BLANKET!

This post has been a very long time in the making. I've been trying very hard to keep mum about it for so long that now, I'm having trouble finding anything to say. So look at this:
Try a mouseover. It's fun.

The above is a blanket. It was made by the four women you see under it (with some help from Jeff, too).

On Saturday, we gave it to Tom and Elizabeth, as a much-delayed wedding gift.

They were surprised.

Which is, itself, surprising, as we've had to keep the project a secret for a whole year. Tom and Eliz got engaged last November, and shortly thereafter someone--I think it was Abigail--came up with the idea that we (Abigail, Melissa, Andrea, and I) should knit them a blanket. So we got together to choose a pattern (we picked "psychedelic squares") and order yarn from KnitPicks. It was tricky to choose colors from a web page, and scary to contemplate how "psychedelic squares" might go very, very wrong--but the hardest thing was being sneaky about it. On the day that we'd chosen for the prep work, Elizabeth called each of us and invited us over for dinner. She thought it strange that we should all have previously unmentioned plans, since, truth be told, at least some of us aren't the type to have our Saturday nights all booked up. So she and Tom ate dinner alone, and drank a whole bottle of wine, and later Elizabeth asked us whether we thought that was problematic--is getting drunk with one's fiancee the same as getting drunk alone? (No, Elizabeth.)

Fortunately the project didn't involve too much us all hanging out and lying to Eliz and Tom about it. Once we had our yarn and everyone could execute a decent ssk, we all went home to knit our 20 squares (we didn't quite reach that goal, and reduced the blanket dimensions in the end). It took months. My squares were knit in Maine and Chicago and on airplanes in between, and while talking to Jeff on the phone; I took 2 little balls of yarn and a pair of needles wherever there was a high likelihood of idle hands (and a low one of Tom or Elizabeth's presence). I got attached to my squares. They saw me--all of us--through our orals. I was sort of sad when they were done. My hands were lonely.

The squares were done sometime in the summer, and we managed to coordinate schedules enough to meet up at Melissa's one very hot day, to figure out how to fit them all together. Blondie helped.


Then we took them home again to stitch them into bigger squares. Then we stitched the big squares into one huge square. Then we had to add a backing--and we didn't know what to do. None of us can sew.

Enter Jeff and his sewing machine! Jeff saved the day. With much ironing, marking, and basting, he made a perfect 60 x 60 square of blue flannel, and sewed red piping around the edges. Piping is magical.

From there, we were only 2 Sundays away from completion. We hand-stitched the blanket onto the backing (hand-stitching being so much less complicated than machine sewing, which is best left to the experts). We ate cookies, as by then it was winter again and proper cookie-season.

We also learned something. You know that little strawberry that's attached to your tomato-shaped pincushion? Nonsensical, when you think about it. It sharpens needles! Who knew? Fortunately, Jeff must have been paying attention in Home Ec. He knew all about the needle sharpener, and it sure came in handy along those 240" of circumference.

Finally, we stitched lots of little pieces of yarn through the blanket and backing to keep it all in place.


The back looked like this:


But then we tied the yarn in knots and cut the ends to uniform size (the length of a Hershey's Miniature turned out to be the perfect measure), so now it looks much more demure.

And then we were done!

Errrr...

Here's where I can't think of anything to say. This has been such a big, long project. I got used to it, you know? I'm not saying I want to jump in and do it all over again (Elizabeth was smart, being the first of our crowd to get married--I don't think anyone else is getting one of these!). But I'm not sure how to let it go...

Well, at least there's all this Christmas stuff to deal with. Last year, during my annual Christmas-Eve sob-fest, Jeff made me promise not to attempt handmade presents this year. Which I did. But I won't lie: when I was packing my suitcase yesterday, I packed some yarn and needles. You know, in case I get bored?

Meanwhile, off to the outlets!

In which what looks evil really isn't (except the dishes)

The library has been taken over by undergraduates, who are supposed to be getting ready for their finals but are mostly just being annoying. Remember when the library was where you went to see all your friends and flirt with the people at the next table? Or maybe you weren't a big dork, like me. At any rate I am now well past all that and thoroughly annoyed at having my workspace hijacked by people who have no idea what working in the library means. So I look like this:


Yes, this annoyance is making me positively beige. It's also (as you can see) keeping me from doing any actual work. So I thought I'd do a blog post.

But what to post about? I can't go on about the annoying undergrads for ever, even if they are so very unwashed, and neglecting cell-phone etiquette completely, and wearing pajama pants for some reason . . . well, really I could go on for quite awhile, but nobody wants to read that. And going through my recent pictures I found that in most of them Jeff looks rather evil. Jeff, for those who don't know him, is not actually evil, nor is he evil-looking. I think he's quite nice looking, actually. But he does have blue eyes and is prone to the demon effect in flash photos. Also, it was just Thanksgiving, so there's some knife-wielding, and so on, making the non-evil pickings pretty slim. So I'll just have to go with the Evil Jeff thing. (Sorry, baby.)

We had a nice Thanksgiving at home--a small affair, with just 3 guests, so we got the fun of cooking without the difficulty of fitting a crowd in our little apartment. But we still did an excessive amount of planning, which involved index cards, and a 40-minute discussion of whether we would have butternut squash puree and some non-pureed form of sweet potatoes, or vice versa, and which recipes we would use for each. Jeff looks plausibly innocent in this phase of the operation.


But before long, out came the turkey--and out came the knife!


Did everyone see the NYT article on carving the turkey? There's even a video. It's about how if it weren't for Norman Rockwell no one would do such a silly thing as try to carve a turkey at the table (which I've never seen anyone do anyway), but would use a "butcher's method" to carve the bird efficiently behind the scenes. As shown above, but more comprehensively in the video.

I don't have much to show, photographically speaking, for Thanksgiving Day. Here's a little during:



And some after:




Jeff boiled down the carcass for a long, long time, and then made enough turkey soup to feed a crowd. Which was fortunate, as we had a brief series of dinner visitors in the next couple of days. Our friend Jake had an unexpected layover in Chicago, so he got to eat some of it. Then, the next day, we all to the top of the Sears Tower. Going to the top of tall buildings seems to be what we do when our friends have layovers in Chicago. When Katherine was here, we went to the top of the Hancock Building and I took a picture of the Sears Tower. So, from the Sears Tower:

It's sort of like taking a picture of someone taking a picture of you, in some complicated way.

Here, again, Jeff doesn't come off well in the photos.



I'm sure he intended neither to backhand Jake nor to plan a villainous takeover of the city, but it sure looks like it, doesn't it?

Maybe the upcoming holiday will yield better photos, and better things to talk about, and fewer dishes. One can dream.