…Chaucer! I mean—ah—let me start over. ahem ::Orson Welles-like voice::  Who isn’t afraid of Chaucer? Okay, Chaucer scholars probably aren’t and… ummmm… no one else. Right? Because it seems so old. And hard. And dry. And boring. And yet…NOT! I’ve been doing a little experiment over at CraftLit and I’m pretty excited about how it’s panning out. Other people seem to be pretty happy about it...

…to dye yarn with Easter egg dye! Never done it before? Check out the link above and see what Tara has to show you. Big fun; no whammies!

I have had the pleasure and honor of working with Ms Hunter Hammersen a few times and I am here to tell you that you will never be disappointed with her patterns. Why am I bothering to broadcast this to you now? Because her new book it out! Yes! The Knitter’s Curiosity Cabinet is a lovely concept and a lovlier book. Head over here, Ravelry: The Knitter’s Curiosity Cabinet, and have a...

I learned how to make this shawl so long ago, I don’t recall the when or the where. I made a lot of them. They were easy—and because of this pattern I never had a fear of short-rows. I was doing them without knowing they had a name. Students who had just learned to knit in the wake of the 9/11 attacks helped me knit one for our principal (see below). You can see how lovely the shawl can be with completely random (though related) colors...

Last year on the Dickens blog hop we offered this over on the What Would Madame Defarge Knit? website. Now it’s here for you! Holiday Freebies for You! A gift from us to you—Christmas Cards from the Good Madame (who is only interested in righting wrongs and vanquishing injustice, after all…which is almost sort of in the spirit of the season…mostly…) Based on the art used in the Crachette Pattern from the Dickens of...

I occasionally write about movies here, but only occasionally. Mostly because I don’t get out much any more, but also because being a movie critic—let me amend that—being a good movie critic is a tricky art. I truly feel that to be useful as a critic you have to look at what the writers and directors were trying to accomplish and then analyze whether they achieved their goal. This means going a fair bit beyond “two...