A Scarf for Your Fridge

I am still working at Lee Mills, to sort out the periodicals collection of the Knitting and Crochet Guild.  By now, most of the periodicals are sorted and listed, but we still occasionally find surprising things.

Here's a pattern leaflet published in 1950 - not in Britain, obviously, as it's priced in cents.  The patterns are for crochet motifs that can be made into mats of various sizes, to cover chairs, tables and the electrical appliances around your home - including the fridge, from the picture on the front cover.  It's a revival, I suppose, of the Victorian idea that you should embellish everything around your home, and leave not a bare surface anywhere - though even the Victorians I think would have drawn the line at a decorative mat for a fridge (supposing that they had had them).  At least televisions and radios were made to look at home in a living room, so if you were the sort of person who made a crocheted mat for every chair-back and table, it was probably quite natural to make one for the television too.   But making one for a fridge, which is designed to look functional, clean and streamlined, seems a bizarre idea.   

Isn't the plural of scarf "scarves", anyway?      

Away in Oregon

Another long blogging silence, this time because we were on holiday in Oregon, visiting our daughter in Portland.  (Although we have now been back home for quite a while, so being away does not totally excuse the lack of posts.)

We had a good time, spent a lot of time with our daughter and her girlfriend and travelled around Oregon east of the Cascades quite a bit.  That's supposed to be the dry side of Oregon, although when we were there it wasn't very dry, and was quite cold - we had some snow and hail.  We saw  lot of wildlife at Tule Lake near Klamath Falls and at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.   It's exciting visiting a wildlife site in the US, because practically everything we see is new to us.  (Except for magpies and sparrows which look pretty much the same as at home, and gray squirrels, which were imported from the US and so definitely are the same.) 

Not a gray squirrel

      I took some yarn and needles to start a new piece of knitting while we were away, but it came back in the same state that it went - it was a busy holiday.  Since we got home, I have cast on and got about 2 inches knitted.   There are over 200 stitches, which was a bit daunting - it's a cardigan knitted on 3mm needles, with the back and fronts made in one piece. I'll write about it in more detail another time.