fat fat fat fat

Happy Fat Tuesday!

Not that any of us need to get any fatter (Ok, Ian could use a little more fat, but he's the only one), but Fiona and I happily made our way to Copernicus Deli this morning to buy some strawberry and prune filled paczki. Fiona was amazed to discover that the trays of paczki were stacked taller than her:
They trucked these, and many more like them, in from Hamtramck and they were tasty--yeastier than a regular donut and the not-overly-sweet prune filling helped my grown up taste buds handle the sugary richness.

Of course, we couldn't leave with just a few paczki, so I also picked up some sauerkraut with caraway, a baton of polish sausage and some mushroom-filled pierogi. We'll have those for dinner later this week.
The book I'm reading right now fits in perfectly with this splurge of Polish delicacies, Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife. I really like the content of the book about the Polish family who ran the Warsaw Zoo and the ways they helped hundreds of Jews escape and hide during the Nazi Occupation.

But I am struggling with Ackerman's writing style. Her prose is florid, which I've appreciated in other settings (there is a lovely poem about pink Amazon river dolphins in her book The Moon by Whale Light), but which I'm finding distracting here. There are tons of digressions, some of which have scientific or historical information, but which also make following the progress of Jan, Antonina and their "guests" hard to follow. I feel like Ackerman is trying too hard to convince us of Jan and Antonina's heroism with this laden prose--their actions speak very clearly to their courage and I wish the story was told simply. Instead I find myself skimming and dodging through the book, trying to follow the narrative and not get side tracked.

Cozy

I've been having some problems storing my MP3 player in my purse--the headphone wires always get tangled up, the player is so small it gets lost at the bottom and when I retrieve it, stray bits of popcorn are statically attached to the player (thanks to Fiona, the popcorn fiend, it seems like there is popcorn everywhere. I found some in my bed the other day which did not please me one bit.)

So I made it a little cozy:
I used some red wool felt, two snaps and a small amount of the miles of bias tape that I made with my cool bias tape maker (and after I made, I had no idea what to do with it).
And now I just have to pick the popcorn off of the felt...

Knitting virtue rewarded

I was very virtuous and used yarn that I salvaged from a sweater I knit back in the early 90s (think dated geometric triangles and stripes...) to make this sweater vest:
The photo is a bit warped due to the angle I took the photo, but essentially it is a long knit tube. I didn't use a pattern, just cast on circular needles and added a little 1x1 ribbing up either side of the rib cages to give it a little flex and not to have to worry about shaping.

I made it to address the fashion conundrum that I've had of late. I've had a revulsion for confinement around my waist area my whole life so I love reasonably low-rise jeans (not the butt-crack showing super low-rise pants, but the normalish low-rise jeans). I've essentially been wearing low rise jeans all my life; before they made them for women, I bought men's jeans which are naturally lower in the rise department.

But while the fashion industry has been dropping the waistband of women's jeans, they haven't been lengthening the hems of shirts. If I was a different demographic I probably wouldn't mind showing off my midrif now and again. But this style is not kind for a) the unemaciated or b) pretty much anyone who has had a kid and doesn't have a personal trainer or c) anyone who doesn't like a draft of cold air wafting around their middle.

Thus the vest. It is long, designed to cover that gap between shirt bottom and jean top, to keep my tummy to myself and to stop the damn draft.

Since I was so virtuous using old yarn and no pattern for the vest, I figured I deserved a treat. So yesterday I went to Flying Sheep and bought this pattern:
And then went on-line and bought this yarn with which to make the above sweater:
This wasn't my first choice of pattern--I really want to make the Paton's Urban Aran sweater:
from the Street Smart booklet:
But everyone is out of the pattern and are waiting for reprints. When I eventually get my greedy hands on the pattern, I plan to make it a zipper cardigan like the beautiful one seen at brooklyntweed, though in charcoal gray.