Monthly Archives: January 2019

A book uniting two passions: fairy tales and knitting

Posted on January 30, 2019 by forstegrupp

Yesterday on the new non-fiction shelf of our local public library, I found a book with a pebbled blue cover and gold gilded lettering and design. It was clearly a knitting book as you can see from the front cover … Continue reading →

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Sometimes you forgot you already read a particular book

Posted on January 28, 2019 by forstegrupp

Leigh Bardugo‘s book The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic (2017) contains her six modern fairy tales with twists on old storylines to shake up the staid perspectives and assumptions of traditional fairy tales. I read this book on … Continue reading →

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Things Break

Posted on January 28, 2019 by forstegrupp

Today I reached for a small ceramic bowl. It was a perfect size. Just right for holding in the palm. It was painted a robin’s egg blue. It looked like a round bird with a little beak and brown eyes … Continue reading →

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Women are allowed to want.

Posted on January 18, 2019 by forstegrupp

Recently I just finished the third book in Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy about a woman in medieval Russia who takes on the responsibility of trying to save her people of Rus from human depredations and supernatural threats and negotiate a … Continue reading →

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Annotations Galore!

Posted on January 14, 2019 by forstegrupp

Once upon a time, I took so many notes and underlined so much in my textbooks that when I got done, the books looked like a very neat second-grader had been let loose with colored pencils. My old college edition … Continue reading →

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Weaving a plaid — it takes yardage

Posted on January 14, 2019 by forstegrupp

Weaving anything I am learning takes a great deal of yarn. For example, this third project used (conservatively) 940 yards of worsted weight alpaca and 200 yards of mohair. The warp was 112 inches long and there were 162 warp … Continue reading →

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“Mom, you are just like Penelope”

Posted on January 7, 2019 by forstegrupp

Said our daughter as she saw me weaving on my rigid heddle loom. Except, thought my pedantic self, Penelope would be weaving on an upright loom. My SH liked this comparison because by extension that made him the wily and … Continue reading →

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Not enough sticks!

Posted on January 3, 2019 by forstegrupp

The new loom came with two stick shuttles. All well and good until you want to use three different colors for your weft design and you don’t want to wait for the order to come from Webs and you don’t … Continue reading →

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What was THE Christmas gift?

Posted on January 3, 2019 by forstegrupp

Something that has proven a most absorbing and entertaining activity during the two-week winter break which my school gives everyone. My SH of 30 years gave me (per a request submitted by a secret unknown informant) a 15-inch rigid heddle … Continue reading →

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