I discovered this great blog, Madison Street Art, just this minute.

I’m posting it in the Prairie Buzz section of this site even though it has nothing to do with Prairie. Or Sauk.

My friend Di started a Facebook group wherein members post a photo a day for the month of January. Today’s suggested topic: a depiction of goals for yourself.

I thought of an easy one! Finish this flipping February Lady sweater.

I started knitting this sweater a year ago. I chugged along nicely until May, when I set the sweater aside. I hate having a pile of wool worsted in my lap and in my hands when it’s 90 degrees out and it’s light until 9 pm. Just too much sweatiness. So I put it aside.

When I put it aside, I had all of it done but one sleeve.

In September, when the days got shorter, the sweater started to look at me, as if to say “hey, get over here and finish me.” But I was teaching a new class, Design Fundamentals. And it is such a big class! Not student-wise (there were only eleven students), but idea-wise. I knew they would need to know the importance of value and repetition and so forth. But I also wanted them to know about Paula Scher and Swiss Industrial Style and Polish Posters.

And I wanted my students to think about the difference between fashion and communication. So I had to think about that myself, and figure out a way to talk about it.

And along with my wonderful class, I had the the Fermentation Fest project. It is such a cool project, particularly with the Farm/Art DTour, and I’m so happy to be able to work on it. But it didn’t leave a lot of time for knitting.

So I didn’t even think about it until a few weeks ago, when I looked at the sweater and thought, “Oh my God, I’m knitting a giant baby sweater.”

It is, in fact, a GIANT BABY SWEATER, adapted from a lovely Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern meant for actual babies.

It’s designed for babies and their little baby selves. They can’t really do buttons and they are basically round: no boobs, no waist, no hips. Just smooth (though wiggly) ovals, who look cute in sweaters.

And what adult woman doesn’t find that amazing? I certainly must have. I bought $65 worth of yarn and knitted this sweater that clearly says “I am in my fifties and yet I am adorable!”

I do understand the rationale behind adapting the Elizabeth Zimmerman sweater for women.

For one thing, it’s easy to knit. The lace makes it look difficult, but its basically knitting a big square thing and a couple of tubes.

For another, it’s adorable. Adorability and cuteness are very huge in the DIY indie culture. Etsy and Ravelry are stuffed with cuteness. They’re not entirely filled with cuteness, but there’s a lot. Like this and this and this.

The combination of ease and trendiness hypnotized me, it would seem. But not quite long enough to remain amazed by the sweater. I’ll finish it anyway.

We had a conversation about typography over dinner the other night.

Which is odd! And and a little bit uncomfortable! Design and typography are 75% taste, and when taste comes up at dinner, people can get defensive.

Maybe because a lot of designers are condescending blowbags in plaid skinny pants who make too big a deal about font choices and not enough of a deal about communication.

But this post is not about the awful Emporer’s New Clothes nature of graphic design. It’s about dinner on Sunday and punctuation.

Dave heard Terry Gross interview Farhad Manjoo on Fresh Air. Manjoo, the technology writer at Slate, recently wrote a piece called Space Invaders which begins:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

In the column, he goes on to talk about the difference between monospaced (typewriter) fonts and proportionally spaced (computer) fonts, and how the written language evolved into and again out of the custom of using two spaces between sentences. I won’t go into it here; you can read it for yourself in Slate his article.

Manjoo is a one-space man, adamantly. Digital fonts have the correct amount of space after a period built into the period itself. You don’t have to add an extra space. If you do, you risk creating patchy-looking areas of type and interrupting the flow thought.

In her interview, though, Terry Gross gently but firmly disagreed with him. She learned from her mom, a secretary, that you put two spaces after a period. She also thinks using two spaces makes the text easier to read.

So my fam wanted to know, which is right?

Neither. Both. Depends.

The goal of professional typesetting is to create uniform areas of value from the type on the page. In other words, when you look at a page from a distance, the blocks of type should appear fairly homogenous. One paragraph should not be filled with white spaces while while another is jammed together and darker than the rest.

