What's black, and white, and red all over?




My new knit-and-read project:



This is going to be a pair of socks, made out of the KnitPicks "Parade" yarn. It's the "Checkers" colorway. I'm using the Garter Ribbing from Charlene Schurch's book.

The funny thing is, these are not normally colors I'd pick - I'm much more about the greens or the jewel tones. Black and white and especially red are not colors I wear often. And yet, the color combination appealed to me. I think it is because it looked "vintage-y" or "old fashioned" to me. Like something I'd find in my grandmother's knitting basket, or the kind of colors in mittens Ralphie Parker would have worn.

I tend to be drawn to things like that. The house I live in is circa 1946. It has glass doorknobs on the interior doors, which is one of the things that charmed me into wanting the house so. (Well, the fact that it had large, well-positioned rooms, and that it didn't have the mingy little nearly-at-the-ceiling windows that the new "energy efficient" houses have - making the interior dark and warrenlike - were more important, but the glass knobs played a role too).

I don't know why, but things that make me think of my grandmothers' houses - particularly my maternal grandmother, who was a bit older and a bit less "stylish" or "up-to-date" appeal deeply to me.

I present to you Exhibit 2:



This is my most recent antiquing purchase. It is a bud vase. I almost never have flowers in the house. Yet I really, really wanted it. I cannot totally explain why - it is not the clone of any item either of my grandmothers had (although it is similar in style to some of the decorative things my maternal grandmother had). But I felt a powerful pull when I saw it - I envisioned it sitting on the shelves in my dining room, being cheerful, and I w*a*n*t*e*d it.

I like to think it is pre-war, like 1930s or so. It's either pre 1945 or post 1952, because it's marked "Made in Japan" (during the 1945-1952 timeframe it would have to say "Occupied Japan"). It also has a little symbol that looks not unlike the Mercedes Benz symbol. I don't know that I feel like going to the effort of trying to track down year and manufacturer; to me, the fact that it may have had a previous life sitting on the kitchen windowsill of a young, early 1940s bride, or that it provided a bit of cheerfulness to the front room of a family in the 1930s is enough.

I like "old stuff." I've always liked "old stuff," even as a child. I remember trying to do digging expeditions in the back yard and hoping I'd turn up things from, like, the Revolutionary War or stuff. (I wasn't thinking history, that the area I grew up in wasn't settled until the 1800s, and I also didn't realize at the time that there was probably "fill" over the "real" soil in my housing development).

Don't get me wrong: I'm no Miniver Cheevy. I'm very grateful to live in an era where we have indoor plumbing and vaccinations and reliable transportation and don't have to can our own food. But sometimes, I think the "industrial design" of this era is a bit lacking - that there's less of a sense of whimsy than there used to be, that with the increased insistence on using "branded characters" there's a greater sameness or homogeneity or slickness. And that there's more mass-production, big sprayer machines painting on the eyes and the details and everything is so much the same.

And so I love my little parakeet (or are those lovebirds?) vase, because when I look at it, I can see the hand of the person who painted on the beaks and the stripes and the flowers. And I can wonder about who owned it before me - was it a young husband's anniversary gift to his wife, when he really wished he had the money for a bigger, more impressive gift? Was it "the kids" gift to Grandma on her birthday? Was it something a career-girl purchased for herself to brighten up her space in the rooming house? There's a romance to these old things that doesn't seem to exist for the anonymous items ranked in rows under the fluorescent lights at the Wal-Mart.