Tales from the Trip

I'm back, with artifacts. For knitting content, hang in there, its at the end.

It has been a long, hard, journey, filled with emotions, tears, laughter, and quite a bit of mucous. A special shout out to 16 year old cousin Daniel, rumoured to have had the flu at the funeral, who has spread that joy throughout southern and middle Indiana up into Illinois and beyond. I'll spare you the details of my van's transmission, going out the day before the trip, and the cheesey rental van, which did have one thing going for it in that it was quite a bit cleaner than my van, even with the previous passenger some kind of long-haired shedding mammal, probably a bear.

OK. I have returned with a few special items that will find a new home in my house, and constantly remind me of my grandparents. There were two particular things that I have always wanted, and of the 2 children and 8 grandchildren, no one wanted these items, so I am thrilled. The first is from my grandpa, it is a quilt he made when I was a teenager. I am pretty much positive it is the only quilt he ever made; my grandma was the avid quilter. But there was a time when my grandma had been sick and not doing her usual sewing, and I remember visiting them on the farm and grandpa showing us the quilt he had made from our old Raggedy Ann and Andy sleeping bags.


Ladies of Gee's Bend, eat your heart out.


The other item is one of my grandma's everyday dishes. I was always fascinated with it as a kid, I guess I had never seen a divided serving dish anywhere else, call me sheltered. Anyway, I love it and it reminds me of good farm food, green beans in one side and corn in the other.

I atually have the whole set of these dishes, because it turns out that no one else really wanted them. The other five cousins didn't want much of anything from my grandparent's household, so my brother and sister and I, partly from being sentimental, and partly because we just like old stuff, ended up with several things.

I have 2 of my grandma's quilts, one with some groovey polyester print dresses, and the other from 70's calicos. I also took her deviled egg dish, and her roaster. (Which I find hilarious, because of all the great farm vegetables we had down there, we never had a real turkey for Thanksgiving, it was always turkey-roll.)

So, what did I do knit-wise? I knit a bit on the Sitcom Chic, which is without picture today, as it looks like 12" of white stockinette, so I'll spare you. More interestingly, I finished up the knitting on "A Good Bias".


Here it is blocking on my bedroom floor (using fancy bathtowel blocking method).

I also finished up the Fleece Artist capelet, pictured here draped artistically over a chair. Tonight I'll sew on a button and weave in ends during reality-TV-aton.