Catching up on crochet: September to December

Working from home means I crochet a lot. Since we’ve been back in Ann Arbor, I’ve been as ambitious as time (and my carpal tunnels) has allowed. First on the list was this temair throw pattern. Normally, afghans look too stuffy or 1970s for me to consider spending 30+ hours on, but this one immediately appealed to me. It was a little tedious to piece it together, but I was more satisfied than not with the result. Not quite what the pattern picture promised, but close.

I asked my mom to pick some colors for a Christmas present, and she decided on green and cream. I did a reprisal of the granny stripe blanket.

This little pillow actually began in San Diego over the summer, but I couldn’t stuff it until we got back to Ann Arbor, because I had a whole unopened bag of stuffing waiting for me in our storage unit. No pattern, just single crochet.

Little Christmas presents have been coming together as well. Some fingerless gloves for one deserving recipient, and a granny square hat for someone who will look very cute in it, I’m sure.

I came across this bunch of flowers and searched in vain to locate a pattern that would produce something similar. I did my best to string together a line of popcorn stitches, but the effect wasn’t quite the same. Oh well. Close enough.

“I regard a campaign as a great interruption to the rational consideration of public questions.”

“What difference does it make that you think a thing as a Republican, if it is wrong? What difference does it make if you think a thing as a Democrat, if it is not true? Your being a Republican or a Democrat does not make it true. And what difference does a party make, or a party’s interest make as compared with the interests of the nation itself? . . . 

“I regard a campaign as a great interruption to the rational consideration of public questions.”

—Woodrow Wilson, The New York Times, October 19, 1916

I’ve been arguing with my mother a lot about politics lately (hi, Mom!). And by arguing, I mean swapping polemical internet articles back and forth. I suppose you could say I leaned Republican from the age of 8, when I cast my vote for Bob Dole in the elementary school mock election (I waffled between Dole and Clinton because one of my parents was voting for each, though I don’t remember the distribution). And then I went to a the-Republican-Party-is God’s-party church during my formative years, and then I read the Wall Street Journal every day right after I finished my daily Bible chapter. And then I went to college, and I realized it wasn’t serendipitous that there was a national political party that just happened to align with all of my views.

For whatever reason, elections have been for me what large national sporting events are, I imagine, for other people. I was never quite the ideal partisan (despite my waxing and waning allegiances, I was and am registered as independent), but I did and still do love following the coverage and dissecting the narratives. I suppose I shouldn’t look at “the future of our country” as a colossal game, but I’m privileged and ensconced, and I do. Part of me does, anyway. Maybe that’s the if-you-don’t-laugh-you’ll-cry part of me, or the part of me that retreats when large and sad things are happening, when that one girl breaks down in the middle of worship service at summer camp and all of the other girls surround her with hugs and comfort, when the country is stunned and launched into mourning by a national tragedy and I’m mortified by my lack of response.

I can blame that part of me on temperament, but it’s more fun to blame it on culture. The most damaging aspect of my adolescent Christianity-Republican Party hybrid was the utter callousness it permitted. The Republican Party callousness, of course, is the bootstraps/personal responsibility narrative: that everyone is responsible for him/herself;  that anyone can be prosperous with a strong work ethic; that poor people deserve their poverty for their own moral failings; that a government with vast resources is not responsible for the well-being of its citizens; that the rich should be rewarded for their position, for it indicates their superior character and judgment; that war is necessary and noble, despite how many people die needlessly; that the free market leads to good for all, despite the mechanism of greed that perpetuates it; that structural economic adjustments that impoverish people are just part of life. The Christianity callousness was linked to these ideals, but it offered on its own a strange logic that let me answer a guy, who asked me whether I believed all of the people who never hear the gospel in the version our church dictated it were going straight to hell, with an unequivocal “Yes.” (Of course, I realized the callousness at the time, but I thought doctrinal purity meant I could answer no other way, and I secretly hoped the harshness of my response would make this particular guy stop liking me. He was weird.)

