Shawls

I haven't shown a lot of finished items on here lately, but I swear they have been happening.  I've been thinking a lot about shawls the last couple weeks because I like to knit them for other people's special events.

For my Bestie's wedding a couple years ago, I made her a Euphrosyne shawl by Kirsten Kapur for her rehearsal dinner. She had told me she was going to carry lilies for her wedding. I thought if she was going to wear a white dress that a green shawl, the color of the stems, would be pretty.

I started with a skein of lace weight from A Verb For Keeping Warm. It's silk and merino, so light and squishy but a little bit shiny and very warm.  They hand-dye their yarn with natural ingredients, so the color really was "stem colored."

After about eighty million hours of knitting (and watching Bones on Netflix), I ended up with this.




I allowed it to block.  And I ended up with this:

These pictures were taken ages ago.  Sorry they are so dark!  Also, my blocking is lop-sided, isn't it?

 Yum!  Fun, easy to follow pattern, but lots of repeats of the same pattern over and over again.  Not sure if I will ever make another one of these.  But Bestie looked so happy trying it on!

So, now I am thinking about what kind of shawl I should make myself.  And should I make it in white or in a pretty color?  What weight of yarn?  What type of fiber?  Oh, the choices!

Yarn Bribery

I am studying for the Bar on Friday night.

I have been studying for hours.  Days.  Weeks.  I like to shut myself into what Fiance lovely calls my Fortress of Solitude (a.k.a. The Wood Office; a.k.a. The Room of Requirement), so that the dogs won't come in and state at me, making me feel guilty for working instead of walking them (Fiance works from home, and claims that if you are by yourself long enough, the dogs will actually start talking to you).

All of the sudden, there is a knock on the door.  "Come in," I say.  Silence.  "COME IN, YOU WEIRDO!" I holler, because Fiance is the only other human in the house and is not opening the door.  More silence.

Annoyed that I have to get up from my comfy chair where I have holed myself up under my "Pussies Unite" quilt with a Trenta-sized mug of Irish breakfast tea, I grumble, push my feet into my foot sleeping bags, and shuffle to the door.  There is no one there except Breck, who gives me this look:

I also see a piece of cardboard which says, "Follow Me."  The cardboard is wrapped in beautiful blue and purple and turquoise yarn and leads downstairs, wrapped around the banister.  I roll the yarn around the card, following it down the stairs, into the living room.  There is dinner on the table, a fire in the fireplace, and Fiance in the living room wrapped in yarn.  I laugh and head over to thank her for being adorable and for making dinner for me.

Trying to untangle her from the yarn, I notice that she is shaking uncontrollably.

"What on earth is wrong with you?" I asked sensitively.

Fiance then gives a beautiful speech ending with, "And if you say yes, I will knit you a hat out of this yarn.  The colors made me think of you."

I said yes.

Moral of the story:  Bribery works.

Two Girl Brides

For those of you who are not stalking me on Facebook, you may not have heard the news: I’m engaged.  For those of you who REALLY have been out of the loop on my life, I’m engaged to the woman I’ve been dating for a year, have graduated from my JD/MPH, decided to stay in Georgia, and am currently studying for the Georgia Bar Exam.  Now you are all caught up.

But I wanted to talk about the whole marriage to a woman in Georgia while studying for the Bar Exam thing.  I got engaged last Friday.  There was yarn involved in the proposal (more on that later).  Fiancé made me promise not to do any wedding planning until after the Bar Exam (February 24 and 25...if anyone else is counting, that is less than 5 weeks away).

So, of course, I immediately started googling wedding-related things.  What I noticed right off the bat is that there are a lot of guides for brides: traditional, practical, DIY, fancy, laid-back.  But no one has really put together a guide-book for “How to Hold a Wedding Where There are Two Brides, Three Sets of Parents, In a Conservative State That May Or May Not Be Forced By the Supreme Court to Recognize Your Marriage By the Time You Get Hitched.”  

“The Knot” is downright infuriating.  It allows me to choose “Bride Marrying a Bride” and "Same-Sex" as the theme (ha!) in the settings, and then proceeds to still call my Bride a “Groom” in the budget, schedule, registry, etc.  As far as I can tell, Ms. Manners has yet to answer the question of whether both brides attend the bridal shower (and do the senior ladies still explain to the blushing brides what happens on your wedding night?  Do they even know?).  And why do all the Bride-And-Bride cake toppers seem to have both brides wearing dresses?

There are some things out there.  TwoBrides.com and GayWeddings.com are the most comprehensive but they just aren’t calming/helpful/comprehensive in the way I would like.  And they are kind of old school.  And OMG weddings with two men have a lot of different issues than weddings with two women.

I haven’t been good at keeping up the blog in the last couple years.  And I can’t promise that I will now.  But I think I might start using this space to figure out how this whole two-bride thing works in the age of Supreme Court decisions, Pride, and the wedding industrial complex.

Also, there will be yarn.  I promise.  There will always be yarn.