Hello? Send Me More Jell-O!

How do you say "Jell-O" in Malay? Agar-Agar! Yesterday I took my friend Shana out for birthday lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant on South Grand. Vietnamese food is a great bloodstream balancer: the perfect flavorful blend of MSG and sugar. Although St. Louis no longer has a Chinatown proper, it does have plenty of Asian restaurants and stores. One of the most fun stores to shop in is Jay's International, right across from our lunch spot. That's where I got these cool packets of Jell-O. Hello!

Happy Buttons

I love buttons. I love them on cards with cool old graphics. I love them in boxes. I love finding a big blue mason jar full of them, unscrewing the glass lined zinc cap, and inhaling eau de sewing room ancienne before spilling the little treasures across the crafty room table. I could do a whole blog on buttons alone. Celluloid Bubble Tops, pearls, plastic, covered, Bakelite, glass, etc. — they all make me happy. Since I love all vintage buttons, it's hard to decide what kind should go on The Mushroom Sweater. I've already decided to skip making buttonholes. I'm going to crochet on some toggle attachments, car coat style. So I probably need some bold buttons. My stash is huge, but not big on sets. I'm hoping to find enough bone or wooden barrel ones. I will keep you posted on this crucial aspect of the amateur design process.

The Two-Headed Cat

These are pictures from a year ago of my amazing two-headed cat. OK, it's trick photography, there are actually two separate cats. The one with the tiny brain is named Bigfoot, while the deep, suave-looking dude is named Brother. They are not related, except by their grey tabby coats. Bigfoot's paws were much bigger than his head when we first got him. Now, a year later, he's the size of a panther, though I don't know if his brain has grown much. (His favorite indoor activities, other than napping, are scratching drywall, swatting lampshades, and tipping over glass bottles of mineral water.) He likes to sleep on my knitting, because when he was first rescued from a farm in Calhoun County, Ills, I was knitting The World's Longest Scarf, and he used to curl up at the (never-ending) end of it while I watched Constance Bennett movies on TCM. Now he'll jump into my lap whenever he sees knitting needles in my hands to give me a few pointers. Note how The Mushroom Sweater has grown under his direction!

Bottle Cap Magic!

What could be better than homemade magic? I'm going to start saving my husband's Anchor Steam caps to make these 3-D babies. (Sadly, I myself no longer drink beer, due to gluten intolerance issues.) You could make just about anything out of them! Jewelry, room dividers, place mats, pointillist art, canisters, coasters, totes, buttons, etc. I need to do a little crochet now because I just had my 3rd knitting dream this week. Which makes it the 3rd knitting dream I've had in my entire life. I have to stop reading stitch dictionaries right before lights out! Here are the directions for this Magical Motif:

Use a #7 hook on Knit Cro-Sheen. Starting at center, ch. 4. 1st rnd: 19 dc in 4th ch from hook. Join to top of ch 4. 2nd rnd: 2 sc in same place as sl st. * sc in next 4 dc, 2 sc in next dc. Repeat from * around. Join. 3rd to 6th rnds icl: Sc into each sc around. Join. 7th rnd: Ch 3, dc in each sc around. Join and break off, leaving a 6-inch length of thread. Insert a bottle cap and sew up by gathering last rnd. Sew motifs together as you see fit.

Whew! Hopefully after a few practice runs, those directions will seem easy. But I'll probably have to start nagging Buster to drink more beer to keep up with my cap demands!

Caveat: A #7 hook seems pretty big for these little guys. Were hook sizes in 1953 different than they are now? I'll let you know what happens when I make one.

Mystery: Pinwheels?

What are these? The guy who sold them to me for a dollar each didn't know either. The paper board they're crafted of feels old. They each have a hole in the middle, as if they were once attached to something: a pinwheel stick? A wall? Some kind of homemade kaleidoscope base? These are the kinds of things we don't feature in our junkzine, Lucky FInd Gazette, because we can't figure out their cultural, sociological, or historical significance! But they sure are cool!

Film Star Hat Dream

I had some highly kooky dreams last night, probably because of the inferior margarita mix I was guzzling at a cookout before passing out, er, I mean, falling asleep. I dreamt Mary J. Blige had hired me as knitting designer for her signature fashion line after I pitched her my idea for knitted Classic Film Star Hats. There was one called The Veronica Lake (long pale fall), The Garbo (turban), The Joan Crawford (jelly roll), and The Carmen Miranda (lots of fruit). I woke up thinking, "What a great idea!" There was so much sugar in those margaritas it must have given me extra brain rocket fuel! This is my second knitting dream, which is perturbing, because I'm obsessed enough with junking without taking on a second sport. Knitting, however, is as soothing as smoking and saying the rosary combined, and since I don't smoke anymore.... I hope no one Out There steals this fabulous concept before I get around to figuring out the patterns to create such masterpieces and then patenting the designs!

