Holiday Weekends

This holiday weekend has been especially lovely. Not only did Andi and her husband host a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with two kinds of stuffing and cranberry sauce with crystallized ginger and other undisclosed special ingredients, but I got to hang out with friends on turkey day and knit. Being invited and included meant a great deal to me.

I had planned to take Rum Balls. I planned ahead for the ingredients and shopped in advance -- except for one crucial ingredient. Many years ago, I bought a giant bottle of rum and kept it in a kitchen cupboard next to my recipe box. (This doesn't qualify as a family tradition -- more of a family habit -- but if I were looking for rum at my parents' house, grandparents' house, or sister's house, the rum would be in a lower kitchen cupboard next to the recipe box.) In any case, when I moved out of my parents house, I bought a bottle of rum to use when I made things like rum balls. Since then, the bottle has always been there and always produced when called upon. The holiday cookies, the occasional rum and coke in the summer, the special ice cream sauce. . . until this Thanksgiving. The never-ending bottle of rum produced only a quarter cup of rum before the bottle was empty. I was shocked, but managed to recover and scrounge around for a different offering. Andi didn't blink at a substitution and happily accepted a bottle of wine instead. 

The rest of the weekend has been filled with crocheting and knitting and spinning. Since the green stuff roving is all gone, a replacement was in order. The crimson combed top from Christopher and Nancy Mercer's The Naked Pines was impossible to resist. I tried very hard. From the moment Mimi carried it out of the backroom at Twist, I wanted it. The reasoning about having several pounds of BFL at home that were waiting to be dyed or the several pounds of Border Leicester didn't make any difference. This needed to come home with me, and I'm glad it did. It is spinning up beautifully in subtle shades of a dark red. Mmmm. Just what I need to fuel the holiday spirit.

Mom even came to Twist to knit with me and Jill. She's working on a Christmas stocking for a grandchild. These stockings have a long tradition in our family, and she said this is her twenty-first stocking. It is the traditional bright green, red, and white intarsia stocking with a little bit of blue as an accent. She was having a hard time focusing on the stocking since she was sitting right next a bulky Rowan wool and some lovely worsted alpaca. She was also intrigued with a striped scarf that Jill was knitting with Noro. I think she might be interested in some non-seasonal knitting.