kmkat and her kneedles

Weekend update.

Our camping trip last weekend to the North Shore went much better than could have been expected, given the dismal weather forecast for the weekend -- rain, thunderstorms, flash flood warnings, doom/gloom, pack your bags, dude, it's the end of the world. In point of fact, it only rained one night while we were there and even then didn't start until after 10pm, so we didn't mind scattering the embers of the campfire and heading to bed to avoid getting wet.

Perhaps this, which we saw as soon as we caught sight of Lake Superior, was an omen.

It wasn't a very long rainbow, but I think it was the most vivid I have ever seen.

There had been heavy rain earlier in the week, and the many streams and rivers that flow into Lake Superior were still running full. This river was full of debris.

You can see how the guardrail was twisted away from the road and the washout that had occurred.

 

At the campsite there was tree climbing and dog napping:

 

There were nature photos galore:

The first and third are the same stump but the third is turned 90°; the second is, I think, trout lilies. They were a week or two past blooming so I only got to see the seed heads. There were hepaticas and wild strawberries and lungwort in bloom, but I got no photos of them.

There was also puking. First Maggie (once), then Matthew (many times), but the rest of us were unaffected. Whew. Perhaps they had eaten some salmonella infested tomatoes before they joined us; but they arrived on Thursday night and didn't get sick until Sunday, so who knows? They were both fine by Monday.

When it was time to break camp Maggie kept Matthew and Andrew on task.

Best of all, there was sock knitting.

The colors are not true in the photo. The background color is more of an olive tan khaki, not as dark as it looks. That ten inches or so of yarn you see lying on my right foot is how much I have left to graft the toe of the left foot. I made the legs extra long; I hate to have cold ankles in January. That little tail is enough to graft, but I want to see exactly how the right foot comes out before I finish off the left. If the second ball -- I wound the 100 gr skein of Colinette Jitterbug into two 50 gr balls -- happens to be slightly shorter, I may finish off both toes with some solid olive green Lang Jawoll that I have in stash. The pair is stalled right now because I ran out of the olive green reinforcing yarn I am using in the heel flaps.The Jitterbug is 100% merino wool, lovely and soft, but I fear it would not wear as well as a yarn with some nylon in it, so I am reinforcing the heels, the spot that I always, always, always wear out first in my purchased socks.

I just noticed that it looks like the columns of purl stitches are wonky in the left sock. They are not, it is just the angle of the photo. I hope.

* * * * *

Back in the heady days of the '60s and '70s there was a saying that dope would get you through times of no money better than money would get you through times of no dope. Be that as it may, I prefer to think that luck will get one through any kind of hard times at all. And my sweetie is Lucky with a Capital L.

On Saturday afternoon he and I took off for a little drive and ended up at Grand Portage at the gas station/convenience store outside the Indian casino there. After we each ate a Haagen Daas ice cream bar with almonds (yum!), he asked if I wanted to watch him throw some quarters down the toilet/into the slot machines in the store. I decided I would rather go back to the parking lot and knit. By the time I had made a pit stop, gotten back out to the car, and settled myself with my knitting, Smokey was back out there, too, with $95 won from a $20 start. That's my Bear.

Eye candy Friday.

This fine fellow visited my deck one day last week.

Orioles tend to be rather shy -- or scarce -- so it was amazing to me to see this guy. He was awfully obliging to pose for me so willingly.

* * * * *

We are heading out today to go camping on the North Shore (that's the north shore of Lake Superior for those of you not of the MN/WI variety). The weather forecast is cool, rainy, possibly stormy for Friday; slightly better for Saturday; a bit better for Sunday; and totally sunny and warm for Monday. Isn't that always the way? But we will be staying until Monday so we will get to enjoy a little bit of the good weather.

If all our plans had come together properly we would be back in the Little Big Horn mountains near Buffalo, Wyoming right now. It was going to be a 150% family camping trip: Andrew's friend K, whom he met when she came to Chiapas last January for the women's encueñtro and who lives in northern California, was going to meet up with us there; and Maggie, Matthew's girlfriend, was going to come along, too. It would have been 2 weeks of knitting (for me), reading (for me and Andrew and K and Maggie), leisurely walks (for all), and hanging out together (ditto). But various bits of life got in the way and suddenly it was going to be just Smokey and I. Okay, fine, we would still have a good time.

But the long term weather forecast for northern WY did not look good -- chilly, with a side of cold -- so we decided to take our vacation here at home on a lake in northern Wisconsin, a locale that many people drive hours to reach in order that they may vacation here. This weekend camping trip is our last chance to hit the woods with our entire family plus Maggie before Andrew leaves for medical school in New York. I've stocked up on snack food:

Dried fruit, crackers, cheese, granola bars, granola, trail mix, Cheetos, corn chips... and a bottle of Herding Cats wine, product of South Africa :-) Should be a fun time...

