Week 51 Challenge

#28 Boxed Shells

63 Easy to Crochet Pattern Stitches Combine to Make an Heirloom Afghan

Leisure Arts

This is a basic shell stitch that is so simple that it's pretty. This summer I am taking a workshop on designing and I plan to use this stitch for a lacy shell top.

Projects in Progress

Dazzling Details Jacket

Design by Garnstudio/Drops Design

Crochet! September 2009

Baby Bee Yarn Sweet Delight, Grape Jelly

The jacket is not quite done. I still have the pockets and then blocking. It is soooooooooooo soft. The pattern calls for buttons on the cuff, but I am going to skip that. Large buttons on cuffs tend to get in my way. The only other change I made was to make the jacket a little longer.

What I am Reading

This week I finished Beloved by Toni Morrison. In this quote Paul D is remembering his various escapes and once again, love comes through:

"And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and low-lying rivers. Or just a house--solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it."

Beloved is a harsh book about slavery, not just the facts, but how the people enslaved felt and the extremes they went to for freedom, for themselves and for the children they were forbidden to love.

On a side note, the last page of the book says several times: "This is not a story to pass on." This reminds me of the "Notice" before the beginning of Huckleberry Finn . Mark Twain states: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR." With this Twain dares his book to be critiqued...Morrison is daring readers to pass the story on and I pass it on to you. Read it.

Other Stuff

Today is Easter Sunday. We had to cancel our traditional egg hunt today because of the rain that won't go away. No matter your religion, blessings to you on this day.

Have a good week!