A Christmas Angel from Nebraska

This is a Garrison Keillor writing appropriate for the season:

...My own Christmas vision appeared three days before Christmas, in a deli on 10th Avenue in New York, where a rather elegant young woman was managing a herd of eight teenaged boys, ordering their breakfasts from the lady behind the counter. The boys spoke Spanish, which the young woman translated into English for the counter lady. I'm standing there, waiting my turn, observing. The boys are docile, cautious, soft-spoken, and then it dawns on me that they are so because of brain damage, mild retardation, however you want to put it, and the young woman is their hired shepherd. A teacher's aide, perhaps. Probably minimum wage. She is lovely, green-eyed, dark hair spilling down on a puffy parka, red wool scarf, and her English sounds very Midwestern to me.

The boys want muffins for breakfast except one boy who earnestly desires a sesame bagel, toasted, with cream cheese, but the deli is all out of sesame, and this is a cruel disappointment to him. He really was counting on it. When you are 14 and so desperately vulnerable in the big city, you do pin your hopes on certain small pleasures. His face crumples and he is about to melt, and the elegant young green-eyed woman puts her head down next to his where he sits slumped on the deli stool. Her pale cheek against his cheek, she murmurs to him and a string of his enormous tears runs onto her face and she wipes it away and says something in Spanish that makes him laugh. And then I notice at the end of her red scarf, the word "Nebraska." Nobody would wear this in New York except a Nebraskan.

I might've asked her a few questions, but she had turned her street face toward me, and so I didn't bother her. A girl from the prairie using her Spanish to care for damaged boys in a callous world where, contrary to everything the Savior said, the poor and powerless get short shrift -- in the U.S. Senate and elsewhere — and she is sharing the tears of the sesame boy and making him laugh. She's my Christmas angel. I hope she gets to go to a party and sing and dance until 3 a.m.

Granny Squares Galore

Having chosen nine different colors of yarn that roughly mirror the colors in the painting previously posted here, granny squares are being crocheted.

This free pattern for a granny square afghan requires 30 granny squares with dimensions of 9" x 9". So far, I have 14 finished.

A few pictures of some completed crocheted squares:

Then the question of how to join them together comes up. How to do this?

Mikey knows! (method 1, the single crochet, is the favored method):

saga to be continued of Granny Squares Galore...

Heifer International and a Podcast Drawing

Listening to Clothed in the Lamb on her recent podcast, subscribers learned that Janeen not only talked about her "fiber adventures," but also gave an incentive for those contributing to Heifer International.

Janeen says about this program:

What Heifer International does is they give animals to impoverished communities. They teach them all they need to know about how to raise the animals, breed them, and use and sell the products of the animals. I’m talking about goats, cows, pigs, rabbits, chickens, bees, llamas, water buffalo, and of course sheep!

Here’s what they do with, say a sheep. They go into a community and choose a family to train about how to care for sheep. When the family is ready, they give them a healthy female sheep, making sure there is healthy breeding stock nearby. Through the next year, the sheep provides the family with wool which they can use to clothe themselves or which they can sell. In time, they breed their own sheep, and give one or more of the offspring to another family in need. This new family agrees to do the same, and so it continues. With the gift of one sheep, a whole community is helped.

The Recycled Lamb in Lakewood, Colorado is the sponsor for this yarny give away.  So how about helping out Heifer International and join in with a sense of community spirit?

All the details about the contest can be found here.

Sage Remedy Top

Remember the "Sage Remedy" Ravelry sweater with capped sleeved and a lace pattern that first showed up on this blog here?

This is a picture of the yarn while in progress:

And here it is completed:

It knitted up fairly quickly and is warm enough to use as a light sweater outside, yet comfortable enough to wear indoors.

No Regrets

Janey Cutler - Britain's Got Talent 2010 - Auditions Week 4 @ Yahoo! Video

Let's all go out this way!

Four Million hits can't be wrong.

