Sneaky Nasty Yarn Porn

Yesterday was a glorious day. The sun was shining. Wifey was working. Little Man was dropped off at daycare at an obscenely early hour. And the Mafia drove west along lovely small highways, crossed ancient bridges, and skillfully avoided end-of-the-month entrapment by the State Police.

I arrived in Noho early, so I swung by Webs. Webs was not part of the original plan. Stop that - I'm not lying. I mean, I owe the electric company and the gas company and the phone company and and and. But what is a trip to Noho without a trip to Webs? Admit it, you'd do the same. And if faced with $12/pd Highland Tweed in a stunning vibrant blue, wouldn't you grab 4 pounds? Big curvy girls need more wool, and two pounds won't be enough for a whole sweater, and since it only comes in 2 lb cones... (cell for scale)


Yeah ... so what if you found entire bags of Rowanspun 4 ply in an amazing emerald? Wouldn't you buy a whole bag?


Yeah ... and if you found sloppy mangled balls of Jo Sharp DK Wool in Brocade, the exact color that you bought every available ball on sale in Philly to make a Pearl Buck Swing Jacket only to realize that you don't have enough, spend the next month hunting the internet and LYSs high and low, and come up empty handed. You'd buy the four remaining balls even if they were missing ball bands, had ends tangled and knotted together and you weren't 100% sure it was the same color, right? And then you'd buy four balls of a beautiful cream color just in case you needed a contrast color when you change to another pattern because you don't have an entire sweaters worth of Brocade, right?


Would you then spend the next few hours stressing about how to get the HUGE Webs bag past the Wifey? Would you hide the bag in the trunk? Would you accidentally leave it in the trunk when Wifey takes the car out to do errands? Would you hide under the bed when she comes home, walks through the door and says "so ... you wanna tell me what you bought at Webs?"

Fearing for your life and dodging flying tea cups (not really, but isn't that a fun image?), would you strike a bargain involving relinquishing the remaining balance of an Amazon gift card, cleaning the house while Wifey sits in front of the TV, and serving gallons of hot tea and piles of warm cookies. Me? Noooo ... I wouldn't lower myself to such degrading agreements.

I've learned that Wifey is more observant than I give her credit for. Even if I snuck the bag into the house, she claims she would've noticed the extra 4 (!) pounds of coned wool. Apparently she's paying more attention to my stash acquisition than I thought. Shit. shit. shit. No more sneaky Mafia. As of today, an entire day of skulking around the house with my wooly tail tucked between my legs, I'm officially on a yarn diet.


After my yarn binge, I met the lovely MamaCate for lunch and a stroll around her leafy women's college campus. With the addition of bustled skirts, leather bound notebooks, and linked arms, we could've skipped back a century. Speaking of linked arms, she greeted me with a hug. See here - I've only met Ms. Mama once before, and I usually reserve hugging for those I'm sleeping with, those I've slept with, and those I want to sleep with. But apparently these blogs make fast friends of virtual strangers, 'cuz I dove straight into the hug without thinking anything of it. It only crossed my mind while driving back across the state later in the afternoon -- "wait a second ... there was hugging." We've clearly reached a new level of friendship. We hug. Cool.

Cate was wearing her lovely rustic handspun and handknit Kepler. Wow. Now I have some serious Kepler envy. We talked work, careers, knitting, socks, dykes, politics, kids, blogging, privacy, architecture, and aging. I even had a chance to call her an older lesbian, and she didn't smack me. Being only 5 years younger, with my grey hairs emerging fast, any comments about aging are entirely tongue in cheek. [bad Mafia, no talk of tongues among the dykey ones...those minds go wandering]

Here is one final image of a beautiful day. Little Man is newly obsessed with the digital camera, which he insists on calling "cheese" instead of "camera". He's been taking lots of close up pictures of his pinky finger, but occasionally he snaps an interesting one. Here's Little Man's view of the world/me: