laundry day blues over whites

As I was putting the laundry away yesterday, I noticed that I have six white shirts in my closet.  Two of them have three-quarter length sleeves.  Two of them have short sleeves, and two of them are sleeveless.  None of them are exactly what I want.  That's obvious, I guess, or I won't have to buy six of them.  I have a picture in my mind of exactly what I am looking for, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere in the more than two years that I have been in the market for white shirts.

I suspect I could find something looking like what I want on line, but I have not had good results with ordering clothes on line.  Clothes that look great on teeny models look less than great on me.  And I like to try on multiple sizes.  You know, like, this size is okay, but would I look even better in the next smaller size? Or, more likely, do I need the next bigger size?

Maybe what I want is just too plain.  Maybe I am shopping in the wrong places.  Whatever.  Like Bono, I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

how I spent my birthday

Yesterday Ben and I bought seven new light fixtures. How many light fixtures do we have in this house? Well, about seven. They are all hideous. We bought a fixture for the foyer, the hall, the little dining room that we are using as a library, two for the kitchen and two to go outside the front and side doors. The fixture for the "library" will also have a ceiling fan - the only one in the house. We got quite used to having ceiling fans in our last house, and it didn't seem right not to have any.

When are we going to install all these fixtures? Well, we're not. We are hiring someone to do it. We need some electrical work done anyway, and when the electrician was here a couple of weeks ago, he said it would be any easy thing for him to do. Imagine that. Someone who thinks killing the power and switching the fixtures is easy. I can't begin to tell you what a hassle it is for the two of us to do something like that. If you have ever done it yourself, perhaps you know.

In addition to the light fixtures we bought new house numbers, window well covers, and a large recycle bin. We also took a little print - perhaps it is a lithograph - to the local framing shop to have it framed. So I spent my birthday shopping and buying things - a great many things - and that made it a great day. I just really don't want to know how much we spent. I mean it.

local yarn report (like the local farm report, except...different)

It may sound like a busman's holiday since I work in a yarn shop, but Julie and I visited a different yarn store every day that I was with her. It was great. If you don't go to a big box store, independent yarn shops are as different from one another as they can possibly be. Think of the independent book stores, for example, that you have been in and you will start to understand what I mean.

On Thursday, we went to A Tangled Skein in Hyattsville, just south of College Park. It was the biggest shop we visited, and the one where we spent the most time. I loved the selection of yarns there, but the lighting was not good, especially towards the back of the store. I bought a skein of beautiful, hand-dyed sock yarn there. It is a 50/50 blend of merino and tencel, and the tencel shimmers in the light.

Our Friday trip took us to Fells Point in Baltimore to visit A Good Yarn. I'm afraid that shop got two thumbs down from us. It wasn't just that the space was incredibly small, it was more the fact that there was almost no yarn on the shelves. Nothing was priced - which I know is not uncommon - and the gentleman behind the counter made both of us uncomfortable as he commented on every skein of yarn we touched. The much larger room in the back of the shop seemed to be used exclusively for classes, and I would have liked to have seen more inventory available there. This shop was a disappointment and will not merit a return trip.

Saturday found us in Baltimore again to attend Squidfire's Spring Art Mart in Fells Point. Then we headed to Hampden for lunch at Golden West Cafe, and to check out Lovelyarns, housed in the first floor of one of Baltimore's ubiquitous row houses. It was a delightful little shop, and I bought some sock yarn for Julie and some brightly-colored, hand-dyed yarn for myself. I had been advised to check out the restroom there, which I did. I found it very charming, but have to admit I didn't like it as well as our restroom at Miss Chickpea's. Shelly did have an eye for design - I will always give her that.

We decided to spend Sunday (Mother's Day) the same place we did last year - in St. Michael's, a small resort town on the Chesapeake Bay. One of our stops was at Frivolous Fibers, a yarn shop that also sells pottery and ceramics. That's a concept I can get behind. I was a little surprised to find a knitting group there on Mother's Day, and was glad when the knitter who wouldn't shut up (there's always one!) finally left. Julie and I browsed at our leisure after that. I resisted the temptation to buy several skeins of a beautiful worsted weight yarn, and have decided I can, indeed, live without it.

Although there was certainly some overlap in the brands and types of yarns we saw on our yarn crawl, the variety was amazing. Savvy shop owners know what keeps their steady customers coming back, as well as what tempts newbies to come in and look around. That's a win-win situation as far as I'm concerned.

random memories of a small-town childhood, part 237

Before there was Walmart, mothers actually bought quality clothing for their children. When my brothers and I were little, our mother generally took us clothes shopping at the Jack & Jill Shop on Broad Street. We went to Weiss Shoes next door where they carried Red Goose Shoes when we needed shoes, although I know they sold shoes at Jack & Jill's as well. I know this because I remember very clearly the little painted wooden chairs where children sat as they tried on shoes. The chairs were painted to look like brightly-colored seated clowns, so when you sat in a chair it was as though you were sitting in the clown's lap. Those chairs creeped us out. Because as children know, clowns are innately creepy. At the same time, we were fascinated by them, and we crawled along the row of four or five of them from lap to lap as our mother shopped and chatted interminably with the shop owner. She was a talker.

The winter I was five or six years old, I needed a new coat to wear to church. My mother had promised me that I could pick it out myself, and I was thrilled at the prospect. We walked downtown to Jack & Jill's, and I picked out a purple wool dress coat. I don't remember anything else about it, but it was very purple. I loved it. It turned out to be not at all what my mother had in mind. "How about this one?" she asked me, holding up a somber tweed coat with a black velvet collar. "It has some purple in it," she said, pointing to some little nubs of color in the fabric. So much more appropriate to wear to the hoity-toity Congregational church where we attended, but never belonged.

More than fifty years later, I still remember a small girl's disappointment in the choice she wasn't allowed to make. But you should see the beautiful purple suede jacket I wear now.