Australia Wins the Cricket World Cup and I Experience the Revenge of the Cricket God

I finally finished the *!$^& bat cozies but didn't actually end up watching the Cricket World Cup Final. (I didn't go to the DKC's Knit Frolic either but that's another story)

I had strong armed my Cricket colleagues into hosting a day long matchcast party complete with a giant plasma T.V. Mount Gay rum (although I really do like Appleton Estates better), Caribbean food (from Granny G) and non-Cricketing activities (a.k.a. lego, game cube and DVDS) for our sproggies but on the way there from my yoga class I had to walk past one of my favourite yarn stores and low and behold there was a single skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in the window.

Of course I had to have it. I finally made it to lace knitting but not to the party.

Now none of my Cricket colleagues really noticed that I wasn't there. They just drank my ration of rum and ate my share of the food (which included Jamaican Black cake but I shouldn't be bitter should I? After all you snooze you lose. Right?)

For those that don't believe that there is a Knitting God, I can assure you that there is indeed a Cricket God who is vengeful and soundly punished me today for neglecting to watch the match by injuring my left hand (the details are too gory to go into) while I was reaching for Ian Brown's feature on the CWC from yesterday's Globe and Mail Focus Section.

As a result of her (?) wrath I can neither knit continental nor play Cricket for the next few weeks.

Cricket World Cup Knitting

I don't know how I get myself into these tangles but I do. The origins of this are really, really wooley (I think they had something to do with a growing sense of desperation over a shortage of volunteer Cricket coaches) but I somehow commited myself to knitting on deadline. Now who would do that? In this case I have to finish three bat cozies in time for the Cricket World Cup Final which is tomorrow. (I just want it noted here that no one I know from Zimbabwe ever uses bat cozies)

My fingers are hurting and I just realized that the one I am making for my colleague Steve looks Jamaican and not West Indian. The South African one is a no brainer except I have no yellow yarn and I may need to felt the New Zealand one, because it looks too Australian.

If you consider that it's Sri Lanka and Australia in the final, I have no idea why I'm knitting cozies for these teams (maybe because they are for a South African and a nice Metis boy from Manitoba who has an obsession with a pretty Maori girl from Tauranga) but hopefully I'll be done by the time the match starts--you can't knit while you watch Cricket, it leads to way too many injuries and I need to save both eyes and my fingers for umpiring.

TTC Knit A Long Coming Soon

Skyknitter's pic of the Fall Crawl

Last fall just before Halloween a bunch of crazy knitters could be heard at the corner of Queen and Shaw singing the following,

"Whenever we go out, whenever we go out...People always ask us, who we are, who we are...So we tell them, so we tell them...We are yarnovres, mighty, mighty yarnovres...Yeah yarnovres!"

Are you a mighty, mighty yarnovre? If the answer is yes...

Then join the Toronto Knit Rabble on what Toronto journalist Liz Clayton as described in Spacing Magazine as an"All-day Roving Party", Saturday 9th, 2007.

Details to follow but rumour has it that we have new stores, Village Yarns and Americo to forage for stash in, a bead expedition planned and an after party at the Naked Sheep to look forward to...there may even be a film crew surreptiously filming us.

Check out: http://ttcknit.blogspot.com for more info.

Knitting on the 49th continued

Minty and Rory


What transpired after this was that his wife Minty and I started an online friendship where we chat daily about:

Our kids (she has an adorable baby who makes sucking sounds and 3 year old who says “Beaucoups owies” sweetly whereas I have a opinionated 14 year old and imperious 9 year old who yell “Mum!” rather rudely);

Our work day, she’s a legal aid lawyer who represents abused women and their children in family court and I was, until recently a women’s advocate, who worked with abused women and their children while they were in family court, (“Why doesn’t anyone get that violence against women affects their children too?”)

Our husbands’ foibles du jour (“He did what?”);

And our perspectives on being American/Canadian (“I thought 34C was your bra size not the temperature in Toronto!”/“Why would U.S. homeland security want to read our emails about kid barf?”)

Our most interesting exchanges however, centre on knitting. The subject lines of our emails include:

“Why do politicians in your country tell each other to stick to their knitting?”
“Do you have an easy poncho pattern?”
“Have you heard of Tricoteuse Sans Frontiers (Knitters without Borders)?”
“What do you do with a crinkly bottom?”
“It has a hole!”
“I have pattern confusion”

“How do I chain stitch button holes?”

