A couple of Monday-morning things:

1. An interesting article on Granny-knitters who intuitively use math. (Thanks, Lydia!)

2. The quilt, when it's finished, will be machine-quilted in a rose pattern. I figure that's the only way I'll get to use it any time in the near future - I'm still picking away at hand quilting the red quilt top that's been in the frame since, like, 2002.

3. There's still flap on the Knitlist about Cotton-Ease and how eeeeevvvvvillll Lion Brand is for discontinuing it. I dunno. I would have been more inclined to have bought it if it came in colors other than those that I normally associate with four year olds. (I will say, though, a lot of people made a good point - "I never even SAW it for sale in the stores around here." Which means, if the merchants don't give it a chance, how can it NOT be discontinued? I noticed at the walmart yesterday - had to go there for Vital Fieldwork Equipment and swung by the yarn section - that they've totally dropped Homespun but are tentatively getting in a small amount of the Lion Suede and the Moonlight Mohair [though if I know the typical local wal-mart shopper, the Moonlight Mohair will NEVER sell - they will look at it, go 'ew, too expensive' and reach for a skein of one of the hairball yarns the next shelf over. And you know - a lot of the novelty yarns the wal-mart near me carries do look like something the cat yakked up - the color combinations in them are just scary. I don't know if their buyer is colorblind or is seduced by yarn reps who say "well, I'll let you have this green-and-orange one for half-price 'cos it won't sell in the Major Metropolitan Areas..."]. And the Hobby Lobby, which I stopped by on Saturday, seems to be expanding their Red Heart selection greatly, but have emptied one of the shelf-banks that once held yarn. So I don't know - either they're going to get in something really new and exciting, or they're preparing to expand their scrapbooking section. My money's on the latter.)

4. Someone posted about - was it Hilary Duff's mother? Lindsay Lohan's? Gah, I can't keep the teenybopper actresses straight - and how she "dissed" knitting in the process of trying to defend her daughter's partying. Um, she's a showbiz mom - not exactly the most stable of people (if you've ever seen the Bravo show). Not exactly the person I'd look to as a tastemaker or someone whose opinions I'd give a lot of weight to.

You know, considering items 3 and 4, I will almost be happy once knitting becomes kind of obscure again. Oh, I'll regret having to mail-order everything I knit with (or make the rare pilgrimage to a real yarn shop), but it will kind of be nice not to have people make "ooh, the new yoga" comments (Um, I do yoga. Both knitting and yoga are friends of mine. But, knitting is no yoga) or tell me that such-and-such actress (perhaps someone of which I've never heard) knits. Or the breathless "It's not your granny's knitting!" stories in the papers (which just suggest to me that ageism in our society runs even deeper than we suspect).

And 5: I've seen knitted dinosaur toys on a couple of blogs now (most recently, Aven's). Is this a new book? New pattern for sale somewhere? I really would love to be able to make knitted dinos...even though I've yarn in stash for sharks and dolphins and penguins and turtles and bears, none of which ever seem to get made...