One of my most gratifying college experiences was the gradual realization that I could be a pacifist. Not only that, I could stop believing that poor people were dirty and deserving. I could stop believing that the death penalty was the best way to scare people into not killing other people. I could stop believing that everyone should have a gun, and the more guns, the less violence. I could stop believing that people who flee the structural oppression, poverty, and violence of their home countries should be summarily shipped back there even though they’d rather live in relative squalor here. I could stop believing that people who wanted health care could just get a job that offered them health care. I could stop believing that there was such a thing as a free market, and that it worked in everyone’s favor. I was allowed to be compassionate, because there were intelligent and Christian people who used a logic that the Republican Party didn’t.

Honestly, the freedom to be compassionate fundamentally changed me. You can ask Daniel. I actually tear up occasionally when I see something upsetting. I’m not a Democrat Party hack. Along with my realization of the contradictions of the modern conservative position came arguments that perhaps there are issues with the entire political structure down to its foundation. I am persuaded by those arguments. But I believe in better and worse, and while I don’t think either candidate in the present election would do much of anything to change politics as usual if elected, I do think perception makes a difference.

I’m doing a lot of projecting here. But just like with Sarah Palin in 2008, I like Barack and Michelle because I see myself in them. I see myself in their reserved, knowing smiles, in their intellectual sadness when basic ideals like health care and fair tax rates are shredded to pieces by the public. I can imagine a more civically minded Daniel and a more hard-edged me meeting as young lawyers. I can imagine that hard-edged me recognizing something in Daniel that meant we needed to pursue political office. I can imagine that hard-edged me recognizing that while the country might not be ready for a black woman, it might countenance a black man. And, just like with Sarah Palin, I might be foisting an idealized version of myself onto carefully crafted political personas that don’t exist. But the perception domestically that we are a country that doesn’t just reward rich white men for being rich and white, and the perception abroad that a man who avoids blustery jingoism and whose last name is one letter off from the first name of the terrorist his administration killed is the man we want in office, is a good perception.

I don’t know if the system is so flawed that it’s nearly impossible to get good things done. I don’t know if we should even try; I haven’t figured out yet whether my eschatology dictates a book-of-Revelation, pessimistic, imminent return disengagement, or a book-of-Daniel brand of optimistic, involved, intentional engagement, or even some other option I haven’t conceptualized, let alone considered. I should really sit down and hammer those out. But I do know that it is good for people to have health care. It is good to consider the poor as people to be helped. It is good to avoid killing people. And it is good for me to have the intellectual space to hold these beliefs.

Things I made this summer.

This has nothing to do with Ann Arbor, but I need to link my pins somewhere, don’t I? I crocheted a little this summer in between hanging out with everyone we hadn’t seen for nine months and working on the living room floor in our apartment in San Diego because why would we scrounge around for a table and chairs if we’re only living there for four months? Now, of course, I’m addicted to working on the floor and probably spend 80 percent of my workday sprawled out next to a perfectly functional futon, desk, and kitchen table (we have a kitchen table! That may or may not get its own blog post in the near future).

For my mom’s birthday, I decided she would be forced into accepting one of my handmade treasures. I thought a beach tote would be appropriate, as my parents are intent on becoming OC people, which is fine by me, because I love a good beach city as much as the next person, but I will mourn the transition out of our dear Inland Empire home of 12 years if and when it happens (I don’t care how impoverished the Valley is becoming; there’s nothing like those mountains, and our little tract home is absolutely adorable without four teenagers living in it).

Of course, I had yarn left over, and Daniel and I had a lot of “Mad Men,” “Community,” and “Suits” to watch (and by a lot, I mean the all of the seasons of all of those shows. And we still hung out with people, I swear). So I attempted this insane-looking potholder pattern. Mom got that one, too. It didn’t come out exactly like it should have, but it’s still interesting to look at. Note also my little plants in the background; I kept basil, lavender, and a couple of snapdragons alive all summer. Now we live half-underground and have no natural sunlight (it’s not quite as bad as it sounds), so an Ann Arbor herb garden may not be so feasible.