If you’re a graphic designer using professional typesetting software such as Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress to design a book or brochure or ad, you need to achieve that goal. People are paying you. So you leave out the extra space.

Most writing in the wild does not need to look professionally typeset. If you’re an attorney writing a brief, put in the extra space. Especially if all the other guys’ briefs have the extra space, and especially especially if the judge’s decisions have the extra space. Let someone else’s brief imply, “Your honor, you’re doing it wrong.”

If you’re a person who has never given this issue any thought in the past, don’t start worrying about it now. Pick a method and stick with it. Try to keep your writing consistent by not mixing one-space sentence endings with two-space sentence endings. You don’t want to seem flighty.

And relax. If you’re going to worry about your writing, worry about whether what you have to say is worth the trouble.

Our scheme for next summer is procure some chickens and keep them in the pen behind the garage. For fun and for eggs.

The garage is not actually a garage, but an old carriage house with a hayloft on top and a concrete-bottomed enclosure right behind it. It was originally built for chicken husbandry, we think. We’ll return it to its original use.

By “we” I mean my son John Dollar and me. He has wanted to have chickens for a long time. Since he lived at home, which was years ago. I wouldn’t accommodate him back then because we used the pen for dogs. But the current wave of dogs barks too much when penned outside, so we might as well convert it to a chicken palace. Chickens couldn’t be as loud as Jimi the dog, who can bark for several hours without stopping when penned outside. John will come out and help with the chicken project.

I don’t know anything about raising chickens. I grew up in a subdivision. We bought our eggs at Albertsons.

John has done a fair amount of chicken research, but our chicken scheme still has to start by learning a lot more about how to do it.

I went on Amazon and ordered this book from a used bookstore. I love that about Amazon – you can get out-of-print books with a couple of keystrokes.

When I ordered this book I didn’t really know what to expect.

What a cool surprise! Minnie Rose Lovegreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens is short book filled with sweet advice:

“Sometimes a hen will only have about 3 or 4 chicks, and you’ll say, well, I’m not going to let her waste her time on these 3 or 4 chicks. I’ll give them all to the other one. Well, you can’t do that, unless you make the room dark and give the chicks a good chance to get acquainted with the new mother’s voice. And put the first mother far enough away where the chicks can’t hear her voice. Because if they can hear, they would remember. It’s remarkable the memory that they have.”

And:

“The main thing is to keep them happy.”

Also Recipe for Raising Chickens is entirely hand-rendered. That’s maybe the best part. The illustrations are brush-and-ink, and the text is either brush-and-ink or pen-and-ink. Some examples:

The copy I bought has this inscription:

Good luck to us, too!

BTW, Nancy Rekow and Claire Frost edited Minnie Rose Lovegreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens and Nancy Rekow also did all the hand lettering. Elizabeth Hutchinson did the lovely illustrations.

That was really fun.

For a couple of years now, the city of Reedsburg and the Wormfarm Institute (an arts incubator and working farm) have put on the Reedsburg Fermentation Fest in October.

The Fest is a “Live Culture Convergence.” For two weekends and the week in-between, it focuses on fermentation and cultures in the literal sense, and also fermentation and culture beyond the literal.

For example, there was a sauerkraut-making demo by Adrienne Fox of Powerkraut, a fermented-food business based in Viroqua. Powerkraut is delicious, made of organic cabbage and sea salt. You can buy it in places like Willy St. Co-op.

But the Fest also featured the Farm/Art DTour – a 50-mile loop drive dotted by installation art and performances. In other words, you drive around the corner and see giant art in the fields, or hanging from the trees. Or you see people sitting on hay bales, watching a performance of an original music/theater piece on the porch of an old house.

All the installations fit in. Katie Schofield’s Come what may installation, for example, was lovely and breathtaking. But it also merged with the landscape so well that I found it comforting. As if, “Ok, that’s what was missing. I’m glad it’s there now.”

I worked on the Fest’s website and some of the printed material. Good times.

The photos above, in order are of Breathing Room, by Laura Annis and Alexis Ortiz,
the Powerkraut workshop, and Come what may, by Katie Schofield.

More photos here, on my flickr page.

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