wishlist: these boots

If you follow me on facebook or caught my links post a few weeks ago, you’ll know that a few weeks ago I was debating between two pairs of boots.

To recap (the visual contrast is critical here), this pair:

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And this pair (though I gather there are quality issues with this design, and have since reconsidered):

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As I was saying earlier, though, when I can’t decide between two items it is often a sign that neither of them is quite suitable, and that the search has only begun.

This point was brought definitively home the second I saw this pair from Free People (I like many of the boots they carry, incidentally), which has so soundly thrashed the former candidates that they are like so much  dust in the wind (though, admittedly, much less expensive dust). The rewards of patient browsing and an unwillingness to compromise.

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Gah!

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AGH!

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GAHHH!

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Such slouchy, distressed, buckled, riveted, quirky pseudo-spat perfection! I must have these boots, come what may. If they do not fit me properly, I believe I shall weep. If they sell out of my size before I can raise the funds, I do not know that there will be enough doughnuts to console me.

That is all.

 

crafted: I knit a thing!

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I have knit a few things, actually. Pretty much all scarves, but scarves of increasing complexity and (to me, though I give them away) appeal.

The beauty of knitting something yourself is that you can get (skill/fortune willing) just the design you want. Again and again I come up against this wall of knowing precisely what I want, and not being able to find it anywhere [ex-cerebrum]. Or perhaps it can sort of be found, but is not realistically purchaseable. This doesn’t mean I can’t have what I want, though…it just means I can’t have it yet. And that it may require a crafting adventure of no small effort/duration. [Possibly years. But I can be patient.]

This is the scarf I knit my little brother for Christmas. It was a kind of dry-run of the pattern, to see if I want it for myself. Which I do. In cream, and a slightly smaller gauge as this one turned out so wide as to border on editorial (I didn’t quite follow the pattern. Typical.).

[Though that’s going to take a year or more. This scarf is 6′ long, and I am only sporadically in the mood to knit.]

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I like the simplicity of this pattern*; the end product looks kind of intricate but the pattern itself is all intuitive repetition and doesn’t even require consulting a guide.

*Lion Brand Harbor Scarf pattern, in Loops & Threads Cozy Wool in ‘moss’