My friend Erin has a great blog: Damknit. Not only does it have one of the most creative and snarky names in craft blog-land but is also a fun read. Erin and I “met” online on a scrapbooking website eons ago. It was because of her that I rediscovered my knitting bug and started blogging and podcasting (briefly!)

She went from being a beginner knitter to spinning her own yarn in record time. She is pretty much self-taught in all her various craft forms. You should see her mad crochet skills! Recently she decided that she wanted to advance her spinning skills and applied for a scholarship to attend SOAR this fall in Oregon. She needed reference letters and I was more than happy to lend a good word or twenty to help her achieve this goal. I was not surprised in the least when she won one of the coveted spots. The thing is is that she lives in Arizona. As I mentioned, SOAR takes place in Oregon. Not exactly right next door.

You see Erin works really hard waiting tables to help support her family. She doesn’t make a lot of money so buying a round trip plane ticket is a real luxury. But in usual Erin style she looked at the problem and set a goal to solve it. She scored a load of decorator samples at a local thrift shop and set to designing an awesome needle holder for interchangeable needle sets. She has been working her fingers and sewing machine to the bone making these and listing them on her etsy shop. All proceeds from the sales will go toward purchasing her plane ticket.

I’m thinking I may just need to invest in a set of Addi Clicks just to have an excuse to buy one of these for myself. Looking at them I think they’d also work great for all those miscellaneous double point sets I have rolling around in the bottom of my knitting bag too. If you have a need for a small, compact, CUTE! needle case this would be the perfect solution. Go now. Buy one, or five!

I have a kind of very eclectic post forming in my brain right now. So forgive me if it goes off campus a tad.

First off, yes Virginia, there will be a podcast this week. Maybe if I get up early enough tomorrow (read: before children are awake but after Mr. Mess leaves for work) I’ll get something recorded. I have a WHOLE PAGE OF NOTES just itching to become random stream of conciousness ramblings from me, your resident Whack-a-Do.

I may even get my shit together enough to take a photo or two of some of my WIPs. Be still your beating heart I know…

I have about 6″ of the lily of the valley shawl and I cast on tonight a bright red shrug from the Lace Styles book, bite me, I don’t have it in front of me and I don’t remember the name. But trust me, it’s cute.

Today Mini-Me and I went to Woodfield Mall to shop for her upcoming trip to NYC. She leaves uber-early Saturday. The main reason we went to Woodfield is because there is a Torrid store there. Most shopping trips with S and I end in tears and a lot of anger and frustration. Why? Because even though the American population and mainly teens are growing increasingly “Plus-sized” the retailers aren’t following the trend. But Torrid rocks. They understand that even the big girls want to look cute/sexy/NORMAL and cater to that reality.

A typical shopping trip with her and I nets one or two pairs of jeans and maybe a half dozen XXL t-shirts that are shapeless and baggy. Today’s trip netted two pair of jeans, two mini-skirts that flatter a bigger girl (one is a black, red, and white plaid pleated one that is SOOOOOoooo cute I covet it), over a dozen shirts that pay homage to a girls’ curves without looking like she’s wearing her dad’s shirts or making her look like a fat slut, one pair of long shorts and a swim suit top that covers the “girls” and the muffins. I even found a cute sundress for me.

On the subject of “big girls”; We just watched Dreamgirls. I knew it was a good movie. I knew that for the most part, I’d like this movie. I was a BIG fan of Jennifer Hudson’s when she was on American Idol and wanted to shove something down Simon Cowell’s gullet whenever he refered to her weight being the reason she couldn’t be an American Idol. But I had no idea that I would end up LOVING this movie. I’m a native Michigander but am far from a Detroiter yet the history of Motown, Barry Gordy, and all that is still a part of my history on some cellular level I don’t quite understand. After the last credit rolled I was sitting there wanting to stand up and dance, sit there and cry, jump up and cheer for Effie/Florence Ballard, and sing my ever-loving lungs out.

I’ll always remember when Camryn Mannheim won an Emmy for her role on Boston Legal. In her acceptance speach she dedicated her award by saying, “this is for all the fat girls out there!” When JHu one her Oscar she dedicated to all the Florence Ballard’s of the world. Amen, sister, amen.

With all these thoughts in my head tonight I sat down to write a post and also checked my bloglines. There is a blog that I’ve been meaning to share with y’all for a while but just never did (sue me!) These bitches are hilarious and I want to adopt them as my own personal gay posse. But lo and behold, today’s entry was about another BIG GIRL that engenders a lively debate. Interestingly enough, I’ve also been debating and considering writing about her and THE SHOW for a little while. I am NOT a fan and I haven’t watched this morning talk show for a number of years because of the general direction that the attitude of the show has taken. I liked it alright at the begining and thought it might have an interesting hook. But when it became personality driven it lost me. (Right around the time I became disillusioned with the BIG O. My feeling remains that SHE was added to the panel for ratings and ratings alone. The producers knew they were setting this whole thing up for a major trainwreck. They twisted the tracks and sat back and waited for the carnage to be tossed about. But the boys at Project Gay have an interesting point. She is what she is, and one must give her credit for staying true to that. Shame that the producers and Barbara W. didn’t realize what they were getting into when they sold their souls…or did they?

