Posted by Heather on Feb 23, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | Comments Off on
Thanks nine-eleven
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Feb 22, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | 1 comment
But pretty good Tahitian dancer
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Feb 22, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | Comments Off on Surf dudes
Takin' after grandpa. . .
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Feb 22, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | Comments Off on Big tree. Little kids.
(and a food court!)
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Feb 22, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | Comments Off on Thing One’s fave breakfast
Rice, soy sauce, miso, salmon, guava juice.
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Feb 22, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | Comments Off on Surf’s up!
Need a board? there are plenty more. . .
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Feb 22, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | Comments Off on Sunset Waikiki!
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Feb 22, 2008 in Family, Love, Travel | Comments Off on Boys. Leid.
At the first hotel, Princess Kaiulani at Waikiki
HeatherViaPhone
Posted by Heather on Jan 14, 2008 in Blog Fun, Love, Writing | 12 comments
I first met
Thor during my trial period as
Andrew’s fiancé. I understood during this time that if I was rejected by Nancy, Kathy, or Thor, there probably wouldn’t be a wedding.
Um…pressure?
You have no idea.
Nancy, Kathy, and Thor are some of the smartest, funniest, quickest, best people I’ve ever met. And while I grew to love them all, Thor always held a special place in my heart for a number of reasons:
- I’d heard hundreds of stories about him while dating Andrew six years earlier (including his climbing Half-Dome, slipping, falling forty feet onto his head, then getting drunk at a New Year’s party shortly thereafter and pulling his stitches out for fun);
- I’d spent a considerable amount of time while dating Andrew wearing a discarded Rugby jersey of Thor’s;
- I didn’t believe any of the stories about him were true… until I met him. And realized they’d probably been played down from their technicolor reality;
- Any time you have the opportunity to meet an actual Norwegian Thunder God…well…it’s a special event.
There are many who knew him better than I and many who will post about him with more of value to say, but he’s in my heart too. He was…blustery. He didn’t suffer fools. He was not an easy person.
But he was good. I’m sure there are female Democratic operatives (and
Ann Coulter) who might like to disagree with me on that as he wasn’t exactly P.C., but he never,
never treated me with anything but respect (once he approved me as Andrew’s To-Be). And honestly, Andrew and an age-old friendship aside, if he didn’t like me, I (and anyone nearby) would have known it.
I think that moment where I earned his stamp-of-approval came at a bar in Atlanta where I was suffering from an hellacious spider bite. I asked the waiter if I could get a black tea bag and boiling water. He looked at me as though I had just stepped off the surface of Mars, when I explained that my Mother-in-Law-to-be had showed me how I could take a boiling hot tea bag and apply it to the bites to alleviate the pain/itch. (Yeah, it hurts, but it must open the pores enough to get some tannins in there b/c it works.) Anyhoo, the waiter said he had no tea bags but he’d be back with some bacon.
If I recall correctly there were a few beats of silence before we all started sniggering, thinking he was an idiot (I believe this is where I was also introduced to the phrase, “parts is parts…”). The waiter returned with several strips of bacon which he–no joke–scotch taped to my leg. There’s photographic proof of this in one of Nancy’s albums (and it worked for a bit!–thanks to Nancy for the photographic evidence…see below). That’s the same night I took a picture of Nancy, Katie, and Thor. And that’s the night Thor told Andrew it was okay with him if we got married.
Later, I managed to hunt Thor down in Croatia…Serbia…Kosovo I think…somewhere that was broken, that he was helping fix…and asked him if he would be able to make it to my husband’s 40th birthday party. I fully expected an, “I’d love to, but…” response because, Dude…he was in Kosovo.
What I got was, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”
He’s the one who snuck upstairs with me to put ALL the candles on Andrew’s cake. He’s the one who carried it down dark and dangerous steps at Marie’s Crisis and presented it to Andrew (I was pretty largely pregnant at the time).
He’s the one who could always make me laugh…generally inappropriately, but laugh a lot.
Anyway, like I said, there are plenty of hundreds of people who knew him better than me, but it’s important to remember, right? It’s important not just to be a Speaker For the Dead, but a Speaker OF the Dead. It’s the only way he stays alive, yeah? In stories. In legends (but seriously, he did fall off Half Dome and took the stitches out at the party). And in our hearts.
And I fully expect to see a
Facebook posting or get an email from him tomorrow saying,
“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated…”
It would be like him…
And a perfectly Thor picture.
You can read details of the tragedy
here and a more complete version with his name in it from the kind Rhonda Cook at the Atlanta Journal Constitution
here.
Posted by Heather on Dec 15, 2007 in Knitting, tutorial | 3 comments
NOTICE: Desperately seeking Bouton D’Or Flash in a vaguely gold colorway–I think the color number is 075 but I’m not sure (I’m looking at the ball band, but who knows…)
Contact me at MamaOKNits [at] gmail [dot] com if you are a goddess who is in possession of such stuff…
PLEASE!
So
I’m a fanatic for sock darning now that I’ve been knitting the darn things.Here’s my step by step for you, so you can join me in my new nuttiness. Understand though, that this isn’t probably the most detailed tutorial. I do expect that you have a basic idea of what you’re about to undertake, but I also figured you’d not be knitting socks if you didn’t:
First, create a vertical scaffold for your darning. It’ll help keep you in line and give you some useful strings to hang on when you need them.
(yeah, it’s blurry, but it’s close-in and you can see the white vertical stripes)
In fact, the more regular you can be about the placement of said scaffolds the happier you’ll be.
If you can put them on the insides or outsides of stitches all the way across, so that you KNOW what your threads are doing, you’ll be in good shape. If you have no idea what I’m talking
about, don’t worry. It won’t kill you (and you may figure it out by the end).
Start a few rows below where you need to be. You’re going to either create stit
ches in that void using the thread guides, or you’re going to pull stitches down from the top and darn them together with stitches at the bottom of your hole…or a little of both. Which is what I did.
So here you can see a couple of rows completed in duplicate stitch. If you’ve never done this before check out this tutorial (and this video…scroll down to “joining a new color yarn”… oh, and this tutorial too…). It’s MUCH easier than you think, though I found working on the purl side even easier when I first started. But this is pretty easy too.
See where the needle comes in and out? That’s actually connecting the top loops of the stitches on either side of that needle. Like linking elbows in a long chain. That’s it. That’s the whole secret of knitting right there.
Easy.
This is the next pic in line. Notice in the pic above this, the yarn tail is coming down from the top? Now it’s coming up from the bottom.
AH
And the top is where it’ll end up at the end of this stitch. You’ll also see (even through the haze of the flash) that there’s VERY LITTLE that I’m able to grab onto with the needle. In fact, most of what I’m stitching through is ground-down fluff from the original sock yarn.
C’est la guerre.
Regardless, this is where those little white threads come in handy. I can hook those as well as whatever fluff I can manage. From this point on, I’ll be using those guide threads until I can get close enough to the top row of the hole to start snagging those loops…until then…it’s a high wire act.
And in this pic you can see just how far I’ve had to reach UP to get at anything…even a tiny little snag that I know would pull out with a gentle tug. That’s fine though, because I’m going to continue my rows above that, so I’ll be “linking arms” with those stitches. I just can’t pull it hard NOW.
And that’s pretty much it. Go AT LEAST two rows past where your hole was…
And now, I’m off to darn another!
MamaO is Heather Ordover, author, designer, mother and knitter... not necessarily in that order. You can get posts from this blog sent directly to your inbox by signing up below, Follow her on Twitter and Like her on Facebook if you're feeling friendly-like.
Latest CraftLit
Visit HOrdover's Craftsy Pattern Store »