Blah, Blah, Blahhhg: Yarn and Comix

The Ontario Library Association's annual conference is this week, so I've got meetings downtown everyday. The meetings are, well, necessary, but as my coworker JS would describe it, "hella boring". On the bright side, since I am downtown, it gives me a chance to visit some of my favourite stores.

I bought some yarn at a knitting store I stumbled across on the way to a meeting. I got 2 skeins of Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool to make the Interweave Knits Flower Basket Shawl (free PDF pattern here), and 2 skeins of Noro Silk Garden to make the Stitch 'n' Bitch Nation fingerless gloves.

One of my meetings was at a public library branch, where I photocopied this knitted bear pattern from the 70s. I was charmed by the idea of knitting a bear from the top down in one piece, using sweater-making techniques for the body and arms, and sock-making techniques for the feet.

I also got to visit the Beguiling bookstore. I used to shop there as an undergrad, to pick up stuff by Daniel Clowes which I liked for its smart-ass attitude.

The strip is called "Paranoid". God's Friend: What's he doing now? God, looking through God's magic telescope: Haw Haw! He's picking his nose with one hand, rearranging his jewels with the other... and watching "The Courtship of Eddie's Father"! God's Friend: What a douche!

This is what I picked up today:

Walt and Skeezix, a collection of Frank King's "Gasoline Alley" strips from 1921-22. When my oldest was born, my father-in-law used to call him Skeezix. As the character Skeezix grew up in real time, he'd be 85 this year.
The Push Man, a gritty collection of stories that Yoshihiro Tatsumi created in 1969. The page below is from a story called, "Sewer".
Optic Nerve number 10 by Adrian Tomine. This is the second part of a three-part series dealing somewhat with Asian-American issues. Part of the first installment was printed in McSweeney's volume 13, which I blogged about previously. In the panels below, the Japanese protagonist is thinking about sleeping with a white girl who may be a lesbian. It'd be his first time with a white girl, and he thinks it's to his advantage that she's gay so that she won't be so size-conscious. His female Korean friend mocks him for believing the stereotype.
Sleepwalk, a collection of stories from the Optic Nerve comic by Adrian Tomine, and
Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life by half-Chinese, half-gwai-lo local artist, Bryan Lee O'Malley. There are lots of true-to-life Toronto street scenes in this one.