The Room Problem

As in “running out of.” Actually, it’s wall space I’m running out of. I’m a sucker for art, eye candy, pretty colorful things to look at. In case it hasn’t dawned on you, gentle reader, I am not a minimalist. I would not be surprised to discover there are magpies roosting in my family tree . . .

There’s a British artist I like who’s named Rima Staines. I have ten of her little whimsical note card prints like these, some in color. I have a conté crayon print of an English village which I bought in England. I have a limited edition photographic print of a one of a kind glass painting of the solar system.

I have posters from art exhibits ( Ed Cota, San Francisco, 1981, and Guy Coheleach, The Carnagie, Pittsburgh, 1995) and the Shogun exhibit in Dallas in 1984. I have an enlarged print of a photograph I took in September of 1974 of the south rose window in Notre Dame de Paris, France taken with the Argus C3 camera my dad used to take all my baby pictures. I have two framed puzzles.

I have 4 prints of paintings of Susan Seddon Boulet, two of which I just got.

Just back from the framer is at left Ixchel, Mayan jaguar goddess of midwifery and medicine, and at right is Spider Woman, who taught the Diné (Navajo) to weave. I just got framed a set of prints (two hedge hogs and a vole, and the moonlight unicorn) by an artist off Etsy. I’m going to have to rearrange things to fit this last acquisition.

And what I have now, except the 2 Boulet unicorns I got last year, and the 2 Boulets and these two are what is left over from when I downsized from a 2-bedroom duplex to a 2 room apartment. I have now reached the one in/one out stage.

Eye resters. That’s what they are. Pretty things at varying distances for me to rest my eyes at a different focal length from what I’m reading, or what I’m looking at on the computer screen. I just ordered my 2024 calendar made by the Becorn man.

Today being a holiday, I got down a book of short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, involving her fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsy. (Edward Petherbridge is my Wimsy of choice.) She, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh were the “Queens of Crime” during the so-called golden age of detective fiction. Sayers, one of the first women to graduate from Cambridge University (1915), is perhaps the most erudite of the bunch, a master of the language, and a meticulous plotter. (She has an extensive vocabulary and she’s not afraid to use it!) I shifted the bed into “Read” and settled in with a plate of croccantini, cracker-sized slices of Havrati cheese and (microwave) bacon for DIY hors’d’oeuvres to keep my strength up. Best way to celebrate Labor Day is not to do any.

In the knitting news, I was playing around with mitered squares and came up with this raglan sleeve decrease for bottom up sweaters.

It’s a centered double decrease worked on stockinette fabric across five stitches:

Row 1: slip 2 stitches purlwise, pass the first slipped stitch over the second, put the second stitch back on the left needle and knit it and the next stitch; on the next 2 stitches, pass the second stitch over the first, then knit the first stitch through the back loop.

Row 2: Purl. (or, if working in the round, knit)

Unfortunately, there’s no way to get a mitered square worked in stockinette to be square. It always ends up diamond shaped. I’m going to try this as a mitered square decrease at some point, but I’m just throwing this out there for those who like the texture and/or the look. Might be fun to do a hat with crown decreases like that.