Fiber Friday/Monday: Wedding Shawl

After much delay, I bring you Fiber Friday on Monday!

I'm getting married in December, and as soon as Logan proposed, I knew I had to make something for the wedding. After a lot of pattern perusal and talks with my knitting friend, I decided on Cheryl Oberle's "Sampler Shawl." If you're on Ravelry, follow this link: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sampler-shawl.

I decided to knit the shawl in laceweight, so it would be extra delicate and fancy. The wedding colors are black, white, and red, and this skein of Colourmart cashmere/silk in Vina was perfect.

The colorway is more brick and less tomato in person, if that makes any sense.

The yarn is a dream to work with, and has made my first delve into lace a treat. I'm halfway through the third of five different lace panels, and it's finally starting to look more like a shawl and less like a pile of tangles.

I've made lots of mistakes, but that's ok. If I wanted something perfect, I would have gone out and bought something, rather than taking all the time to make it myself. I can hardly wait to block it to unleash it's full beauty, but it's a BIG shawl (400 stitches per row, lots of rows) and that won't be for a while!

Oh well, it's pretty just the same.

Sunday Salivation: Tofu Lo Mein

Logan and I decided that we would turn our apartment into a healthy eating zone, so we've been trying a lot of new recipes lately. Our favorite so far is "Fast and Easy Tofu Lo Mein" from allrecipes.com. (http://allrecipes.com/recipe/fast-and-easy-tofu-lo-mein/detail.aspx)

We like it because it really is fast and easy. The whole process takes about 20 minutes, and it's the best kind of cooking -- just dump already cooked ingredients together and mix. The first time I made it, the whole thing seemed a little too good to be true. All I had to do was make some ramen and fry some tofu?

The end result was beautiful.

And it tasted just as good as it looked. What's even better? The reheated leftovers.

Fiber Friday Postponed

The first Fiber Friday is officially postponed. Pictures of yarn coming soon(ish).

I lost my SD card reader AND camera charger cord during my recent move. If I can't find them by Sunday, I'll go buy a replacement for each.

I am the best blogger ever.

Lolita

Sometimes, I feel like a bad English major. I read far more genre novels than "literary" ones, and my knowledge of classics is, frankly, lacking. Usually, this doesn't bother me very much, but I recently became vice president of my school's Sigma Tau Delta chapter, which means I'm going to be hanging out with lit majors a lot more, and I would like to be able to hold my own in discussions of classics.

I started with Lolita. Honestly, I don't even know if Lolita is considered a classic or not, but I hear it referenced a lot, happened upon it in the library, and decided to go for it.

Usually, when I've finished a book, I have a pretty strong opinion of it and can back that opinion up with specific passages. But Lolita has me torn in a way most books simply don't. I'm not sure if I liked it or not, but I don't think I'm supposed to be sure if I liked it or not.

On the one hand, I enjoyed Nabokov's writing style. On the other hand, the subject was disturbing.

For those of you who don't know, Lolita is about Humbert Humbert (a pseudonym) who is attracted to "nymphets" -- young girls between the ages of 9 and 14. He falls for one nymphet in particular named Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita. The novel is structured like a memoir, and serves as Humbert's attempt to confess to his relationship with Lolita and make peace with himself and with her.

What makes the novel so disturbing isn't the sexual content between a young girl and a man old enough to be her father, but the way the reader begins to sympathize and understand Humbert. I wanted to hate Humbert for what he did to Lolita, how he broke her childhood and obviously traumatized her, but I couldn't. His rationalizations made too much twisted sense. I could tell that he really didn't understand how wrong he was, and that gets into some big moral questions, such as, if he really believes he's in the right, is he? And of course the biggest question -- what makes me think I have the authority to say what's right and what's wrong?

Lolita made me feel things that I didn't want to feel, took me down a dark part of myself that could sympathize with an unlikable hero, and that bothers me. I can never un-see that corner of myself, and that makes me kind of hate the book. But I also think it's important to read literature like this because it makes us uncomfortable. It's the only way we'll ever learn.

So, read Lolita at your own risk.

Blog Overhaul (For Real This Time)

I intended this blog to be a craft blog, but (as you can see if you look at the archives) I'm a slow crafter. Lately, I've been taking on really big projects where the change is so tiny it's not worth posting about with any sort of regularity, and that has caused the blog to fizzle out and die.

