The Shtick I Do

Winter is "almost" gone (I say "almost" because we had to use the heated mattress pad last night >.<) and while the cold, dry air is usually hardest on my hands, I like having lotion with me throughout the year. Ever washed your hands in a public restroom then dried them on bark-like paper towels or used the flay-the-skin-from-your-fingers air dryer? My hands are always left feeling .... icky. Sometimes, I've used my "moisturizing" hand sanitizer and that stuff, while it gets rid of germs, isn't really all that moisturizing, is it? How could it be when it's mostly alcohol? *facepalm* Now if you've been here before, I made this little helper (for the aforementioned "moisturizing" hand sanitizer) and it's been hanging around my purse for more than a year. I usually kept lotion inside my purse and just like with the hand sanitizer I would hate digging for it. Inevitably it would be in some nook or cranny and I'd not...

Hookers? Well that's a term . . . umm . . . let me quote an expert here: " . . . the first printed crochet pattern appeared in a Dutch magazine early in the nineteenth century . . . As the appalling conditions of lace makers became known to the American women, they started to get interested in creating the work themselves rather than supporting the abusive practices of the lace making industry. In a book published at the time, a lace manufacturer admitted that he expected his workers to turn a few tricks on the side to make up for his not paying them a living wage. As Donna Kooler suggests in The Encyclopedia of Crochet , this may even explain how the word "hooker" came to have such wayward connotations. " ~ Debbie Stoller   Stitch 'n Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker Now since crochet has only been around for a little over 200 years ( * ) and no one really knows where it started we can pretty much only rely on what's been written. Knitting has bee...