Wow, who knew there were so many Miyazaki fans reading this blog? Congratulations to everyone who pounced on the kodama spirits from Princess Mononoke. It’s not my favorite of his films (that honor would have to go to My Neighbor Totoro on the strength of the Catbus alone, and additionally it’s a perfect little movie), but those funny wood spirits with their rattly heads lodged in my memory. Their crude little white faces also made me think of the days when jack o’ lanterns were carved in turnips instead of pumpkins.

But enough backstory: I asked Mr. Garter to think of a number between one and thirty-three (inclusive), since that was the number of comments on this post. He came up with twenty-three, and then launched into a musing about how many prime numbers produce another prime number when you add their digits. I’m afraid I tuned out this nerdy segue (although doubtless I’ll find myself thinking about it later, being a nerd myself), because twenty-three was Veronique’s comment, and she got it right! So send me your new address, Veronique, and I’ll pop a little something in the mail to you!

In which we have two agendas: firstly, to kick off November with a little contest. As always, I waited until the evening of the 30th to carve my Hallowe’en pumpkin. The challenge? Identify the source of the inspiration for this year’s carving:

Hint: It’s a movie. I’ll take the title or the director’s name to be a correct answer. You have until Wednesday the 7th to enter your guesses, at which time I’ll put the names of all those who got it right into a hat and select a winner. What’s on the line? Something tasty from the Blue Garter stash, of course! Since I can’t seem to stop adding to it, I figure I’d better spread the love around to my loyal readers now and then.

And secondly, the epic project reveal. The winter before last, we lost Cousin Saucy, as my branch of the family always called my mother’s cousin Sandra. She went in for a knee-replacement surgery, and during her recovery a blood clot went to her brain and left her in a coma from which there was no chance of recovery. We had to let her go. Last year’s trip up into the San Juan Mountains in Colorado was our memorial to her, and we left her ashes at the mouth of her father’s silver mine. Saucy and I had a kinship of the mind and soul, not just of genes, and she was a big influence on my young life. She was a horsewoman, a farmwife, an archaeologist, an advocate for the rights of Native Americans, a bookworm, a historian, and, as it turns out, a knitter. According to her sister, she didn’t do much knitting after her sons were born, which was back around 1970. But she kept a stash of yarn, and I inherited a load of it.

(Thanks to Mr. Garter for the artsy photo shoot, since I’m never home during the daylight hours!)

Vintage Norwegian Raumagarn 3-Ply (at least that’s what I think “3 tr.” means – correct me if I’m wrong, Norwegian readers!) from, if I’m interpreting the shade card correctly, 1966. Forty-year-old virgin wool! And it didn’t take me long to figure out that I have basically all the colors for this:

A quintessential 1920’s Fair Isle sweater! This picture is from Ann Feitelson’s tour de force The Art of Fair Isle Knitting. I’ve got my shades of sheep colors, my blues, my red/oranges, and a dash of mustard yellow, and the picture is clear enough to serve as a template. The colors are best here:

I’ll never know what Saucy intended to knit with this wool, but I think she’d be deeply tickled by this project. We never did get to go pony trekking in the Scottish highlands together (although she did go with her son), but she loved the country and would certainly have approved of an historical Fair Isle recreation. It’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t have had something like this up her sleeve, since the colors are so exactly appropriate. And Scotland may well have been on her mind in the latter half of the ’60s, as our mutual favorite historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett were being published. It’s all I can do not to cast on a swatch cap right now, but I must be disciplined and finish my Shibui sweater first. And since the Quintessential Fair Isle may top out the list of my most Meaningful Handknits, being sort of sacred to the memory of someone I loved, one really mustn’t rush it anyway.

