News Flash: Wool Shrinks!

I am a knitter.  I taught myself to knit when I got married  - lo! back in the 70's - when we lived in Eureka, CA.  My husband was finishing up college in Arcata and because we were only there for winter quarter, I couldn't get a good job, so I became a domestic goddess.  I knit, I embroidered, I needlepointed, I attempted cooking, I read a lot.  In essence, I went slightly mad.  Wow, I could have had a great blog if only computers and the blogging universe had existed back then.  Ah, well.

Anyway, I had a baby and knitted him and his little cousins baby things until we moved to Casper, WY and I got a real job.  No more time to do much of anything except work and yell at the kid, so I ceased knitting.  Flash forward thirty years to my retirement.  The Golden years, such as.  I happened on, purely by chance, a small group of like-minded women who wanted to learn to knit.  A couple of us already knitted or knew the basics, so we began to meet every week and in one of those lucky coincidences (yeah, yeah, I know - there are no coincidences) we all gelled, bonded, became buddies.  Call it what you want, I call it a remedy for insanity.  If our group was harnessed to a time machine, we would be ruling the universe in some distant, yarn-filled hegemony with dominance over the less vocal craft alliances.

Back here on Earth, however, we do alright.  We knit a wide variety of items, but lately we have all (or mostly all) decided to knit felted slippers.  I resisted felting for a long time because I had a bad experience with wool early in my marriage.  I'll preface it by saying that I grew up in the sunny south where sheep are only good for lamb chops.  If I ever owned a piece of woolen apparel,  I've forgotten what on earth it could have been.  I vaguely remember that my uncle wore wool suits in the winter, but I never became acquainted with the material on an itchy, personal level.  So imagine my surprise when I married a Western outdoorsman who was inordinately fond of wool shirts and coats and socks and mittens and hats...you get the idea.  The man liked wool.  Pendleton wool is a primo variety of the genre and they make beautiful shirts in lots of pretty plaids and solids.   Uh, and they shrink when you put them in the hot water cycle.

To this day, my husband washes his own clothes.

When my knitting group explained to me that I would need to shrink a woolen garment upon which I had lavished attention and time - not to mention money for Cascade 220 - I was horrified.  I could still hear the wails of dismay coming from my young husband's mouth.  Nope.  I don't think I'll go there.  But they insisted that they'd help me, encourage me and tell me how wonderful the slippers were - even if they shrunk up small enough to fit my whippet, Lucy.  Yeah, right, I thought.  But I did it anyway.  The slippers knitted up like a breeze but looked really strange and BIG.

The photo doesn't show how much bigger the slippers are than normal-sized feet, so perhaps this photo will clear up any misconceptions.

That is one big slipper, and very fashionble.  Of course, my knitting group didn't think so.


Once I finished knitting the slippers, grafted on the double soles so that they would be cushy and comfy, it was time to felt.  I ran a tub of hot water in the washing machine - with just a skush of detergent and two bath towels for extra agitation - and threw them in...with my eyes closed.  If I had been a praying woman, the ceiling would have been plastered with "Please, please, please don't let them become doll slippers."  Instead, I just pestered the hell out of them by opening the top of the washer, pulling them out and gasping because they were dragged out to a yard's length by the weight of the water.  And, my skush of detergent produced a buttload of bubbles that turned the slippers white with lathery soap.  Not going well.

Finally, I threw up my hands and left them alone for ten minutes or so and was amazed to find that when I came back to check on them, the felting process had begun.  They weren't as stretchy - still about six inches longer than my feet - but smaller than a sombrero.  Each time I pulled them out, I tried the wet, woolly-smelling things on my feet.  This wasn't my favorite part of the process because first I had to strip the soap off, wiggle my feet into the slippers and try to imagine if they would be the correct size when they dried off.  It was a touch and go process - putting your feet into wet, clingy sheep-leavings.  Takes a lot of imagination to get past the undeniably weird idea that wool shrinks.  I mean, does it shrink on the sheep?

When I was finally satisfied that I had done as much as I could to create footwear out of yarn, I took them out, stuffed the toes with paper and placed them in front of the fire to dry.  The next morning - Voila! - I had slippers.  That fit.  That looked cool.  That I loved!  Yay.  And here they are.

