http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/dynaweb/adaccess/beauty/
An interesting archive of health and beauty ads from 1920’s-50’s, ganked from
ETA: Actually, the entire archive is pretty fascinating!
At the grocery store this morning, I was wearing a little silk garden roll-brim beanie I threw together in Jan 2005, and saw a young mom in a cabled green hat with a garter stitch base. Hers was handmade, very well done. Now, I’ve found that when I make things too well or too polished, I don’t get compliments, possibly because people assume they’re manufactured. Shedir? Not a word. Booga bag? People are all over it. I figured it was probably the same with her.
I walked past her in the aisle and said, “nice hat!” She beamed so hard I think the sun actually burst forth from behind the clouds. There may have been angels singing. She said enthusiastically, “thank you! I like yours too!” I grinned back and said, “thank you!” She said, “it’s a great day for hats, isn’t it?” I was smiling too at this point, and my whole day went better. I’ll bet hers did too.
Someone commented in
No one’s ever asked me that, which means I must be hanging out with the right crowd. However, I do have some answers that come up when strangers comment:
“Knitting just let me meet you, a total stranger. Pretty neat, eh?”
“I can sit here and do nothing or I can sit here and do something.”
“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”
“I have a handy skill in case society collapses and we all wind up herding goats.”
“I can make something while drinking coffee that I can hand down to my grandchildren.”
“Knowledge is power.”
“It’s like yoga without the sweating.”
“Because it’s there.”
I do get people saying they don’t have the patience to knit, or maybe they just mean they don’t have the patience to learn. It’s not that hard, really. And as for not having the patience to knit, my response is generally that I don’t have the patience NOT to knit. I can stand in line at the post office and crank out a few rows on a hat, or I can stare into space. I know what I pick.
I can knit and read, or otherwise look at places other than my hands, and that seems to be what gets people commenting the most. I say, “it’s like driving a car. When you first learn, you’re very tense and nervous, but after a while you get to the point where you realize you’ve gone five miles you don’t even remember driving.” I’m very fond of analogy, you may have noticed.
My daughter’s occupational therapist just found out that the things I make in her waiting room go all over the world, and now she’s fascinated. For instance, yesterday: “Where’s that one going?” “Oxford.” “Wow!” Which pretty much sums up how I feel about it, too. Of course, the down side of knitting the Jayne hat over and over is that people who see you ever day think you’re just really slow at knitting a single hat. It takes a while for them to realize what’s going on.
Firefly DVDs are on loan to a woman from Charlotte Yarn, and another woman there wants to borrow them after. Then they go to prostiturtle. There’s some kind of strong crafty/Firefly link that’s not been explored enough. Maybe the show would have made it if there had been flyers at your local fabric store.
Hats up for: VA, CA, CA.
Internet was down all day until about 6pm. Now my computer chair has finally broken. It’s like my Mac is surrounded by some kind of Luddite vortex.
I won’t go over my computer troubles again, except to say that I’m having trouble with iTunes.
I think I can probably figure out why it’s quoting me prices in Japanese Yen as opposed to American Dollars. No, my real difficulty is this:
I’m currently at the maximum number of machines allowed to play my tunes. I’d like to disallow my old hard drive, the one that died, from playing tunes, since I’ll never use it again except to try to keep pulling data off of it. However, when I log on to attempt to disallow a machine, it seems to want to disallow my current machine, meaning my brand new shiny hard drive in my beautiful desklamp Mac.
Has anyone tried to disallow a computer other than they one they’re on from using iTunes? I’m at the max number, as I say, so if something goes wrong with this computer then I’m kind of screwed.
By the way, lest anyone think it’s all doom and gloom on the school front, Emily’s had three excellent days in a row. As she told me this afternoon, “I did super-good today!”
Atta girl!
(I tried to re-load Photoshop onto my machine today, but the disk was too scratched. I’m still waiting on a new copy of Photoshop and a newer version of Mac OSX, so no new original pics for at least another four days. Le sigh.)
Old FO plus good Emily stuff