Best Quote I Heard All Day
There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.--Dorothy Parker

Fortunately, there is little charm on this blog.

Bestest Places in the Cybarena
Last night I was making an effort to clean up and organize my bookmarks. I have a bad habit of bookmarking anything that is even vaguely interesting.

And I realized that there are sites I return to frequently. So for your eddy-fuc-ation, I thought I'd give you some of my favorites, one in each category.

• Knitting
• Yarndex--I don't know who put this together but it's a fantastic database of most of the yarn companies, their yarns and pertinent data. If you read about a yarn and you want to know what it looks like, suggested gauge, needles, yardage, this is the place with the info.
  
  
• Spinning
• The Joy of Handspinning--I've mentioned this site before and it deserves another mention. Whether you are just starting or you are an experienced spinner, this is an excellent resource.
  
  
• Weaving
• Handweaving.net--More than 50,000 weaving drafts, all free. In addition, it now incorporates Ralph Griswold's Digital Archive on Weaving, Textiles, Lace and Related Topics. Griswold and a group of volunteers are collecting and archiving all sorts of arcane publications, scanning them and making them available in .pdf format.
  

And here's one last place to visit. This is serious business.

Wherein Liz Determines to Ham It Up for the Camera
I finished the cuff last night and got Liz to try it on to make sure the loop on the end of the cuff was the right length. Many thanks to Ted for suggesting this idea. It was the one she liked and it worked perfectly.

Before you ask, yes, I made it longer per Liz's wishes. She wears everything long.

The I-cord loop worked perfectly. I decreased the cuff down to 3 stitches, worked 3 inches of I-cord, attached it to the base and then looped the end around the base, tightened it and wove in the ends. Here's a close-up of the finished loop.

Slipping the first stitch of every cuff row made a neat edging while I was decreasing the 1/1 rib. She's pleased, I'm pleased. A number of these pictures that I've taken will go into the directions for the sweater, which I'll publish via The Knitting Vault.

There will be enough yarn left over for a Rasta hat of some kind, I think. We'll see. I'm truly jonesin' to get back to the Melanie shawl. Because that June wedding will be here before I know it.

Birgit Nilsson
Many of you know that I'm a fan of opera. So I was saddened to read about the death of Birgit Nilsson in the New York Times yesterday. She died on Christmas Day but apparently the news was only just released. She was 87.

Birgit Nilsson was the first opera star I ever saw, singing in the first opera I ever saw, Die Walkure by Richard Wagner (sorry, can't do the umlauts). My parents were members of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and my mother thought that at 8, I was old enough to attend an opera. So she took me out of school and we went to a dress rehearsal. Guild members got free tickets to those, two a year, if memory serves. In 1958, Nilsson was arguably at the height of her career. I never forgot that performance, even though I was probably too young at the time to truly understand much.

Here's an audio clip of her singing Hojotoho, the famous aria from Die Walkure.

And yeah, I do love "What's Opera, Doc" because I also love Looney Tunes. Kill da wabbit.

Looney Tunes and grand opera. Perfectly rare and handy.