you will!) for a few weeks before plunging into the editing process.  The less fresh any stupidities are in my mind, the thinking goes, the easier it will be to spot them.  In the meantime, I'm knitting.

The Washington Post ran an op-ed piece last weekend about twentysomethings taking up crafts, including knitting, that their mothers and grandmothers wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole.  The writer came up with various reasons for it, feminism chief among them.  I don't know which feminists she's been talking to, but this feminist has been crafting since she was a kid.  I was doing embroidery before I was ten, sewing and crewelwork in my teens, needlepoint in my twenties.  In short, I was crafting before crafting was cool.

I also doubt that the author has stepped away from her jam-making to visit a local yarn shop, or she would have noticed that it's not just twentysomethings who are picking up needles.  I didn't learn to knit 'til I was in my forties, and I'm certainly not the only knitter coming late to the game.  I think one reason middle-aged women are getting into it, or getting back into it, is that nicer yarns are more readily available.  There are only so many things you can make with the cheap acrylic worsted in brassy colors at the chain crafts stores.  But these days, you can walk into an independently-owned yarn shop (or find one on teh intarwebz) and oooh and aaah over handpainted and subtly shaded yarns in colors that don't look like they came from your kid's crayon box.  And older knitters have the cash to pay the premium prices for these yarns.

I have my own theory about why these homey crafts are becoming popular again.  A lot of us spend our working lives in an office, pushing (virtual) paper or answering phones.  You don't create much of anything tangible at a job like that.  I suppose you could tally up the number of calls you answered or e-mails you sent, but it's not like you can take them home and hang them on the wall.  Radio news is even more ephemeral -- you write a script, you read it on the air, and poof!  It's gone forever.  You can save scripts or tapes, sure, but who would be interested in them next week or next year?  By contrast, crafts allow you to make something to hang onto.  The hat I made in a day last weekend will still keep my head warm several years from now.  Talk about longevity.

The author of the article got at least one thing right:  women enjoy doing crafts today because we don't have to.  When I was teaching myself colorwork, I did a little reading about the women who invented Fair Isle sweaters.  They were churning out a sweater a week, using skinny yarns in intricate patterns, to supplement their household income.  A sweater a week!  I can't imagine they were having much fun.  And I would bet you money that they never picked up the needles for relaxation.


Speaking of money, I have a friend who's been after me to set up an Etsy site for my knitting.  I think I've finally convinced her it wouldn't be worth it.  Once you add up the cost of the yarn and something approaching a reasonable hourly rate for the labor, the item would be so expensive that nobody would buy it.  In addition, I suspect I would end up like those Fair Isle women, having all the joy sucked out of the craft in order to make a quota.

I have noticed something else about my own knitting: when I wasn't writing regularly, my knitting projects were much more creative.  I have been known to sit down with graph paper, yarn and needles, and devise my own colorwork pattern.  It's been quite awhile since I've done that; in fact, lately I've been downloading a lot of ready-made patterns.  It's not that invent-your-own-design knitting isn't fun for me any more -- I think it's just that lately I'm flexing my creative muscles in other ways.

And when it comes to writing and publishing e-books, the materials costs are negligible, storage space is minimal, and the inventory is inexhaustible.  Sounds, to me, like a much better return on my investment.