spaazlicious

So, I'm up to working the body of the previously-ripped-and-to-be-modified-Meringue-Yoke-cardigan, and I tried to give drop spindling another shot after seeing the amazing work of Stephanie at the meetup, the women at the S/MFFF, and the speedy spinners of Chiapas. My bit of knitting and spinning don't look like much, and Bélu horned in on the picture. I placed the items for the photo shoot on the dog bed in the spare bedroom because it is one of the few places in our house not covered in dog hair or little bits of paper and she decided to help.



I asked her to go away (because her movements where threatening to pull stitches off the needles) so don't believe that sullen "just get the pictures over with" look on her face.

Speaking of strange facial expressions, has anyone seen the new
Patternworks catalogue? What is up with the models? Are they having a mortician do the make-up? Very creepy faces of pancake death make-up in shades of gray and brown, or the few faces which don't look like they belong to propped up corpses either have the sullen/annoyed Bélu face going, or in one case, appear to be caught mid-bowel movement. There's even a baby who looks a little taxidermied, with his blond hair spit-smeared down on his liitle head. Not exactly the look I'd be aiming for in selling knitstuff, but I'm always behind the marketing curve.

Coincidentally, I picked up this great book yesterday:



It's very funny, and interesting, and contains this great bit from a chapter on "resurrectionists" [those who made money stealing corpses from graves to supply anatomists for dissection purposes]:

So similar in their treatment were the dead to ordinary items of commerce that every now and then boxes would be mixed up in transit. James Moores Ball, author of The Sack-'Em-Up Men, tells the tale of the flummoxed anatomist who opened a crate delivered to his lab expecting a cadaver but found instead "a very fine ham, a large cheese, a basket of eggs, and a huge ball of yarn." One can only imagine the surprise and very special disappointment of the party expecting a very fine ham, cheese, eggs, or a huge ball of yarn, who found instead a well-packed but quite dead Englishman. [p.47]

So maybe that's where Patternworks is going, branching out a bit in their mail-order business.