Sometimes, I get letters.  Sometimes,  I get a stack of bills and junk mail, but sometimes, the magical postman sprinkles fairy dust on my mailbox, and things arrive that knock my flippin’ socks off.  (Hand knit, usually brightly colored, though I’m changing that as I go along….  The socks, not the mail, though those are often brightly colored, too.)

The past couple weeks have been fairly slow-moving.  All this slogging through stuff, throwing stuff out, and generally trying to erase 38 years of crap has had its share of challenging days.  Of course.  So when things arrive, you have NO IDEA how excited I get.  It’s like freakin’ Christmas in here.  I curl up on the bed and squeal.

No, really, I do.  It’s kind of pathetic.  Just sayin’.

I thought I’d share a few things that came in the past couple weeks, because I’m of the mind that my friends are incredibly, awe-astoundingly creative, all in different ways, and the fact that they share that with me boggles my mind.  How could I *not* share with y’all?

For example, my friend Becca.  Becca has this demented sense of humor that translates right into her knitting.  And apparently, she’s some kind of math genius, too, because when we were talking about HOW she came up with this, she said she makes a sketch and then does the math.

My math?  Does not produce things like Becca’s.  My math gives me strange numbers that don’t seem to add up when I’m balancing the checkbook.  Or makes doubling a recipe give me enough to feed the armies of several small nations.  My math does not produce things like this:

Yes.  That’s a severed horse head, a’la The Godfather, designed and knitted by Becca, and published by the Anticraft.  I have no words.

Technically, this was not a mail day, which is why I’m putting it here first.  Becca handed this to me IN PERSON this past weekend at the knitting retreat we were at.  She said it’s to use the next time I start getting threats from the unbalanced.  Just pop it right in the bed, and INSTANT MOB HIT.

I’ve named him Vinnie.  Vinnie Vendetta.  He would sleep with me if the dogs wouldn’t eat him while I slept.  So instead, he watches from a very high shelf next to the bed.  (Which may explain my weirder-than-usual dreams, actually.)

Not all the mail comes with an Ewww Warning(tm).  Or, for that matter, the urge to make really bad beating-a-dead-horse jokes.  :)

Some of it, like this next bit from Star, made me cry a little.  In a good way.

On a particularly bad day (or at least one that was less than ideal), this hand-made card arrived from Star.  She made the envelope, took all of the pictures, and made this INSANELY gorgeous bit of mail art that totally turned my day around.  (I mean, how COULDN’T IT.  Sunshine panties AND pics of the northwest?  Seriously.)  Plus, there was a note inside that made me cry.

Awesome.

So then there’s my friend Alynxia.  She hails from Canada, which, surprisingly, does not mean that she has beady eyes or a floppy head.  (ducks)

Alynxia makes stuff.  She knits, like a lot of folks I know.  But when I say “I knit”, what I do isn’t even on the same field as Ms A.  When we did the lace episode of L&V Live, she trotted out something like a half-dozen of the things.  And we won’t even talk about the GIANT BIN of handmade socks she has.  When Alynxia says “I knit”, she means it. She KNITS, boyhowdy.

People who don’t knit are looking at this wondering what the heck it is.

This, my friends, is a LACE SHAWL.

And those of you who don’t knit don’t realize it, but that bit of knitting right there?  That would’ve taken me about eight zillion years to finish.  If I finished at all before getting it so hopelessly tangled that it would be neither shawl nor ball of yarn ever again.  This is like looking at the masterwork in person.

And she sent it to me.  I boggled.

I wore it all last weekend, despite the fact that it was two hundred and seventy-three degrees in the shade and cows were randomly bursting into flames in the fields along the way.  And almost every knitter that talked to me fondled it and I got to say that a friend knit it for me.  You can’t even see it all here — there’s nowhere in my house big enough to lay it all out for a good look, and the camera lens doesn’t go that wide.  But it’s all gorgeous.

Thanks, you three.  You seriously made the last couple of weeks just that much better.  I gave the mailman some kisses to take back to you. :)