*Whenever I say those three words to Mr. Mess, he instinctively cringes and grabs his wallet or braces himself for a long lecture about some inane topic I’ve interested myself in.

This won’t cost us anything, and it may or may not start others to thinking. We’ll see I guess.

What got me thinking was a convergence of a something I’d been brewing in the back of my mind for months now and a thread on the Knitty Coffehouse that I read this week.

I had intended to start a new category this month here on my blog to honor the Women of Influence in my life. I even started a post back at the end of February but never quite got it “right”. I wanted to share stories and brief personal biographies of some of the women, both famous and not, that have influenced me over the 40 years of my life. But I never got it done.

The above mentioned thread was started by a mother looking for good role models for her daughter. I can understand this need. I put in my two cents as did many others at Knitty. The answers ranged from the historical to the fictional and everywhere in between.

I’m interested in learning who my readers looked to as role models growing up and do you still have role models now as an adult? Are your role models all female? (I don’t think I have any regular male readers but if I do I’d love to have your perspective too.) Do you purposely set out to find and provide role models for your children?

I’ll start.
I grew up surrounded by women and I learned something from each and everyone of them. My faternal grandma, Lilas, was a very strong personality. She had left our small town and went to Detroit as a young woman to attend Nursing School and worked at Henry Ford Hospital and lived in the city with her girlfriends and fellow nurses before marrying my Grandpa and returning to the farm and raising a family. I think I get a lot of my personality from her, she was opinionated, stubborn, funny, hard-working, smart and did I mention opinionated?

I didn’t know my other Grandma, Murial, as well. She had many health problems, both physical and mental. I inherited that from her I guess. In many ways it would be easy to say she was weak, especially in comparison to my Grandma Lilas. But looking back now I’m not sure that would be a true judgement. She raised a family of four girls on a farm during and after the Depression. She lost a couple children in infancy. She suffered from depression during a time when it was undiagnosed and untreated and she survived. Her husband, my Grandpa Albion, died relatively young. I never knew him. From all the stories from my mother I know he was the ballast that had kept their family on a steady keel. My grandmother must have suffered greatly at his death. But she again managed to survive. I know she put her daughters through a hard time but they all made it.

In the community I grew up in strong women were everywhere. If all the women of Marlette, Michigan were abducted by aliens and taken away, that town would cease to operate. Most of the women around me as a child did not have college degrees and many didn’t work outside the home for pay. But they were most definitely working women. They helped their families run their businesses and farms, they raised children, animals and food, they ran the churches, Sunday Schools, volunteered at the schools, ran the sports boosters, band boosters and any other school volunteer organization there was in addition to the county’s largest 4H club and hospital auxilary. I could type out right now a list of at least 50 women from my small hometown and give at least one example of how each of them influenced me in some way. It’s a real shame my daughers will never have that kind of community behind them.

My mother is one of those women. I don’t think she always realizes how strong and influential she is most of the time. She has always been able to walk the fine line that balances her commitments to her community and the needs of her family. I see now looking back with the eyes of an adult and a mother that there were many times that her own needs got lost in that balancing act. And yet she did still manage to share her many talents with her children and her community. She is a fabulous seamstress and quilter. I learned a lot of what I know either directly from her tutelage or just from osmosis of watching her do what she did. Her love and loyalty to my father is a true inspiration. Our family and community has had more than its share of tragedy and pain. I give my parents credit for being that rock that I could always rely on to be there to hold onto during even the worst of times. I have cousins and friends that went through the same tragedies and difficulties and not make it out the other side nearly as whole as I and my siblings have. I give my parents credit for that and thank them for that.

As far as “famous” role models I have a few.

I’ve always admired Katharine Hepburn, both as an actress and as a woman who stood her ground with the men and got her way without losing her femininity in the process. In high school if I had to list one woman that I wanted to grow up to be like it would have been her.

The quiet strength of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King has always been something I’ve greatly admired and wished I had more of in my personality.

I also admire Melissa Etheridge, Ellen DeGeneres, P!nk, Terry Irwin, Camryn Mannheim, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. I’m sure there are more but these came to mind first.

Also Elizabeth Zimmerman, JK Rowling, and Oprah deserve and honorable mention.

So please, share with me your stories and lists. I have some present day role models that I will share in a later post.