Gah! Ten days gone without a post! Granted, I’ve been on the road, and I don’t travel with a laptop because I haven’t had a working battery in about eight years. But every now and then unexpected friends and relations reveal themselves as readers here, and it makes me remember that distant folks I love do check up on me in this space. And that makes me want to be a better, more consistent poster. This blog needs to become something more than it is now: I hardly know what, but I’m giving it some thought. I never remember when my blogiversary (should that be anniblogary?) is, but Blue Garter will enter its third year in the next few months. I want it to have more knitting content – more patterns, a proper gallery of finished handknits – but I want it to have more personal content, too. I want to improve the quality of the writing. I’ve meant to do these things for a long time, and my several jobs and mountain of knitting projects tend to interfere, but I know I could make more productive use of the time I do have. None of this, however, is your problem. So let’s forget the soul-searching for now and cut straight to the good stuff: squishy little edible people in handknits.

Hello. I am seven weeks old. My new hat is way too big for me.

And, dudes, I’m pretty sure my blankie is 100% acrylic.

Good thing I live across the street from someone who finds me irresistible and will knit me merino sweaters as fast as I can spoil them with bodily fluids and mashed banana. 

The part of my work life that takes place at an elementary school has recently been affording me the privilege of sitting in on a seminar of 6th-8th graders. I love middle schoolers, and I love to watch them explore their liminal kid/adult roles and come to grips with their new awarenesses. Their task during the first 50 minutes of the school day is to read and discuss and argue about big ideas, and under the extraordinary leadership of their veteran teacher, they do so with confidence and insight. They’re about to start in on To Kill a Mockingbird, one of my favorite books, and I can’t wait to see what they make of it. And so I’ve been thinking about books that really stick with you, that stamp themselves on your person, change the way you think and what you expect of yourself and of others. Then I saw the Unread Books list over at Katie’s:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of some days ago). Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote — reading it again soon, because my brother gave me the new Edith Grossman translation for Christmas
Moby Dick
Ulysses – I’ve read excerpts. I was intrigued.
Madame Bovary – reading it right now! Yay nerdy bookclub!
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice****
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma**
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner– does it count if I read the manuscript and haven’t yet read the finished book? I know they softened the ending, at least, and changed the wife character…
Mrs. Dalloway*
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha – good enough for a beach read, which it was for me, but irrevocably spoiled by a few lines of truly horrific innuendo involving eels and caves. I shudder to think of it.
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury tales*
The historian: a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum – but I was only in 9th grade. I’ll probably try it again.
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king*
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels and demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility***
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes: a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita*
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the art of motocycle maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s rainbow
The Hobbit**
In cold blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

This is an odd list: I’ve no idea how it was complied, and can only assume titles like Time Traveller’s Wife, Curious Incident, and Kite Runner show up here because they’ve loomed so large on the pop lit scene of late, and therefore they’re on people’s minds as books they think they ought to read (or vow never to read, if they’re contrarians). But there are many books on the list that I consider really important, whose characters have taken up residence in my mind and whose themes have affected me deeply, and I feel pity for all those folks who haven’t discovered them yet.

As for my own current reading, Madame Bovary is engaging, which surprised me a little. I was half expecting I’d need to pull up my socks and apply myself to get into it, but it caught me right away when I started reading on the flight home on Monday. Despite my exhaustion, I blazed through the first six chapters. I also need to get going on Longitude for a school faculty retreat in a month, and I’m thinking I may try to get it on audio so I can listen and knit. The Subtle Knife is on my bedside table: I’m rereading Philip Pullman’s trilogy in the hope of cementing it in my mind before the coming movies recolor my images of the characters and story. And at the risk of offending delicate sensibilities, I also have a dedicated bathroom book. It’s Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry, and it’s been installed on the bathroom shelf since the middle of last winter (all praises upon the former residents who thought to build a bookshelf above the WC). It’s such a languid river of a book, and its inhabitants are so richly drawn, that it’s perfect for just dipping in for a beautiful chapter once a week or so.

So what about you? What books burn brightest in your memory? Because winter is coming, and my favorite local socialist institution is richly stocked, and I’m beginning to think there’s really something to this idea of books on tape + knitting.