Post on Comments and Past Posts

Since I didn't get to pick up the fish or the mitten thumbs yesterday, I thought I'd reply to some of the comments I've gotten on recent posts. (I'm really grateful to you guys for giving me something to post about today. Noting again that "guys" is Michigan slang for "bunch of people, not necessarily male," a northern version of "y'all".)

That phone scam guy sounded totally believable. He was very polite, soft-spoken, and sincere. (I've also learned that two ones can be substituted for the "*" in "*72" if you have a rotary phone or pulse dialing, but I haven't been able to learn if that works with touch-tone dialing.)

When my husband hit the deer with this car back in February, the insurance company sent us to a body shop that was a long drive away, and we ended up taking it back because they didn't do an alignment.

This time my husband called local body shops until he found one that could do it right down the road (literally a mile and a half down the road), because we were NOT going back to the far-away one. This shop gave us a time estimate of five days, and this morning cheerfully informed us that it might be done tomorrow. I think that one's a keeper!

Re the possibly-Dutch knitted petticoat in the Victoria & Albert Museum:
(If you want to see it, start at the V&A's "Search the Collections" site and put T.177-1926 in the "All fields" box.)

One thing I'd like to say about this petticoat is that the 120 in/305 cm circumference is not that big, from a "wearing a long gown" perspective.

The absolute minimum circumference I want in an ankle-length gown I am going to wear a lot is double my walking stride length, otherwise it hobbles me. That's about 45 or 50 inches. In fact, my very plain, only slightly-flared SCA gowns run about 80-84 inches in circumference at the hem. And those are plain, A-line gowns with no bustles, panniers, or hoops.

While I completely agree that 120 inches at 22 stitches per inch is blinkin' miles of knitting (and especially in all those bird, leaf and animal patterns! emus, ostriches, peacocks and parrots!), from the practical standpoint of wearing such a thing, the same 120 inches is not that nuts. (The 22-per-inch knitting gauge is still nuts.)

Bells asked "ok, so how did you avoid getting puncture wounds? I get them with 2mm DPNs."

When I first started knitting with really small needles, my very first ones were a pair of hatpins. Then I moved on to Dritz doll needles and Havel's tatting needles. All of these things were needle-needles, with an eye, or sharp-pointed pins.

If you knit with normal-sized needles, you can push the stitch off with your finger tip. My fingertips quickly taught me what a bad idea that was with a doll needle!

It's hard to describe, but I use the right needle to brush the new stitch off the left needle. The needle tip doesn't touch my finger tip. It's kind of like using a knife-sharpening steel, or the motion I use to peel a carrot.

(I didn't really invent it -- Left Hand apparently got with Right Hand and said, "You stab me with that thing again and I guarantee there WILL be trouble!" -- anyway, at some point without my brain working it out, my hands started doing it this way.)

And now I really must go knit. After sticking my head in the freezer and rooting around for frozen cranberries and pecans.