I have been blessed with the sweetest, most generous in-laws one could ask for–the sort of folks that are always ready to lend a hand and always have a kind word. Like many of the generation that lived through the depression and World War II, they have the bred in the bone frugality of waste not, want not. In other words, they cannot throw anything away. Anything. So their solution to their bulging closets and overflowing garage is to bring their stuff, I mean gifts, to our house whenever they get a chance.
Invited for dinner last weekend, they arrived with their usual bags and boxes. My father-in-law, a retired high school science teacher, hauled in three crates chock a block full of chemistry papers and biology text books circa 1963, a cigar box holding several neatly labeled fossils trapped in rocks, thirty worm dissectors–one for each student in the class (I’m not making this up, I swear), and a box of booze purchased THIRTY-FIVE years ago for a party which included two bottles of grenadine, one of which was OPEN and had been open for the ENTIRE thirty-five years.
Fish Tail Fossil: My mother-in law’s stash included a crate full of jiffy pop popcorn, the kind you need the special popper for–sans popper, a never worn velour designer track suit that WE gave her in the eighties, nine glass flower vases, the top of a fruit strainer for canning fruits (ONLY the top) and two grocery bags jammed with different colored balls of yarn that were the remnants of a craft project she had led for my husband’s cub scout troop FORTY-TWO years ago. The wool was nothing like the soft alpaca, cashmere or manos de uruguay wools so popular right now in the midst of the current knitting rage. It was thick and itchy, as if it had been sheared off the back of some kind of industrial strength sheep bred for war time blankets and soldier's socks. We laid it out along the counter and stood back, amazed by its hardiness and the depth and richness of the colors. I guess there’s a reason they say “dyed in the wool.” I’d been wanting to knit a backpack for my daughter from “Kids Knitting” by Melanie Falick since I’d first seen it and although we‘d looked high and low for weeks, we’d never found the right yarn. It was either too soft, the wrong color or too expensive. You need alot of yarn to knit a backpack and ever since knitting became the new celebrity hobby, yarn prices have become equivalent to oil prices and there's just something that feels off about knitting a scrappy, throw around backpack with $200 worth of yarn. Well, here it was, the perfect yarn–happily arrived in my kitchen with no fanfare, no shopping and at the perfect price - free! Lumpy Stripes:
I can tell you that even before the roast chicken and potatoes were out of the oven, I knocked that yarn onto size eight 24” circular needles and started knitting. The packaging called for size nine or ten needles, but that’s the thing about knitting–it’s rare (at least for me) to have the exact size and length of needles called for, particularly with circular needles. I added some brick red and Naples yellow scrap yarn from my stash for stripes, but even doubled over it’s not thick enough to match the wool and is lending a textured (lumpy?) look to the bag, but I like it and I’m a happy camper, knitting an industrial strength keepsake for my daughter out of wool bought for her father when he was still into acquiring merit badges and building soap box derby cars. We’ll take some more pics when it’s completed. Now, anybody have any ideas about what to do with thirty worm dissectors?
