Knit Cap

While checking out some wonderful information on 18th century knit caps, I came across these two pictures.

I wanted to reproduce that striped cap, and the cook in our reenacting group graciously volunteered to be the recipient of the finished cap, even though I’ve never seen anyone in the hobby wear a striped cap. Besides what we dubbed the “rasta” cap, I found a striped cap in Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness series. The same guy with the eye patch shows up in several plates.

I started by knitting a swatch on my needles of choice. Then using Mara Riley’s pattern, I scaled my pattern up since I was using a finer yarn, and cast on the navy wool. I knit about 30 rows and realized that my scale was way off. I also noticed that in both paintings, the knit cap was worn over a linen workman’s cap. So … I ripped out all 3 inches, knit a bigger swatch, recalculated how many stitches to cast on (remembering THIS time that it had to go over another cap) and started again.

 I used the "Porter" painting to try to gauge the scale. I looked at how much of the ear the navy yarn covered, and went from there. The stripes looked like they were a finger and a half wide. I kept knitting until I had what looked like was going to be that distinctive “bell” shape and started decreasing. I didn’t like the way the top looked, so I ripped that out, pulled out my copies of Mark Tully’s “The Packet” series until I found the directions for his knit cap and tried again.

I was happy with it, so I wet it, blocked it, and put it over a "bouncy ball" to dry.

I’ll get pictures of it on our cook, complete with black felt hat, at our next event.

UPDATED to add: Another knit cap here.

Oh, rats!

Our friend, Mike, delights in spoiling Sweet Daughter. He also does his best to, um, cultivate her sense of humor and develop her appreciation of the absurd. (Like I’m not doing a fine job on my own, thank-you-very-much. *grin*) When SD was two, he sent her a stuffed toy for Easter. It was a ‘possum. Yes, he sent her an Easter Possum. She was nonplussed at the time, but we managed to have fun with it. We'd startle Shorter Half on a regular basis by leaving it hanging from unexpected places. The shower curtain rod, for example.

Sweet Daughter has an affection for cats. She likes to pretend to be a kitty, complete with her own cat language, which I don’t understand. “Honey, I don’t understand ‘cat’. Please use real words!” This is handy for her, because I suspect she has cussed me out in cat language once or twice. Anyhow …

Mike decided that a proper kitten like Sweet Daughter needed her own rat for Valentine’s Day. He sent about 9 gummi rats in shades of red and orange. On the morning of V-day, I said, “Hey Sweetie! Mike sent you a Valentine’s present!”

She responded by stopping, taking a deep breath as if to resign herself to the inevitable, and said “What is it?”

I said brightly, “Here honey! It’s a gummi rat! He says a kitty needs her own rat! You like gummi bears, right? This is just a big gummi candy.”

She held the package, not sure she liked the way it quivered. The rat was removed from the package and she refused to touch it as it trembled gently.

“Ew, mommy! It feels likes REAL rat! Take it take it take it take it!"

(Note: We have friends with a marvelous pet rat named Cornwallis. She knows what a real rat feels like, and that it does not feel like gummi candy.)

The rat is placed on a plate. She contemplates her options. She swallows her disappointment.

 

“Momma, may I have some chocolate now?”

And I wonder why she has bad dreams.

For the record, she got her chocolate, and her bad dreams have never featured marsupials, rats or candy. Only the big, bad wolf. And I'm pretty sure she won't hold this against Mike.

Perspective

Just to put all the whining, sniveling, teeth gnashing, and hair-pulling into perspective, the mid-Atlantic has had a hell of a winter, at least by local standards. We don’t a snowmobile tucked away in the back of the garage for inclement weather. Heck, a lot of people didn’t even have snow shovels 10 days ago. The belief is that if Mother Nature put it there, she can darn well clean up after herself and take it away. For those who have never lived north of the Sweet Tea Line*, there really is no frame of reference.

December 19-20, 2009: Snowpocalypse
February 5-6, 2010: Snowmageddon
February 10-11, 2010: Snoverkill

Check out the amounts so far this winter:

Washington D.C. National Airport - 55.9”
Old record: 54.4", Winter of 1898-1899
Average: 16.6”

Washington D.C. Dulles Airport, VA - 75.0"
Old record: 61.9", Winter of 1995-1996
Average: 22.3”

Baltimore, MD - 79.9"
Old record: 62.5", Winter of 1995-1996
Average: 20.8”

Wilmington, DE - 66.7"
Old record: 55.9", Winter of 1995-1996
Average: 20.5”

Philadelphia, PA - 71.6"
Old record: 65.5", Winter of 1995-1996
Average: 20.5”

Atlantic City, NJ, 49.9"
Old record: 46.9", Winter of 1966-1967
Average: 15.7”

Compare to these annual averages:

Barrow, AK - 29.7”
Colorado Springs, CO - 42.4”
Bridgeport, CT - 26.2”
Chicago, IL - 38.5”
Boston, MA - 42.2”
Detroit, MI - 41.1”
Minneapolis-St. Paul - 49.9”
Central Park, NY - 28.4”
Fargo, ND - 40.8”
Pittsburgh, PA – 43”
Green Bay, WI - 47.7”


And yeah. It’s supposed to snow again on Monday.