Granny Square on Steroids

The first granny square was addictive, once I got the hang of simple crochet.  9 inches square (it is supposed to be square, that is, although it looks a bit wobbly around the perimeter):

Whilst watching tv, the little 9 inch square looked up and said "FEED ME".  Really.

So back to the craft closet for odds and ends of yarn, and more crocheting.  It will end up an afghan because it just keeps growing.

It is abour two feet square now and continuing to add girth.  It is eating up wool, acrylic, possum fur, and every blended fiber in my stash. 

Even without vitamins, it is growing like a weed.

The pattern can be found here under Heirloom Stitches.

Picasa Web Album Photos

Just found that Google has an inbed code for pictures that are uploaded to their albums. 

Here are pictures from October (167 total) from London, Bath and Wales (Cardiff, mostly, and some in Tenby)

CRAFTLIT TOUR 2010 (London, Bath, Wales)

Being Thankful

Apple Dumplings

You probably think that all thoughts of dessert the day before Thanksgiving in the US are on pumpkin pie. 

But this is what I'm going to do in a few minutes for breakfast (don't scold about the calories, ok?): apple dumplings.

This recipe is so easy and I love the syrup that covers the apple dumplings.  The weird part is that canned soda pop is added before cooking.
Here is the recipe and video from FoodTv:

Free Fonts (monthly) at Outside the Line

Wow.  Outside -the -Line, written by Rae, Justine and Nancy V., offers a free font of the month if you sign up for their monthly newsletter.

Here is the example page of their November font give away, called Holiday Doodles, found at this webpage.

A fun new free toy to work with !!

The Stewardship of Pain

You probably have a book, or poem, letter or picture you sometimes review to keep your focus on what is important in your life.

I would like to share this missile with universal meaning. These are excerpts from a sermon by Fredrick Buchner, whose "many books include the critically acclaimed The Sacred Journey, Whistling in the Dark, and Godric, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times has called Fred Buechner the finest religious writer in America."  (Source: 30 Good Minutes)

The Physician, Pablo Ruiz (Ciencia Y Caridad, Barcelona, 1816-1897)

Someone once said to Buchner:

"You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it."

That phrase caught me absolutely off guard -- to be a steward of your pain. I didn't hear it as a compliment particularly. It is not as if I had set out to be a steward of my pain, but rather something that happened.

I thought a lot about what the stewardship of pain means; the ways in which we deal with pain. Beside being a steward of it, there are alternatives. The most tempting is to forget it, to hide it, to cover it over, to pretend it never happened, because it is too hard to deal with.

Buechner goes on...

Stewardship of pain. What does that mean? I have thought a lot about it. I think it means, before anything else, to keep in touch with your pain, to keep in touch with the sad times, with the hard times of your past for many reasons. I think it is often those times when we were most alive, when we were somehow closest to being most vitally human beings. 

Keep in touch with it because it is at those moments of pain where you are most open to the pain of other people -- most open to your own deep places. Keep in touch with those sad times because it is then that you are most aware of your own powerlessness, crushed in a way by what is happening to you, but also most aware of God's power to pull you through it, to be with you in it. Keeping in touch with your pain, I think, means also to be true to who in your depths you have it in you to be -- depths of pain and also in a way depths of joy, because they both come from the same place.

Continuing: 

Pain can become a treasure if we treasure it to the point where it can become compassion and healing, not just for ourselves, but also for other people. If you want to see that sort of thing in operation, the treasuring of pain, the using of pain to the healing of yourself and others, someday attend an open meeting of AA or any of the related groups. That is exactly what those people are doing, sharing their hurts, their experiences and their joys.

And remember the cross. It seems to me that the cross of Christ in a way speaks somewhat like this same word, saying that out of that greatest pain endured in love and faithfulness, comes the greatest beauty and our greatest hope.

Read the entire writing of Fredrick Buchner here at 30 Good Minutes.  It is good to remember.

Better yet, listen to his sermon on your computer by clicking on his recording back in 1992.  It can be found at the top of the website.  His voice is comforting yet authoritative.