Now that I've felted one thing (or rather two things), I think I'll felt something else.  A purse, maybe, or a tote.  Or Mittens or a hat.  Or even more slippers.  But first I think I'll dance in these for a while.

Really. Are there any bad mysteries? Uh, regrettably, yes.

A bad mystery novel is like a burned crunchy Cheeto.  You root around in the bag blindly with your orange cheesy fingers searching for the perfectly shaped cheese tidbit.  You bring one up to your lips only to find, with that first bite, that it tastes a little...funny.  A little too crunchy.  The flavor is slightly overdone, although by now your tongue's tastebuds have been obliterated by a half a bag of salty, crunchy snacks that have rendered your mouth puckered and taste-dead.  But still, there's something wrong with this Cheeto.  You look keenly at the remaining half clutched in your fingers and OH MY GOD it's brown!  Brown!  Not Cheeto orange like nothing else seen in nature, but brown like your first attempt at baking biscuits.  Just this side of charred.  And now there's a nasty taste in your mouth.  Ugh.


Well, that's how I felt when I finished MALICE IN THE HIGHLANDS by Graham Thomas.  Like I'd been handed a burned Cheeto.  Letdown.  Disappointed.  But it was my fault for buying it based solely on the premise that it is set in Scotland and Scotland is where I'm going in September.  I was browsing the Kindle Store and there it was, enticing me with visions of salmon streams in spate rushing over the verdant hills of the Scottish highlands.  Ahh.  Stupid Marsha.  I'm so easily led astray, especially when it comes to books and most especially when it comes to mysteries.

I love mysteries.  Always have ever since I discovered Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys way, way back in the dark ages when only Agatha Christie existed in the genre along with the noir detective novels that had scantily clad floozies on the cover.  My father liked the floozy variety.  Once I had outgrown Nancy, I loved Dame Agatha with her simple story lines and flat characterizations.  Quick reads that had me rushing to the public library every week, then rushing home and devouring my little mysteries with my little gray cells and orange-stained fingers.  Yes, the Cheetos analogy was born along with my love of reading mysteries.  I thought nothing could be more entertaining than to sit down with Miss Marple or Poirot and while away a quick hour or two knocking off a British cosy.  Now I realize that Agatha Christie was merely the hook that I took in my brain and never got loose.  I'm not satisfied with poor plotting now that I've been reading a plethora of better British writers for more years than Miss Marple had knitted shawls.

My favorites include a few Scottish mystery writers that put Graham Thomas in the shade: Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Alexander McCall Smith to name a few.  I'm terribly afraid that Mr. Thomas won't make my list based on his first endeavor.  Should I give him a chance with MALICE IN CORNWALL?  Not ready yet, I'm afraid. Perhaps in the future if it goes on sale in the Kindle store (and, really, does that ever happen?).  Until then, I'm left with the memory of interminable dialogue about short selling in the Canadian stock market (no lie!) and extremely poor editing throughout the book.  Now, whether this is a function of the author or of the Kindle translation is up for discussion.  There were no text breaks for scenes, which as a writer, really aggravates me to no end.  There were numerous boo-boos of editing - too numerous to mention, which had me shaking my head and cursing mildly.  I always read my Kindle in bed so it doesn't do to get too lathered that late at night.  After all, I don't want to lose any sleep over a rant, even if it's a well deserved rant.

To be fair, there were some good parts of MALICE IN THE HIGHLANDS.  The main characters were fairly well-drawn.  The main character, Erskine Powell, had a catchy name.  He had some angst, like lusting after a main suspect and thinking of her while he made love to his bitchy wife.  And DS Powell complained about his job a lot.  For CID Supers that was pretty progressive.   Hmmm. Possibilities.  The descriptions of the landscape were evocative of romantic Scotland.  I quite liked that. But the mystery itself had more red herrings than salmon in the River Spey.  Ha.  Now, mysteries need red herrings, but good god, man!  What were you thinking?

Ah, well.  I love a good book rant over a bad book, don't you?  Or even a book rant over a mostly-good book that has a few issues that raise my blood pressure.  Like ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG.  Errggh!  Don't get me started.