happy friday

Last night, we had a friend over for dinner for an assortment of soups, and then sat down at the dining room table for several hours of beeswax manipulation.

This was good colorful fun, and the kids created a produce market, inspired by the image on the box of wax. This is an activity that takes some time, and is more satisfying when the weather's warm, because the wax is more pliable. The wax needs the warmth of your hands to make it pliable, and that can be challenging when it's cold outside, no matter what the furnace and the thermostat say. For some reason, though, I never think to do it in the summer. It's a great thing for cooped-up winter evenings.


Bev is making an abstract, as is Little One. Little considers the wax to be exclusively his own, and was very generous to allow all of us to play with it.

Big One and Joe got interested in making their stuff as realistic as possible, and the results are here. This is a bowl full of carrots, a basket of lemons, and a large yellow thing that I believe is a tangelo. Somewhere there is a bowl of blueberries as well.

Oh yes, I left all of this out on the table last night, thinking that the kids would want to get right into it this morning. I'm always trying to think of ways to get them out of their warm sleepy beds and their rooms full of books. Not easy. I thought the wax would do it.

But this morning, instead of continuing to construct their produce market and their abstract scupltures, they were playing Library.

Big one has set up a library in his room, with sections by genre, and a front desk where he uses his old manual typewriter to make out a list of books you've checked out.

So this is where I found them this morning. They've started to get into a habit of getting dressed in the morning, without being asked, and what mother could possibly find anything amiss in the sight of an older son reading to a younger son?
Not me, anyway... I was happily downstairs, playing my own version of Library, reading this book, which is completely fabulous, by the way. I love Margaret Atwood, and this is an unusual book for her. They are miniatures, according to the fragment of the review from the Toronto Globe and Mail on the back of the book, and they are stunning. Hilarious, absurd, sarcastic, cynical. And the writing, of course, is breathtaking.

wiggin

This editorial has me wigging out, on a number of fronts. In particular, this one sentence:

"Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.

Professionally, this doesn't seem to apply to me in any way. Because my profession is overwhelmingly female-dominated, my gender has certainly not restricted me. For now, let's leave aside questions of whether I would get hired by a school that was really hoping to increase male role models in an elementary school. Practically speaking, there are enough teaching jobs to go around for all qualified candidates, male or female. And let's also leave aside the question of why I might choose to be an elementary teacher in the first place, rather than an IT professional or a rocket scientist.

Educationally, I was accepted into the college of my choice as well as the graduate program of my choice, and while in school, I perceived no restrictions on my work or progress that stemmed from my gender. Any problems I had with fellow students or professors along the way were certainly the result of my own work or lack of work, and I believe I was never discriminated against in any way. Likewise, in my family of origin as well as in my current nuclear family, I have been treated as one with full rights to all the goodies: intellectual, material, recreational, and so on.

Personally, however, it's a different story. Here we must pause and give this some serious thought. When I think about the things I am interested in doing, the projects I've pursued, the interests I've spent my time and money on, I have to say it looks like I'm choosing from the girl list. In other words, while I have not been limited by outer circumstances because of my gender, it looks very much like I've limited myself from within.

Here's what I've done for pay: taken care of other people's children, baked bread, answered phones and worked the front desk for a university museum, worked in marketing for a scholarly press, and taught elementary school.

Here's what I do for fun: knit, sew, bake, read fiction, write journal-like prose and a little poetry, do yoga, play music.

See what I mean? I'm choosing from the girl list.

Even if you include my athletic pursuits (it's so easy to forget about those in the middle of January) there's nothing there that really bucks the trend. It's all gender neutral at best. I like to camp, canoe, walk, bike, and swim.

Then I have to ask myself if that's really so terrible. Isn't it just as intellectually rigorous to figure out a complex sewing pattern as it is to figure out how to fix a toilet? More so, probably. It's not that hard to fix a toilet. I used to tinker with them, back before Joe and I got together. But now that there's a man in the house, I hardly ever rouse myself to investigate. Embarassing, but true.

And how else do you explain that this* is as easy for me as simply sitting down and figuring it out:

While this:
is a project that's been languishing for months, in spite of very helpful advice from online friends, and the exhortations of Dave, a real-life friend who has assured me that fixing this is as easy as pie.

I'd rather make a pie. Gloria Steinem would not be proud.

*This, by the way, in spite of my careful calculations and the dutiful use of an actual, smaller swatch, is a giant swatch. 280 stitches per round, and still the thing measures only 32". Back to the pattern books.

Alison's blanket

Remember the blanket from our very first post? It was called Elsie and Joe Get Things Done, and it's from April 06. I can't seem to link to it, so if you're interested, you'll have to go look. It's a blanket that I sewed together by machine from rectangles cut from felted sweaters. We got these sweaters for free, and some of them were pre-felted for us. My friend Alison took a liking to this blanket, and I agreed to make another one.

She and I have been trolling local Salvation Army stores for months now, looking for the right combination of colors. Sometimes we find the sweaters already felted, which is a good sign that they will felt well. Other times we've bought sweaters nobody else is likely to buy, because they have great gaping holes or stains.

And we have even bought perfectly good sweaters, with the sole intention of shrinking them and cutting them apart. We think we have almost enough now. Here is a rough mock-up of what the blanket might begin to look like. The sweaters are laid out on my lawn, to get an idea of how much contrast we have and how much we need.


We think we need more red, and a nice grassy green would be nice. Let me know if you have any old sweaters you'd like to donate to Alison's blanket.

The giant ball of yarn is getting smaller. This is a swatch:
I have officially run out of blue yarn for my mittens:
And no, I don't have anything that comes close to matching this yarn. I'm afraid the thumb is going to be either gray or green Lopi. You can see why this project has stalled out.