The Mushroom Sweater

The plaque above is the Inspiration Piece for my first sweater. All future crafty posts will remain just as firmly rooted in junk.


I've been knitting scarves, shawls, and string bags forever, but since trig class in high school scared me off math, I've been wary of starting a sweater. Increase here! Decrease there! Check your gauge! All those little tiny k2togs and @#!&^%¿ in the pattern books look too much like sines and cosines. Just brain-hurting squiggles. Then I read Knitting in Plain English by Maggie Righetti and her story about the Mexican knitters who would clip a few fashion shots from Vogue, pull out their tape measures, and have at it — somehow that story gave me courage. I found a basic raglan sleeve cardigan pattern that lets me mess around with everything except the armholes and now I'm clicking right along. I haven't gotten to any k2togs or @#!&^%¿ yet, but my fingers do know how to make those stitches. It's just that I hate following instructions even more than I hate trigonometry. But I have such a sweet vision of the finished work that I've vowed to swallow, breathe, and do what the pattern ladies tell me to, when they tell me to do it. That orangey-red yarn, which is going to make up the edging, says "mushroom cap." Don't you think? It turns the other colors from Hunter's Camo into Hansel and Gretel. I may even embroider mushrooms onto the planned patch pockets. And it might be ready to wear by Sweater Weather. My cat Bigfoot is sleeping on it right now, so it's going have a little grey mixed in, too, for that classic heathered tweed look. It will be perfect for kicking leaves around in the woods, as long as I remember a bright orange hat during deer season.

40 Winks

40 Winks was once a popular name for motels, before they were all renamed Chain Motel, and rightly so. On vacation, you don't really want to do anything in a motel other than shower with some smelly but attractively wrapped Cashmere Bouquet, steal an ashtray, and sleep just enough to prevent you from driving off the road.

Cowboy Weather

Something about the end of August reminds me of this firecracker label, maybe because the cicadas are so loud. Open the door to the insulated house and the heat and noise hit with a "BANG!" It's a bad time to ride horses, though this is the time of year I most want to ride them. Cowboy weather: hot, dusty, and timeless. The horseflies are as big as crop dusters, and sting you and your pony — "BANG!"— before either of you even know they've landed. It seems inhumane to throw a saddle on when it's over 90°F by 9 AM, so I ride bareback instead. By the end of the long slow trail plod, my horse is doing fine, but my jeans are covered with a thick paste of horse sweat and all the hairy dirt I thought I'd carefully curried off!

Mrs. Garden Club President

This picture is from an old FTD floral arrangement catalog we found somewhere. Here's the situation: Mrs. Henry Green has just received a corsage and a congratulatory note from her "girls," before her first luncheon as newly-elected Garden Club President. She's my obverse image! I have the requisite bossiness to be the President of Something, but neither the charm nor the tact necessary to actually get elected. My only way to the top: blackmail and extortion. I would make an excellent Garden Club Dictator. During my (lifetime) term, all of our Garden Club Luncheons would be spent weeding my garden. Do they have extreme makeovers for personalities? Then there's the porch furniture. Mrs. Green's is a lovely blemish-free rattan with clean, bright cushions. My porch furniture is ancient in-law-donated wicker coated with 25 pounds of chipped paint. It's been painted so many times the individual wicker canes are scarcely distinguishable from one another. They just ooze together. And the "green" cushions on my chairs have faded to dinge in the sunlight. They spend most of the year marinating in a mess of leaf crumb, bug parts, acorn caps, spider gore, cat hair, and Chihuahua drool. Also, I could never wear those spikes she has on without killing myself, though they look like excellent soil aerators. My closet is full of clogs. I do have heel envy, but zero ability to walk in them. Is my drive to accculmulate junk just a perverted form of female shoe greed? That's the deep soul searching question of the day.

Totem Owl Cookie Jars

I just read in one of those flimsy supermarket magazines geared towards the women who want to learn, all in one place, how to lose 30 pounds by Labor Day and some new recipes for triple fudge brownies, that my totem animal is the owl! That must be why they follow me everywhere: I can't go junking without seeing a few. I can't even shop at (upscale) Anthropologie without seeing one! I'm glad they're so cute.

The Moolah Mug

We found this recently in the Florissant Salvation Army Family Store, just a few miles from Lutheran North High School, whose most famous alumnus must be Kimora Lee Simmons. I can't really imagine drinking coffee out of it, this guy looks like he'd slip you a mickey just for fun!