Yarn School! (posted by Lani)

Dear Ann,

I think your cranes are fabulous, and beautiful, and I also think you definitely need to string them together and festoon your office with cranes until you're done -- and then do send them to the Hiroshima Project, the address is in that link along with the stringing instructions. On the subject of those cranes, I have to wonder if you remember when we were kidlets and lived in Alexandria, just before Dad retired from the Army and we moved to Florida. We had gone ... somewhere? Maybe Mom will remember, some market with lots of unusual stuff ... and we saw a package of origami paper with instructions on it, and were fascinated by it. I remember folding cranes back then, along with fish and flowers and you name it. You were maybe third grade, kiddo; do you have any memories of this at all? I look at your beautiful cranes, and I wonder whether the reason you can do them without having to even think about it is that your fingers still remember. Maybe not, but it sure brought back memories for me.

The pic from your sailing trip is so funny! How could you leave your wine out to get wet?? You may not be a real Weaver if you're leaving the booze behind when you evacuate, girl.

Here on the east coast the heat wave finally broke, just in time for my friend Cathy to finally manage to get up for a (far too short) visit this weekend. Both Steve and I thoroughly enjoyed having her here. I think I told you Steve had bought a big ol' honkin' TV and that I was going to have to finally break down and actually do something with the living room just to accomodate it, so Cathy and I went furniture shopping Saturday. Such fun! We took the new camera with us (let me digress a moment to say that thus far I love it and would unhesitatingly recommend it) and spent roughly 6 hours on Saturday going from furniture store to furniture store, snapping pictures of everything that passed muster as a possibility. Then we came home and put on a slide show for Steve -- and let me tell you, this is the way to do it with a guy who hates shopping.

Within about 20 minutes after we got home we'd narrowed the possibilities for a console table down to two, picked out two new pictures for the wall, and narrowed cocktail table possibilities down to three. We hopped back into the car, zipped down to the two stores that had the finalists, and in no time flat had purchased a console table (to be delivered wednesday) and two large pictures (already on the wall). No cocktail or end tables; we need a smaller scale cocktail table and everything we saw was either too large or failed the stability test -- with a 22 pound cat, stability becomes a real concern. We returned home triumphant, had a wonderful dinner, and celebrated with a few after-dinner drinks; altogether a nice productive day. Got up this morning and had a luxuriously late breakfast, enjoyed the absolutely gorgeous weather for a bit, and Cathy was off again.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention that Cathy is also a knitter/crocheter, so while she was here we spent some time comparing favorite patterns, discussing current and future projects, and looking at yarn from her stash, my stash, and elsewhere. There are so many fabulous yarns out there, aren't there? And isn't this a perfect opportunity for me to segue right into my recent discovery of Yarn School, make a few innocent comments about how fascinating it looks and how potentially cool it would be for two sisters who both knit and crochet to learn how to spin their own yarn, and stroll off into the sunset? I thought so too, and what a coincidence that the sun is setting!

Love to you and Don, and to your Steve if you get to talk to him this week, and I hope you had a great weekend too.