Try 'em on!

The More Big Girl Knits trunk show will be at Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor next Tuesday night at 7pm.
I'll be there too, signing books and talking about the Bs that obsess me.
Come play & try on some sweaters!!!!!

The reading meme

Thanks Steph, I needed a diversion today. I t seems like half the fiber world has chosen May 15th as a due date. Also day 7 of 9 of the Honey Man being out of town.
Beth and I decided we need a Sisterhood of the Traveling Husbands group on Ravelry.

Let's be diverted, shall we?

What we have here is the top 200 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (have it at home, might read it)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I managed to get a lit degree, and work in the book business for 20 years without reading the Russians or much Dickens. One of the best parts of doing this is recalling when I read them. The most vibrant of memories are the books read for classes, and especially, books read on obsessive binges (Atwood, Kundera, Morrison) authors that so hooked me that I had to read everything they wrote.

Toronto Book Launch

More partying, more cupcakes, Beer & Cider(!),an Irish band, Shannon!, Denny doing a jig.
Tracey, how are you in none of the pictures?
Yes, we were moist, thanks for asking!

More party pics!

Because you can't have too many party pics!
We're missing a picture of Rob & Matt - the hosts with the most.
Amy was here & we laughed and met amazing people in person. We played with old friends. We worked on Knitty, and other craziness.

My big girl went to the state gymnastics meet & came home with 2 medals - I cried. Then later I got food poisoning - note to self, just don't eat when traveling.
Tomorrow I hit the rails to Toronto for the next More Big Girl Knits party at Lettuce Knits. Special guests include Shannon Oakey, Denny and Dr. Steph with Guinness!

Woooooooooooooooooo!

The photo above photo by Mike Yoder shows 40,000 Jayhawk fans on Mass St in Lawrence.
I was there in spirit, and old enough to have been there the last time in 1988.

Happy Book Day!

Woo0hoo! Today is the official release day for More Big Girl Knits. Amy & I are doing a happy dance, we hope you'll join in!

Abby!

I spent 6 hours spinning 4 yarns on Saturday & it was fantastic.
It was all types of spinning I avoid - the chain ply, the long draw, the spinning from the fold because I'm not comfortable with them.

Abby made it all doable and gave history and stories. It was never not frustrating, but there's bliss (at least to me ) in that type of frustration.

I love learning new things, especially when it's not easy. Abby made me want to keep trying, and to me that's a key to a great teacher. Not just keep trying, but can't- wait- to- go- be- frustrated- at- my- wheel- until- I- get- it ,trying.

Thanks Abby you are a Rockstar!


Also, we were nasty. My whole end of the room was so moist the whole shop should have felted.
I laughed until my stomach hurt & may have said things that embarrassed my own self.

I am in love with Greg, and am convinced that Kat & I are soul sisters - she laughs even louder than me. Yes, Beth, you still make me moist.



Yes, I do still knit. It is all secret knitting, which sorta sucks because it's deadline knitting. But look at that fabric I'm making, it's yarn from the The Fibre Company, it is wonderful, sexy and tweedy. Now I must go have conversations with a calculator about armholes, then I can spin again.