Linked by a car blog!

A very nice gentleman named John from My First Car e-mailed me and asked if he could use my story about Mr. Valiant.

Linked by a car blog. What I know about cars can be writen on the inside of a matchbook with a grease pencil. The next thing you know, JayG will be asking me about Harleys, Tam will ask my opinion about pistols, Brigid will want pointers on poetry, and Alan Gura will be asking me for legal advice.

Anyhow, go check him out, and if you like, offer to share your first car story with him.

Most of you have already see this, but

To the half-dozen of you that stop by here and don’t follow the gun blogs, go check out A Girl and Her Gun, and her post about the gun community. That pretty sums things up for me, too.

Also, if you’re one of the 3 women in the above group, you may (or may not) be interested in her give-away.  Many more items have been donated as well - check out her side bar.

I'm 2 today!

Sweet Daughter reminded me that today was my 2^nd blogiversay. I’d thought it was somewhere during the second half of the month. Oh well. To say I attract (and least once before they run screaming) an eclectic bunch of readers would be an understatement. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have been linked by the likes of JayG, Breda, Tam, SayUncle, and all the rest I’m inadvertently insulting by not mentioning them. I got included on the first Gun Blog Black List. I got to meet Alan Gura. I’ve been linked by Jane Austen’s World. S.W.A.T. magazine via Facebook. Tank.net. Some forum in Russia (no, not THAT kind, it was gun-related). I’ve been red-shirted (well not really, I didn’t die) by New York Times Best-Selling Author, Larry Corriea. I got linked to a very well respected 18^th century knitting page. I got invited to the Second Amendment Foundation Dinner at the NRA convention in Pittsburgh and wore 5” werewolf shoes. I got a hit from someone searching for “milf dogs”. I got to be one of the instigators of “Open Carry Day” last June. I got to review a product for Brownell’s. The first time I OC’d, a Fud accused me of “bristling with ammunition”.  It’s all been pretty awesome.

Thanks to all of you for stopping by. I really appreciate it, even if you’re only stopping out of idle curiosity. Here’s hoping 2012 is just as entertaining. But not in the Chinese “may you live in interesting times” kind of way.

Stop the violence

Go over to Weer'd's place for the backstory.

Light a candle to stop violence? If I light five, will that stop more violence? How about I carry the means to keep myself and my loved ones safe, instead? You know what will stop more violence? Two extra magazines.

That's my Springfield XD. 16 +1 in the tube. There's 32 more rounds that go with it. I won't start a fight. I will do my best to walk away from, or talk my way out of a fight. I'm blessed I've never had to use it. But I'm also blessed that I have the right to carry it.

New nomenclature

Sweet Daughter acquired several new games during Christmas. I've had the pleasure of playing them with her, and she's quite ... proficient.  She regularly creams both Shorter Half and me at cribbage, for instance. She started owning us at Uno. I'm still holding my own at Mancala, but I'm running out of adjectives for getting soundly beaten at Concentration and the like. There's getting "spanked", "getting beat like a rented mule", being told "You're going down!" and the ever popular "I'm going to beat the pants off you!"

Which, of course, evolved into "I am SO going to Robb Allen you!"

Why I love the internet

I've had this book “Tea drinking in 18th-century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage”on my Amazon wish list of years. It's out of print. There is one copy available on AbeBooks for $144. This afternoon, I applied my best Google-fu and I managed to find a course syllabus from 2005 that had this listed as one of the readings. Lo and behold, the email for the professor was included as well. I figured what did I have to lose? So I shot a brief note asking if she knew how I could acquire a copy and she got right back to me with the name of an anthology that includes it. It's now on the way for under $15, shipped.

Why now, all of a sudden? Well, Military Through the Ages is less than 2 1/2 months away, and it's time to build up to "full panic" mode. Our cook has some rather ambitious ideas for a menu, and we're trying to find some warm bodies to play wounded soldiers.