Well, now I'm moving away from craft blogging, sort of. There will still be crafts featured, but along with two of my other loves: language and food. Here's the plan.

We'll have "Wordy Wednesdays," during which I'll talk about whatever I'm reading at the moment, what my favorite authors are up to, or whatever else happened that week in the realm of words.

"Fiber Fridays" will feature my yarn work. Maybe the weekly posts on progress will drive me to knit/crochet faster!

"Salivation Sundays" will be all about delicious food.

Be on the lookout for the first Wordy Wednesday tomorrow, which will feature talk about a "classic" and sex!

The F-Word

Sometimes, people ask me why I am a feminist. It's usually not as straightforward a question as that, but they're asking it. They'll ask me things like, "Isn't that over?" and "Doesn't the world have bigger problems?" They aren't questions I hear often, because most people who don't understand my choice don't bother to ask about it at all, they just roll their eyes or cock their heads and change the subject.

Not that everyone is like that. Don't read me wrong. I know lots of people who identify with feminism, totally get it, and think it's great. I know even more people who get behind feminism's ideals, but don't want to be called "the f-word." Feminism has gotten a bad rap, and I think that's what confuses the people who ask me about it.

But it's not confusing. I proudly identify as a feminist because it gives me a way to approach bettering the world that I can wrap my mind around. Simple as that. We live in a pretty amazing world, but it has its fair share of problems that need to be tackled, and no one can handle tackling all of them.

Feminism deals with problems I understand and can think of ways to change. I don't know what can be done about the damage we've dealt our ozone, nor do I know what it would take to help cure diseases, nor what steps we need to take to bring infrastructure to undeveloped countries that need clean water. To help with these issues, I donate my money to charities full of people who do know what needs to be done.

But I know what it takes to start changing the way we view gender. I know how to talk to others and show them where sexism still lives in our culture. Feminism also serves as the foundation for how I view equality. It's a movement that teaches us to view people as complex beings and see through things like sex, gender, race, social status, and all those other things we tend to use to bring each other down.

Feminism challenges me to keep a vigilant eye on myself to make sure I see past my own assumptions about people and overcome my own shortcomings to be a better, more accepting person. I can only hope that everyone finds a movement they identify with that helps them do the same.

Unicorn Hair

     Today I went to the yarn store and, as usual, wanted to buy everything. I don't know what comes over me in there. Something about being surrounded by so much of what I love makes me a little high. It always starts with store's picks all lined up in the front of the store, which lead me straight into the worsted weight section, then to the fingering weight yarns. By time I've made it to the "fun" fibers, I've gotten so loopy off of everything else that I even considered buying eyelash yarn.

     For those of you who don't knit, eyelash yarn is that fuzzy stuff that usually comes in weird colors. You've seen it, and you've probably wanted a scarf made out of it. It feels great, and back when I was a young, naive knitter I made the mistake of trying to make myself a scarf out of it. It's the worst fiber available to man. It tangles in on itself, you can't see your stitches well enough to work with ease, and cats tear what little work you have managed to get through apart in even less time than a normal project.

     But today, while under the influence of way too much fiber in too little time, I seriously contemplated buying a small skein of pink, blue, and purple eyelash yarn. I looked at Logan, who's my voice of reason when I go to the yarn store, and told him I wanted it because it reminded me of unicorn hair. 

     Yes. Unicorn hair. I obviously wasn't thinking straight.

     Logan looked back at me and didn't say a word. Instead, he just tilted his head a little and raised an eyebrow, his silent way of telling me that I'm being a little insane. Logan doesn't break this look out often, so it snapped me out of my blissed-out state. He never gives me that look in the yarn store, because even though he may think spending money on yarn instead of games is crazy, he knows I love it, and he respects that choice.
     But today I got the look, and I was so grateful that he threw it at me. It saved me from the abomination I held in my hand, and got me to buy a lovely sock yarn from Cascade Yarns instead. I plan on making these socks for Logan after I finish up the wedding shawl: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/whippersnapper
     It'll be a while before that happens, but I like to have my next project in mind while I finish whatever I'm working on for some reason. That, and I just needed to buy some yarn because I'm down to just three balls in my stash, and that's just wrong. The green he picked will be lovely to just look at for a while before I get started on the socks themselves.