Giving Thanks
Today, on Thanksgiving before the eating and the family time begin, I'm taking the time to jot down a few of thing things I am thankful for.
I am thankful that TheBoy and I live in a fairly nice apartment and that we can afford not just food and clothing but also a few non-necessity items now and then and that we can afford to help those less fortunate as well. I'm thankful for the rain here in Oregon because anywhere else I've ever lived it would be snow which would make getting around lately very hard. I am thankful for my family, as crazy as we all can be:
TheMom, TheSisters and I
TheDad, his sister, TheYoungerSister and I
I'm thankful for the ladies of the guild, particularly Sara, Emily and Miriam for welcoming me into their circle of fiber fiends with such open arms. You guys are great and I'm very glad to know you:
Me, E, M, S and K in the back.
And last, but definitely not least I am thankful for TheBoy. His love and support get me through every single day; good and bad. I can't imagine being without him and I am very excited to be marrying him. I am also thankful that even though he hates having his photo taken that he lets me take photos like this:
I swear he's not really as sad as he looks considering we both burst out laughing after I took this shot.
Flickr to the Rescue
There've been several suggestions made for how to handle my flickr issue. However, Flickr itself introduced a new feature today that solves them all for me. You can now issue "guest passes" to friends and family without a flickr account. This "guest pass" gives you the option of allowing them to see private photos. So, if I want my mom to see my wedding dress photos, I can just click on the set that they're in and at the top is gives me a share option. This keeps any photos that I want private from the rest of the world, other than those folks that I want to share them with. [It creates a different url than the standard one for the set. Anyone with this url can see the photos, so it's not something I'd necessarily post here for example.]
This would be great for photos I wanted to catalog using flickr but didn't want to put out there for the world, like photos that include a friend's child with a sweater I knit for him. Then I could email my mom and friend and say here, you can see the photos at this link, but the rest of the world can't.
Hooray for guest passes!
The Dangers of Public Photos.
This morning I logged into Flickr to see if I had any new comments on my photos. My most recent comment was from another kind Flickr member telling me that the photos I had posted of myself in my wedding dress were being linked to in a gallery on a German corset-fetishist website. I had innocently tagged the dress with the tag "corset" and the website was pulling any public photo tagged with that word into a gallery on their site. So, for the first time ever I have had to make some of my photos private which means that as it stands right now my mother, father and at least one of my sisters who do not have flickr accounts would not be able to see them. I know flickr is free and they could get an account easily but that's not the point. The point is that while I have put the photos there for the entire world to see, I did not put the photos there for the world to take and use for their own [dirty or otherwise] purposes. And it grosses me out to know that the photos of my wedding dress have been used so.
I know that this is all because I made the choice to make all of my photos public. I take responsibility for my actions. I know that I don't have to use Flickr if I don't want people to steal, abuse or otherwise mangle my personal photos because I understand that there is virtually no way to keep people who really want them from getting them. But it grieves me none-the-less that this is the world that we are living in.
How I Learned to Knit
For Sara
Okay. I'm going to write this story the way that I remember it. My mom reads so if her memory is better than mine I expect that she'll clear things up for me.
My mom is crafty. She sews, and she sewed most of our clothes up until I was in middle school. She crochets, including very delicate lace patterns around glass Christmas balls with tiny steel hooks. She knits, including these amazing Christmas stockings that we all have with stripes and figures on them [santa heads, wreaths, reindeer.] We had afghans and knit pillow covers when I was a kid. And now my mom cross-stitches. With beads. Tiny beads. Over canvas with tiny tiny squares. Her patience for it amazes me. Edit: My mom says in the comments that she cross-stitches mostly on linen these days.
At any rate, somewhere about age 8 my mom taught my older sister how to knit. She was making a quilt with big garter stitch squares. And I desperately wanted to learn how to knit but my mom kept putting it off. Finally I convinced her to teach me to crochet instead. What followed was many random Barbie outfits and a whole bunch of granny squares and potholders. Then, finally, I convinced her to teach me to knit. I don't remember doing anything with it.
Fast forward to 14. I decided to knit a scarf for a friend of mine. It was striped and done in garter stitch I believe. I was thrilled to realize that I could make stripes even if I couldn't purl. I'm a lefty but knit right-handed [I'm a thrower] because that's how my mom taught me to knit. And for some reason my left-handed brain just could not get purling. I finally got it and away I went.
I credit my mother with my fearlessness when it comes to fiber arts. The first sweater I ever cast on for was Rogue, even though I'd never knit a sweater OR cables. With the exception of gauge issues, it would have turned out really nicely. Instead, it's now a simple knitted bodice. 
And I started spinning this time last year after pining away for a wheel for several years prior. So, that's my short history of my fiber arts career.
One more edit: In the comments my mom also asked me if I remember a fair isle sweater that she knit me. I certainly do. It was a tweedy dark purple with white x's across the front and I didn't love it nearly as much then as I would now understanding how much effort and time and love went into it. Kids.
The One With the Explosion
I'm mostly blogging about this so that my parents can laugh [hi mom! hi dad!] People who know me know that I learned to cook as soon as I could reach the top of the stove and that I made dinner occasionally for my family while I was in high school and I've been cooking the majority of my own meals for the past five years. Never once in my life have I had a serious cooking disaster. Until the other day.
TheBoy and I decided to have baked potatoes and chicken for dinner. I scrubbed them, poked a bajillion holes in them with my fork and stuck them in a 350 degree oven. One hour later TheBoy decreed that they were still a little hard and needed another ten minutes. He nudged the heat up a bit, and then I nudged it up a little bit more. We closed the oven door and retreated to the living room where we sat for not more than two minutes when we heard *ka-poof* TheBoy and I looked at each other and then-not liking the sound of the noise-hopped up to investigate. Sure enough, one of the potatoes had exploded all over the inside of the oven. Luckily I had had the foresight to cook an extra potato for TheBoy's lunch. And here, as proof, I give you the carnage:
And like a good adult, I cleaned the potato out of the oven yesterday.