And there was yet more yarn, so another potholder needed to be made. It took me about three times of practically crocheting the entire thing to figure this one out, but I did it, by golly.

And the last few scraps went into some African flower coasters. Happily, I realized, they are reasonable facsimiles of the U of M maize and blue, so they are exceedingly appropriate in our Ann Arbor apartment. I am so good at this grad school wife thing.

Things I made this month.

At some point in January, it got so cold, and the evenings got so long, that I decided I had the fortitude to crochet an entire blanket. I had come across a simple pattern that didn’t look too stuffy or ugly, as crochet is often wont to do, and I traipsed down to Michael's to select my yarns. I don’t do gauging or yarn matching, so I got what I thought was a lot of skeins and set to work. A couple of rows in, I realized the extra thickness of my chosen yarn probably made it a lot longer than the pattern intended, and that I was going to be in for a long ride. My first set of skeins got me to what I quickly realized was going to have to be only the halfway point if anyone was ever actually going to use what was at that point a giant yarn strip.

So I traveled to Michael’s once more to stock up on the store brand I had selected, which cannot be purchased online from anyone, least of all Michael’s. Two of my colors were still there, but lemongrass, alas, was no more. The store couldn't order it for me, either. I took inventory of my remaining choices, and I decided pumpkin would be the least heinous replacement. Whether that is the case is up to the viewer, I suppose. For my part, the finished project is a little more 1970s than I would have liked, but really, how could chartreuse and orange ever look like anything else?

Things I made this week.

Daniel spent 10 and a half hours working on a law journal at school on Sunday. I made him a quilled valentine.

On Monday, I was throwing away a paper towel tube, when it occurred to me to google “paper towel tube art.” Lo and behold, the interwebs had come up with a quick and easy way to repurpose paper towel tubes. So I did.

Pinterest strikes again. I was never a cutesy and sentimental person until I met Daniel, but I have a long history of word art (cf. the stenciled quotations of canonical authors on the walls of my adolescent bedroom). So Daniel’s second Valentine’s Day gift was a framed print on vellum of the song from our first dance.

Valentine's [Birth]day.

My Valentine’s Day got off to a spectacular start. I answered the door midmorning, in my yoga pants and tank top in our toasty old radiator-filled apartment as usual, and a delivery guy stood outside, snow swirling around him, with a vision of the tropics in his hands. My parents had sent me my favorite flowers, and they were almost too good to be true.

There’s nothing like picture-perfect orchids next to our snow-filled neighborhood. To top it off, Grandma Barr sent us a box of Malley’s Chocolates (mixed nuts—so delicious!). It was already one of the best Valentine’s Days ever.

I picked Daniel up after he got out of class, and we headed to quaint Kerrytown for tea for two at the TeaHaus. I had been wanting to do this for ages, and it was better than I expected. We were presented with savory and sweet delicacies, as well as all of the tea we could drink. Everything was delicious.

I can’t even remember everything we tried. There was brie and fig, black pepper salami, egg salad, cucumber sandwiches, cherry chocolate scones, clotted cream and lemon curd, strawberry and lemon macarons, and crepes filled with strawberries and whipped cream. It was like all of the best things in Europe in a two-hour tasting.

I think we had six pots of tea between us: vanilla, mascarpone, chile chocolate, Indian chai, ginger orange, and bossa nova hazelnut.

 After we waddled out of the tea shop, we spent a couple of minutes in a dusty bookshop before commencing part II of the evening. Daniel had, adorably, pilfered my Pinterest crafting wishlist and picked up some supplies. We had a couple more items to get, and as we drove by the store, we noticed a thrift shop next door was open. We decided we’d spend a few minutes browsing. As we were walking inside, a lady leaving with a shopping cart stuffed to bursting asked us if we had a coupon. We didn’t, we said, so she handed us one for 50 percent off our entire purchase. In a thrift shop, that is better than gold. Suffice it to say we made out like bandits. Daniel found two pairs of shoes that number one, fit him, and number two, looked awesome. Like, $100 dress shoes awesome.

