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Estonian Express

I mentioned earlier in the week that packages with surprising contents had arrived; one of them was from the brilliant, beautiful, and bilingual Minna. She recently visited Estonia, and while there, she picked up some booklets for me that are full of Estonian mitten and glove charts. Oh my! They are gorgeous booklets!

The first one, Kirkindad: Patterned Mittens by Aino Praakli, is full of fabulous charts, many of which I have never seen, and certainly would never have dreamed of. How wonderful it is to try to guess what was in the mitten-author's mind while she patterned away! The second is Mulgi Kindad, written by Heili Kirjastus. I have never ever seen any of the charts that are in this little booklet. One of the mittens is patterned to look like rows of ripe ears of corn, for example. Charming, and very unusual! The back cover has a glove that is embroidered, and to misquote Rod Stewart, "Every finger tells a different story."

Fascinating! One of the designs in this book contains crosses, diamonds, and stars, all in one integrated pattern...I've never seen the likes of it.

As soon as I'm over my hat-attack for the vets, I'm diving back into mittens and gloves. They are the perfect canvases to portray myth, narrative, and everyday life.

Kirkindad: Patterned Mittens may be available from Nancy Bush at Wooly West. The other seems to be only available from the publisher in Estonia. I am so delighted to have both. Thank you, Minna!

Pups and Admin. Matters

Blogging turns sporadic with this entry. I'm relocating over the holidays, and so will be disconnected for a bit (in terms of modems). Have yourselves a merry, and look for us around the first of the year. We may squeeze in a post or two, but blogging will be, by necessity, a lower priority than usual.

Happy holidogs from Mike, Jack, Della, and me!

Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight

Several unexpected packages arrived yesterday, all with surprising contents. I was deeply touched; isn't it wonderful to receive knitterly gifts from knitters? Thank you, my dear dearies! The most surprising and touching thing about these surprises was that they were all so thoughtfully chosen to please me, and were so perfectly just-what-I-wanted! When I had never mentioned any of these items on the blog! Thrilling! And wonderful!

Let me show you contents from one of my goodie packages. This one is from Donna, who saw vintage glove patterns on ebay.au and snapped them up with me in mind!

In addition to gloves, there were several patterns for hats. Vintage knitted hat patterns are harder to come by; they are usually crocheted. I was delighted with these, especially the name of this one:

Oh! I'm in heaven! Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight. Why? Because of those little pom-poms? I love everything about vintage patterns!

And, because doggies like surprises too, Donna kindly included some previously unknown and unavailable to us treats: Schmackos!

Thank you Donna! Dear me. We are nearly overcome with emotion here. We'll just recycle one of our greatest-hits for today's dachshund photo.

Happy Tuesday! Hang in there with the ho-hos!

Chock full o'Weekend

The most splendiferous package of hats and scarves arrived from Anne on Friday! These are all for the effort for homeless vets in Austin, and they are right on time...bizarrely, after a few days in the 80s, we are expecting cold weather through Christmas, with the possibility, even, of flurries!

Observe the fantastic warm woolies:

and observe this one in particular:

I spent the weekend coveting a hat for a homeless person! How low is that on the scale of human vices? But isn't it fabulous? The dachshunds (there are more than one) form a nose-to-tail ring around the hat that I just am crazy about. However, I handed all the hats, and the scarf too, very nobly over to Sister for delivery downtown this morning. Laura has been such a help with this by being the delivery person. "Downtown" is a bit inconvenient for me, so Sister, who works downtown, has been very generously donating her lunch hour to deliver them to the Homeless Task Force.

Anne also sent some Kidsilk Haze for further knitting for the homeless here, but I suspect she was trying to distract me from the evil deed of coveting the dachshund hat :-) Here it is, though, and it's gorgeous:

Fabulous! Thank you, Anne!

Meanwhile, I finished the dubblemossa hat made from sock yarn. Here is the blue and yellow Socka hat:

or is it?

This is a nice warm double-hat; very very easy and it uses up sock yarn when you are sick of knitting socks but still have heaps of self-patterning yarns.

Pups

The pups had an exciting weekend as they had a short, dark, and handsome visitor: Cousin Bear!

Cousin Bear grew up in the same California avocado orchard as my pups, and they share a father. Or an uncle. Or something like that. He's Cousin Bear. And it was a regular riot of dachshunds + one chihuahua (who thinks she is a dachshund) around here when Dyna and Apple came to visit.

Monday. Have a happy one! We'll be wishing you the best.