Another knit cap

The knitting deities have not been kind to me this past year. Regardless, upon flipping through my print-outs from The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, I found this cap: [original]

The description is courtesy of Google Translate. It's not really an ikat, but it gets the point across.

and decided I wanted to try to reproduce it. Why? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s so completely unlike anything I’ve seen. Maybe it’s because I’m a glutton for punishment. But on Christmas Day, I got started. Technically, I should have dyed some blue wool and then taken that and some white wool and spun them into a variegated yarn. Not happening, so I went with Plan B.

So first, I took a skein of blue wool yarn that very closely matched the original picture, and I tried to see if I could bleach the blue out of it. Nope. Using a few strands to experiment, I increased the ratio of bleach to water and found it started to dissolve the wool but it didn’t lighten the color. On to Plan C. Next I took a skein of natural merino wool, and wrapped it around and around the back of a dining room chair until I had a giant donut of yarn. Then I loosely tied it in a few places and pre-wet it. Then I folded it in half, and in half again, and put two of the resulting bends into a small crock-pot, with the other two bends sticking up.

Yes, that's Sweet Daughter's Hello Kitty toaster in the background.

I went down to my Rubbermaid tub marked “dyeing” and dug around hoping I had some acid dye in blue left over from a project over 15 years ago. Score! It was a rather bright blue, but it was all I had. I trotted back upstairs, read the directions for using it in a washing machine, and then extrapolated what I would need for the crock-pot. This highly scientific method meant I took an old rum bottle (it was all I had handy, really! *hic!*), and put some water in it. Then I added approximately ½ teaspoon of dye and shook it up until it was well dissolved.

This used to hold Cruzan Blackstrap Rum. You recycle your way, I'll recycle mine.

Then I carefully poured it into the center of the crock-pot, trying to keep it near the bottom. Then I added more water until the crock-pot was almost full. I turned it on (no “high” or “low” on this one) and went and played with Sweet Daughter for an hour or so.

I removed the yarn from the crock-pot and dumped it in a colander and let it cool a bit before rinsing it so it wouldn’t felt into a giant wad. (Agitation and/or rapid temperature change will felt wool.) I squeezed out as much water as I could by wrapping it in a towel and then hung it to dry.

One side.

The other side.

Then I rolled it into a ball.

I got out some size 8 needles and started knitting a swatch. Got my gauge. Started knitting the actual hat, and one of my big fears came to pass. See that original hat? See how the colors just sort of magically seemed to alternate with a minimum puddling of colors? Well, I got the blocks of color.  Sort of like this, but bigger.

I couldn’t have gotten the colors to line up like that if I tried. So I quit while I was ahead, and swore quietly under my breath and then it came to me … change the size of the needles, and that should shift everything one way or the other. I found a size 5 circular needle, knit a swatch, calculated my stitches, and started again.

Victory!

I knit for an inch and a half or so, did a row of purl stitches (so it would turn nicely) and then another inch and a half. I then picked up the bottom edge in the next round, knitting them together, and then just knit in a circle for a while. The next challenge was figuring out how tall to make it, so when I felted it it would come out looking right. One thing I’ve found over the past year is that when you double the bottom edge, it doesn’t shrink (much) when you try to felt. The diameter of the rest will shrink some, but proportionately the length shrinks much more. No, I didn’t remember how much more, so this time I decided to get all scientific and measure. But first I had to figure out the decrease at the top. I decreased 4 stitches every row until I had eight stitches left which I looped onto the end of the yarn, pulled to the inside and secured.

Then I put it in a lingerie bag and threw it in the wash with some other laundry, not noticing that the cycle was set on “delicate”. It came out of the wash the same size it went in. So back in it went, by itself, set on “regular”. I stood there and pulled it out every few minutes to measure the progress. After the length had shrunk 2”, I spun the water out and blocked (shaped) it over two mixing bowls to get the curve at the top and the slight flare at the bottom. The color also mellowed out a bit but is still well within the realm of possibility for indigo dye.

Sorry - picture's a little crooked.

Not a perfect match, but recognizable. And I'm not trying to recreate a couple-of-hundred-years-old cap. I'm trying to make it look like it did when it was new. I’ll call it a win.