Crazy for Ewe
The average size?
During the middle of the last century, the Air Force had a problem. It’s planes were crashing. A lot. They looked first at mechanical issues and then at pilot behavior. Then they looked at pilots themselves. Turns out that pilots were significantly bigger and taller than pilots were in the early days. But the cockpits had never been modified or redesigned. The Air Force began a huge study of its pilots. They measured the arms, legs, back, chest, etc, of every single pilot. Crunching this data gave them what they determined were the average measurements for pilot – the measurements around which they would redesign all the cockpits. One bright data analyst said, “Hold one,” and ran a check of this wonderful new average against individual pilots’ measurements. And guess what he found.
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Don't go to Europe before you go to Boston
“They didn’t come, Mom,“ Elizabeth managed to choke out, “they never came,” barely contained tears in her voice.” Almost 500 miles away, she’s waiting for the car I had hired to take her from the Boston airport to her rented apartment outside the city. A car that didn’t come. Not only had I paid them weeks in advance, I had trusted them with my firstborn’s safe passage through a strange city. They took my money and left my sweet child all alone with no car and no friends. While Elizabeth was very mature, having found and secured a prestigious internship after just one year of college, she was barely 18, and very much a small-town
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Snopes for knitters
Or the top ten lies knitters tell themselves
- I’ll just use the needle size the designer recommends – it’ll be fine. The truth is that the designer only tells you what size he or she, or other knitters used to get the gauge in that pattern with that yarn. You may knit very differently than the designer or the test knitters, so you always have to swatch.
- My swatch is too big -- I’ll just fix that when I block it. There are a lot of ways you can manipulate your fabric when you block it, but making it smaller is not one of them. Bigger, yes. Smaller? No.continue
Big words and short rows
My father, God rest his soul, was not a fan of big words. Although he was a linguist and had an expansive vocabulary, he believed that communication should be clear and direct. My maternal grandmother, however, did not. One fidgety afternoon as the chair seat itched my sweaty little legs, I reached for a fourth golden butterscotch. “No more candy, Ellen,” Daddy said, “Sugar rots your teeth.” Grandma’s face looked like she’d bitten a lemon. “Rot is such a vulgar word,” she announced.
Laughing, he quickly rephrased, “No more candy, Ellen. Sugar has a deleterious more
Five reasons to knit a swatch
At the shop, I say “You’ll have to swatch it and see,“ at least fifty times a day. That guidance is always met with a groan or at least a heavy sigh. Knitters hate to swatch. I get it. We want get started NOW, because the project is going to take a while, and swatching feels like a waste of precious knitting time.
Casting on a big project without swatching is like marrying someone we met at the bar last night. It might work out great, but maybe not, and it could be a while before we figure out that it was a horrible mistake. By then, we’ve already invested so much time and energy that we’re tempted to just soldier on and hope it gets better and turns out okay. It doesn’t. As painful as it is, just cut your losses and head to the frog pond – Rip it, rip it, rip it.Love it or hate it, swatching is important, and here are five things more
Where you belong
Before Covid, I used to go to quite a few networking events – you know, graying men in blue suits drinking cheap red wine from plastic tumblers. They’re all in a group laughing about something. All the big important businesses and all the big important people, with all the important titles. Eventually one of them notice the blond woman in the sweater looking at her wine glass and wishing she hadn’t come. It goes like this:
“So, what do you do, young lady?” he asks.
“I own a yarn store, Crazy for Ewe, in downtown Leonardtown,” I tell him.
If this were a cartoon strip, you would see the thought bubble above his head fill with
The time to knit it is before you're ready
Our son Colton is going off to college this fall, good Lord willing, but I worry that he isn’t ready. The piles of clothes he steps over on his way to his unmade bed each night, evidence of his lack of laundry skills, and a host of other things that make me think he should mature another year. I was railing on about this the other morning to my husband, Bill, man of few words, who listened and calmly sipped his coffee “I don’t know if he can even get up on his own to make it to class!” I ranted. When I finished presenting the evidence of Co
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All the times to be fully present
I recently had a conversation with a lovely knitter who is cranking out projects at an prodigious rate. She said she'd been spending a lot of time recently with her parent who was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. It can be very stressful to know that someone to whom you looked up for guidance and support is now struggling to remember the conversation you had yesterday, and knitting is certainly a way we can calm ourselves as we deal with this new reality. But it's more than that.
Alzheimer patients cannot really be left alone. They will forget where they are, wander off, and get lost. They will forget that they turned the burner on, or that the
Progress, not perfection
Thanks to Governor Hogan who has implemented Phase 2, allowing non-essential retail to re-open. And so we are open. But before we move fully into that, I want to say Thank you. Thank you to you, my lovely knitters and crocheters. Thank you for your online, Facebook, email, Instagram purchases of Quaranskeins, LYS Day kits, Albuquerque Sunset, drop-ship afghans, regular projects, yarn, needles, and more. There are not enough ways to tell you how very much I appreciate you keeping Crazy for Ewe on your mind and in your hearts. Thank you for being cheerful and patient and kind as I fumbled through my first videos, my first Facebook Lives, and my work in progress website. Thank you for watching those videos, for joining the Facebook Group, and for supporting each other around a virtual table as you connect on line. I have said it before, but Crazy for Ewe is truly a special
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Black lives matter
This has been a week. I am a word person, and my first response to an emotionally devastating situation is to write about it. But there are no words. The savagery against people of color,, not just in the past week, but for centuries, is inexcusable. The senseless death of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arberu, Breonna Tayler, and others, reflect the horrors of injustice and oppression that still pervade our entire country. Society has failed when those whose role it is to protect lives, use their power and authority to take lives. Society has failed when people of color are more frequently arrested, more
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No, it's not normal
Everyone is asking when we will be able to open, and we are all wondering what that will look like. The first answer is fairly easy - I want to open as much as you want me to, but I need to be absolutely sure that I am comfortable with our protocol to ensure everyone's safety. The second answer is, I don't know what it will be like. It will be different for sure. But it's the new normal. It is kind of scary, because change is hard, but we have new normals in our life all the time.
A while back, after her first lesson, one of my newer
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A while back, after her first lesson, one of my newer