* The Mason-Dixon Line is not the dividing line between the North and the South, it’s the Sweet Tea Line. McDonald’s not withstanding, you know you’re in the South when restaurants have sweet tea ready made.

Always chamber check

We were watching TV the other night and saw this State Farm commercial.



The commercial wasn't even over before Shorter Half emphatically stated, "And THAT'S why you always chamber check your pistol!"

Guilt

I got up this morning and went to check on the results of the overnight storm. It looked like I’d been stood up. Maybe a half inch of fluff on top of a quarter inch of icy slush. This wasn’t a bad thing, as I’d left my snow boots in the car. I shoveled off the steps, retrieved my boots, and contemplated the fact that I’d forgotten to pick up bird seed yesterday. I had a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a Blue Jay, two Cardinals and a Cedar Waxwing looking pointedly back-and-forth from the empty bird feeding to me. I’ve got thistle seed coming out of my ears (no finches this year, for some reason), but I only had a little songbird mix left. I pried off the frozen roof of the feeder and dumped the last of the birdseed in. And I felt bad because I was sure they were counting on me.

This is all rather ironic considering I have little bit of a phobia of things that flutter.* Flapping wings whether they’re birds, bats, or butterflies instantly puts me in fight-or-flight mode. It’s a challenge not teaching this response to Sweet Daughter, but I try. So I feed the birds because it seems like the right thing to do, and I do like watching them from the other side of the glass, and for some bizarre reason, we don’t have a squirrel problem. It could be that the starling and crow problem we have (greedy buggers) keeps the squirrels away, but whatever.

Then I went inside to fix breakfast. Sweet Daughter requested waffles, and since the guilt quotient wasn’t high enough for the morning, I made these. From the 1961 Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook, I bring you:

Richer Waffles

3 eggs
1 ½ cups buttermilk or soured milk
1 teaspoon soda
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup soft shortening (fresh bacon fat is good)

Heat waffle iron while mixing batter. Beat eggs well. Beat in remaining ingredients with a rotary beater until smooth. Cook according to whatever works best for your iron, but I find I don't have to grease the iron first with this batter. (Ya THINK?)

Perfect fuel for shoveling out the driveway. Especially when the weather wienies are calling for another couple of inches of white stuff and 30 – 40 mph winds. Sorry, birds. Maybe I'll toss the leftovers your way.

*While looking here for whatever “flutterphobia” is called, I found this.

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia - Fear of long words.

That's just mean.

Son of the Snowpocalypse: The Return of Snowmageddon

So, our first snowfall of the season occurred at the end of Autumn. We got about 18” or so and the weather gods were kind enough to dump it on the weekend. It was novel. It was fun. We still had enough snow at Christmas to build a snowman. It was perfect.

Sweet Daugher and "Mr. Shivers". Yes, that's a belly-button.

Then, the last weekend in January, another little storm swept through. Probably about 7” when all was said and done, it was light and fluffy, and shoveled easily. The roads were passable by the next day, and our road had so much salt on it, it looked like the rim of a margarita glass. The novelty had not yet worn off

Then, a mere seven days later, it hit again. Snow. Then a layer of sleet. Then another layer of snow. We got a good solid 18” – 20” layer of winter, depending on where you measured. That, to put it mildly, was a bitch to shovel. Roads took longer to plow (due, no doubt to all the downed trees), and there was a dearth of salt and sand.







Now, a mere three days later, it’s sleeting. It’s supposed to switch to snow, and snow all day tomorrow. It’s not a weekend and I’m not amused. I got enough snow when I lived in Minnesota (13 years, and 2 weeks) to last me the rest of my life.

The bright spots? Sweet Daughter LOVES playing in the snow, and we have an awesome neighbor with a tractor and a blade who scrapes the end of our driveway for us. And I can think of worse things than spending a day at home with SD. I’m actually looking forward to it.

So THAT's what you call it.

In an effort to not be a total sloth, I try to have some sort of project going on while watching TV. The Great Coat project took place in front of the boob tube and kept me warmer than a Snugli while I was at it. I’m currently trying to knock some knitting projects out of the queue.


Now keep in mind I don’t consider myself a “knitter”, but rather a reenactor who knits. My personal stereotype of a knitter involves projects made out of colorful esoteric fibers, “Celtic Women” playing on the MP3, and cats raptly watching the needles as they dance together, tip-to-tip. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not my thing.  95% of anything I’ve ever knit has been an 18th century design, in colors found in nature, from 100% wool. The cool thing about knitting these small projects (mittens, caps and the like) is that I found I can sit here with the laptop, cruising my favorite blogs, all the while knitting in the round. Shorter Half calls it “interknitting”.