My crowning achievement was a navy blue party dress with silver detailing. I’ll probably never wear it, but who could resist?

Then we still had presents. I got Daniel a how-to book on massage, with the promise that I am going to learn how to give massages as well as he can. We’ll see. I also made him a little framed print of the lyrics to our wedding song, which actually ended up being one of the crafts he had planned for the evening (downside to pilfering my Pinterest). I think we might just make another one anyway. His version is much more elaborate and fun.

Daniel’s boxed gift was a cookbook from our wedding registry (clever, clever). It’s a collection of the best recipes from the last 150 years of the New York Times. The font is beautiful, and I’ve already found a typo. My kind of book. (Is it weird that typos make me like a book more sometimes? There’s something about other copy editors being fallible that comforts me, especially when they get one of those glowing thank-yous in the acknowledgments like I tend to get from my self-publishers).

Daniel’s other planned craft: silhouettes made from pictures of us. We painstakingly cut out pictures, traced them onto black construction paper, cut them out again, and arranged them. Not bad, right?

Adventures in the kitchen.

Me: Here, try some of my yogurt with the carrots.
Daniel: Wow, this is really good. What did you put in it?
Me: Basil, oregano, garlic powder, salt, and pepper.
Daniel: Ooh, it's the basil. I want some in mine.
Me: You have Nutella in your yogurt.
Daniel: So? [dumps in basil] Mmmmm.

Things I made this week.

Sopes! Daniel and I were at Walmart, and I noticed queso fresco next to my (consumed daily) cheese sticks. I never, ever thought I’d see Mexican cheese in the Midwest. Daniel then convinced me it was okay to spend $2 on masa harina (which Walmart also had!). So we had sopes twice last week. And it may have been the best thing I've eaten in months. That’s not entirely true, but there is something primally soothing about fried corn, refried beans, and queso, and I could probably go for some right now...

Blatantly copied from Pinterest. I had some embroidery thread lying around and some boring work to do, so I combined them with something I probably spent half of my childhood doing—tying spiral knots. And now I have the celebrated no-tangle headphones promised by a Pinterest post.

Also taken from Pinterest. I, weirdly, had some bronze-colored jewelry wire. My needle-nosed pliers are sadly somewhere in California, but I found some decent substitutes in our tool kit.

Things I made this week.

Surprisingly, the crystallized candied ginger was not my main aim. I ventured into the local Asian market for the first time back in the fall, about a month after we moved here. While there, sudden inspiration prompted me to search for boba that we could make at home, a recurring theme in this too-short blog. I came across some frozen rice balls in the freezer case, and I decided they looked enough like boba to be what I was looking for. Some quick internet research, of course, reminded me that I was looking for tapioca balls, not rice balls. So the pink and white rice rejects sat in our freezer.

Until this week. After googling what turned out to be Vietnamese on the rice ball package, I surmised the little treats were meant to be boiled and served as dessert, often in a ginger syrup. So I dutifully picked up some ginger and made a syrup. The rice balls ended up being close to gag-worthy in my Western mouth (soft, sweet, glutinous blobs, etc.), but the syrup was divine, as all things ginger tend to be. I saved the boiled ginger pieces, rolled them in sugar, and consumed them within 24 hours (with Daniel’s help, of course).

All that ginger triggered a taste memory that brought me back to the Barr’s ginger beer we picked up on a whim when we were in Scotland last summer, which led me to google Barr’s ginger beer, which led me to amazon.com, which led me to purchase a 24-pack of ginger beer, ecstatic in my newfound realization of the profound reaches of globalization and with an Amazon gift card burning a hole in my work inbox. But that’s another, less interesting story.

