>no one really want to read words without looking at pictures, but i am really lazy about taking them. plus, my camera has run out of batteries and i am too lazy to charge it. well, not too lazy exactly, but to make a long story short, baki got a little lego camera for christmas and he took some photos(that’s a link to a flickr album) when we went on a walk last week.
it had been cloudy on and off for ages, and finally rained last night, so the pick axes and shovels are on the shelf until the soil dries out again. as i took baki to school this morning, the sun broke through the clouds for a moment and it was just gorgeous. everything had been drenched, so i was looking at tree trunks slick with water, grass that shone, earth deep and rich, stones bright. a moment later, the sun was again behind the clouds and everything went back to normal, which is also pretty nice to look at.
i had an interesting sort of epiphany the other night. when i took out the woolens last october, i was horrified to find that there were huge holes in some of the sweaters and socks. moths? mice? it was particularly distressing to see them in garments that i had hand knit for ali and baki, namely ali’s socks and baki’s sweaters (lest i sound like some sort of knitting superhero, let me just point out that i knit baki exactly one sweater a year, and this year i am not even doing sleeves — i decided on a vest) my immediate response was denial, impenetrable denial. i just bundled everything up together and resolutely ignored the problem.
for whatever reason, i decided the other day to look up how to mend knitted garments online and found this very encouraging article at one of my very favorite knitting websites (i know that this is going deep into territory where only the smallest number of people could possibly care about what i am writing about here…). thus prepared, i got out baki’s sweater and ali’s socks and got to work.
i am no stranger to mending, as the mother of a child who, when he sees a big boulder thinks, “slide!” many are the hours i have spent sewing his clothes back together. mending his sweater though, was less like repairing than recreating the fabric of the sweater. it was such a fiddly yet satisfying task, and perhaps it was the sound of ali and baki snoring away in the loft beds overhead that made me feel as if i were doing something secret, so that the repairs would seem as if they had happened magically. of course, that is supposing that anyone would notice that they had been made, which naturally no one did, but the moral here is, don’t despair when there is a hole in your favorite sweater — an interesting puzzle awaits!