A mixed bag of things

Do you ever look at your kids and wonder how you possibly could have given birth to such great guys?  Here is one of them.  Number 2 son, a tall, broad shouldered, big man modeling his completed Brownstone!

It turned out really great, even though , as usual, I gave only glancing attention to the pattern and just sort of followed along in my usual way.  My gauge was different, my number of stitches was different, but even so, still indisputably a Brownstone.  The sweater knit from a pattern without a pattern.

And then just before dinner, Number 1 son and his wife dropped by.  It was the perfect day.

One of the other things that has been going on around Chez Needles is, as ever, the constant reading of books.  I sure don't read like I used to but I do manage to get my fair share of reading in.

I've had an old copy of the letters of Thomas Jefferson for a while now.  It is the perfect thing to read in short bursts of time.  Each letter is self contained and does not rely on what precedes it.  So long as your page is properly marked, you can still move forward in a nice slow procession of time.

That is what reading a book of letters feels like.  Especially old letters.  You move along through a writers life, watches as they change their points of view, watching as history passes, and in this case feeling history being made as you read along and get a real feel for the scope of the man and his life.


I am just to the point where he has been elected president.  I was scanning ahead and a letter titled Friendship Renewed, written to John Adams, caught my eye. So I stopped to read it.  A nice letter about day to day things.   

"Every family in the country is a manufactory within itself, and is very 

generally able to make within itself all the stouter and middling stuffs for 

its own clothing and household use. We consider a sheep for every person in the family as sufficient to clothe it, in addition to the cotton, hemp and flax 

which we raise ourselves. For fine stuff we shall depend on your northern 

manufactories."  (Thomas Jefferson)

See that? "A sheep for every person in the family as sufficient to clothe it."

People often ask how I know little detaily things.  Now you know.  And, once read from paper, not easily forgotten.

So, when I'm are trying to sort out how much fibre one needs to clothe oneself for a year, I would say 2 fleeces considering that in Virginia, they likely sheered twice a year.  This would be offset by the lack of truly deep, cold weather (which Jefferson addresses in another letter in this section), and the modern offset, that I don't have to make all my own garments from wool.  

Thinking of the unrecorded and unwritten down fibre stash....I have 3 full fleeces and umm, how shall I say it, 'some' other stuff.  

I think I have this covered for a few years.