Like a year ago, I promised Daniel that if he stopped wearing his worn-out t-shirts, I would make a quilt out of them. I had never made a quilt before, but that wasn’t going to stop me. And it didn’t. Because Rachel had gotten my sewing machine up and running, I felt empowered enough to make this thing happen. I cut a raft of 12-inch squares, pinned and sewed them in columns, and then sewed the columns together. I attached a blue flannel backing, and that was that. It’s terribly, horribly uneven in some spots and definitely needs some spot mending, but I did it.

It was my dad’s birthday, so I sketched a wintry scene for his card that looks quite similar to our neighborhood, minus the apartments and campus buildings (too complicated for me). We have a veritable deer infestation, but they’re beautiful nonetheless.

One skein's worth.

A cell phone cover seems superfluous at first. But the amount of time my phone spends in subfreezing temperatures made me seriously consider the amigurumi tutorial I came across.

Continuing my cowl pursuit, I went for this maple leaf scarflet. I don’t know why the concept of a scarflet had never occurred to me before I did some hardcore crochet googling this month, but it hadn’t. Scarflets give all of the gratification without the long-term commitment of a regular scarf.

Me + 3-day virtual conference = cowl and Swiffer sock.

Somehow, at some point, I became fascinated with the idea of cowls. It may have been the point at which the temperature dropped below 20 degrees. At first I aspired to a large, drapey production, but I ended up with a smaller adjustable one that seemed to suit my purposes better.

I keep every button that comes with clothing, and I forced myself to use a couple here. I’m sure in the back of my mind I will continue to think, “What if I need them?” But frankly, I have no idea what they belong to, and I can’t remember the last time I lost a button on anything.

When the twins were here, I sat through three straight days of a virtual conference on critical thinking questions. So I crocheted, of course. One of the results: a reusable Swiffer sock.

Shannon put it to quick work. The twins made dinner and did the dishes almost every night they were here—totally spoiled us.

Retroactively presented.

 When we were in Cleveland for Thanksgiving, my aunt and uncle gave us this little tree, which plugs into a USB port and lights up, as our “Christmas tree,” since we’d be back in Ohio for the holidays. It was incredibly apt, considering our laptop-centered lives. It also served as a place to store Angelica’s Christmas present. I had picked up a tiny B crochet hook a couple of year ago but never had the time to experiment with such thin thread until December. I was trying to craft earring-sized medallions out of a lightweight cotton yarn, but they were simply too big for normal tastes. This tiny thread, though tricky to work with, meant I could use the patterns I wanted and still come up with something someone might actually wear.

Rachel and Shannon texted me the week before Christmas asking for crocheted legwarmers. I wasn’t sure I’d have the time or the ability, but I managed to get through two sets (and aggravate my carpal tunnels). I didn’t use particularly special yarn, so they don’t drape as nicely as I’d like them to, but my sisters are cool enough to make them work, I think.

Robot love.

For Christmas, Daniel and I decided to set a $10 spending limit for each other. Some chance Etsy browsing led to an embroidery pattern that I kind-of sort-of imitated because it was too perfect. Daniel’s debate team nickname is and was “Robot,” so anything robot-related, be it Marina and the Diamonds’ “I Am Not a Robot” or the 826 literacy center in Ann Arbor, is an instant favorite.

I had never embroidered anything in earnest before, so I was gratified to find that you can backstitch pretty much anything you can draw. The fabric I chose is probably better suited for cross-stitching (I also didn’t realize that there is a difference, or that you can embroider just about all fabrics), and the large holes meant my finished product probably isn’t as refined around the edges as it could have been. But I was satisfied enough to hang it in our living room and to make Daniel accept it as a present. He got me a Michigan wife t-shirt, one of those things I’m embarrassed to admit I really wanted, which matches perfectly with his birthday present.

Honestly, though, the entire town dresses this way. I don’t think anyone owns any other colors of clothing besides maize and blue, except maybe their black North Face coats.