Jack and Lawrence

Six months after we started we started our online exchanges we actually got to meet in person. I was in Long Beach for the National Needlework Association’s trade show. On my last day there Minty, Lawrence and their son Jack drove all the way down from their home near Culver City to supposedly take me for brunch on the beach but really for Minty to see the stash I was taking home from the show.

Over brunch Minty modeled a garter stitch asymmetrical poncho she made while Jack smushed pineapple all over the table and I worked on a pink chenille caplet. Somewhere between all the knit-speak and Jacksperanto (a newly discovered language only spoken by Jack Siu-Kootnikoff), Lawrence and I, aided by copious amounts of (what was probably unfairly traded, environmentally unfriendly and peasant exploiting) coffee, managed to catch up on the last 20 odd years of each others’ lives.

He hadn’t really changed much. He still had his quirks (“Gas may be more expensive in Canada but the taxes pay for things like medicare.”) and seemed even more normal than I remembered (“We’ll take you to the airport, no we insist.”). I could see how I was once in love (or was that in lust?) with him but I wasn’t any longer. Not for the obvious reasons like two decades had passed, we had partners and we had absolutely nothing in common but because Minty revealed to me at the end of our visit that Lawrence thought her knitting habit was “weird.”

My online friendship with Minty continues. We recently had our first online tiff after she found errors in a pattern I posted online. It involved lots of capitals and many exclamation points but was resolved it when I corrected the pattern for her and re-posted it.

Caplet made from Corrected and Reposted Pattern

Knitting on the 49th

For years I had a deep dark secret that I kept carefully hidden beneath a veneer of respectable latte leftism, not just any kind of latte leftism but the kind that will only drink latte made from fairly traded, cooperatively grown, bird-friendly beans.

I drove a Volvo, shared my home with a Corporate Social Responsibility expert and togged our children in clothing from Mountain Equipment Coop—a well known Canadian tree-hugging institution.

More importantly, I made it a point to only purchase yarn from LYSs (local yarn stores) as opposed to BBSs (big box stores).

Then it all came crashing down on me. Late one evening while searching on line for “Housing Boating Adventures in the Kootneys”, a particularly picturesque region of British Columbia, I came across the website for Lawrence Kootnikoff, the only man in the world with the power to destroy my carefully crafted latte leftist persona

For four whole days in 1982 (or was it 1983?) Lawrence was the absolute love (or was it lust?) of my life. He had some interesting quirks, like hosting the Folk Show on CITR Radio in Vancouver, sleeping with a picture of Che Guevera over his bed and sporting a button that said “Question Authority!” but he treated me so much better (“Cold eh? Want my jacket?”) than all the other guys I dated (“Cold eh? Can ya drive me to the peeler bar?”) that I was willing to over look them. My feelings however, were unrequited. I think it had something to do with the fact that he thought we were politically incompatible or that I was morally bankrupt, I can’t remember which.

Sure I was the vice president of the UBC Progressive Conservative Youth Association and co-chair of the Ayn Rand book club but what did that have to do with anything? I could’ve removed the picture of Ronald Reagan from my night stand and stopped wearing my “Don’t be Vague, Honk for Haig” button (as in General Alexander Haig who was Reagan’s then Secretary of State--Haig was so far to the right he makes Dick Cheney look like a liberal) but it just wasn’t meant to be.

A big sticking point to having a relationship with me was his opposition to supply side economics which I supported. I mean any fiscal policy that increased the supply of quality yarn (artisan not acrylic) in the marketplace so that prices came down and yarnovres—like me—could benefit from the lower prices of their favourite fibres couldn’t be all bad, could it?

After my discovery of Lawrence’s continued existence, I started having nightmares that he would one day Google me, find out that I now moved in politically respectable (responsible?) circles (Jack Layton the leader of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s only socialist political party, is a family friend) and show up in Toronto to denounce me as some sort of faux latte leftist.
Now the likelihood that this would actually happen was unlikely, but I’m somewhat paranoid and delusional at the best of times, so why not now?

To preempt Lawrence from spilling the beans on me, I decided to contact him. I found out that in addition to “living in the desert of Los Angeles”, he was married to an absolutely brilliant woman, parenting 2 small children and working as writer.

The Fibre Floozie's First Forays

Greetings all, after years of vicariously living through the posts of others, I'm ready to start my own. My inner godess is screaming. What do I write about?