Catching up, vol. 3: The Art Institute of Chicago.

On Saturday Maggie and Matthew and Andrew and I took the train into Chicago to go to the Art Institute.

The Metra is an electric train, but Maggie and Matthew insisted it wasn't nearly as nice as the [new] light rail transit in Minneapolis. I didn't care. I love a man in uniform.

I don't know if it is evident in these photos, but it was exquisitely cold, about zero degrees F. That's minus 18 degrees Celsius for you Canadians. Brrrr.

 

We split up as soon as we checked our coats and agreed to meet again at 5 pm when the museum closed. Ready, set, go!

I remembered this painting from my last visit to the Institute in 2003.

It is a land/seascape by Cezanne and was my favorite painting on that last visit. But I remember the vivid and unearthily beautiful blue sea as occupying a larger portion of the canvas and being a greener blue. And I remember the painting as being larger than it was this time. Either Cezanne did more than one version of the painting, which is entirely possible, or my memory has magnified its qualities, also entirely possible.

I stood, transfixed, in front of it for several minutes last time. It is difficult to see it in my photograph, but the blue of the sea is a sort of heathery teal color (is that a knitterly description or what?). I fell in love with the color. Then I read the plaque next to the painting, which said that (paraphrasing from memory) the true subject of the painting is the color of the sea. I felt like had just gotten an A on an art history essay.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is a famous painting by Georges Seurat that had never particularly appealed to me, but there was bench in front of it and my feet hurt, so I contemplated it for a few minutes.

I noticed a couple things. First, although the scene should be full of movement -- children playing, dogs leaping, people strolling -- it really isn't. Everything looks perfectly static and posed. Weird.

Second, for some reason known only to the artist and his muse, he painted a red and blue sort of pointillist frame around the edge of the canvas.

 

I say again. Weird.

I loved both of these...

 

...the one on the left for the way it works with its shadow and the one on the right for... I don't know why. Maybe I think he needs socks.

Does this look like a sheep's head to you? It doesn't look like a sheep's head to me; it looks more like a cow's head. Any sheep experts out there?

 

These guys looked straight out of a Monty Python sketch. Or maybe Labyrinth.

I was fascinated by the way these textures and shapes were depicted in marble.

Sometimes life imitates art. Andrew didn't know I was sitting quietly in the corner of the sculpture gallery, knitting and resting my feet.

I found that I seem to be captivated by early  paintings by Piet Mondrian, an artist whose major works never caught my fancy. Who knew?

I like the funny tracery of the bare branches against the sky. One can see the beginnings of the artist's fascination with rectilinear geometry. I remember studying the colors in some of his early paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in NY and thinking how nice those colors would look in a sweater.

Back when I was an art history major in college I took a class in ancient Chinese art because I liked Oriental art and really enjoyed that professor. It turned out that ancient Chinese art is 100% about bronze ritual vessels, ding (tripod cauldron) and gui (bowl) and fanding (rectangular cauldron). The two best collections in the world are the Pillsbury collection in the Minneapolis Institute of Art and another collection in the Cleveland Museum of Art. That means that, by necessity, the collection in the Art Institute of Chicago is second-rate.

I concur. Although my eyes lit upon these once-so-familiar shapes as though they were long-lost family members, I gradually became disenchanted with the pieces. They just weren't as perfectly made, as intricately inscribed, as balanced, as the ones we studied. Second rate.

This was the best of the bunch.

These made me cringe. Especially the fourth one. Ewwww.

   

   

I could go on for several paragraphs pointing out what is good and classical about the first one and blech about the rest, but I suspect y'all are not real fascinated by ancient Chinese ritual vessels. So I shall spare you.

Sometimes the best art wasn't the art.

 

More penguin fun.

Sign by the parking area where we left our car while we stalked the mighty penguin with eyeball and camera.

Eye candy Friday.

This is one of my favorite photos from our 2005 trip to South Africa. It was taken at a place called (I think) Boulder Beach; we pulled in there on impulse because there was a highway sign indicating that there were penguins there. Indeed, there was an impressive colony of them. What I love about this photo is that I took a shot of Matthew, who was videoing the penguins, while all the time the two nice suburban-type ladies were having coffee and chatting on their balcony and ignoring all of us.

The road home.

On the way home from the class reunion, we could see that autumn is approaching in the north woods. Rose hip jam, anyone?

Autumn also means deer season. Want to buy a deer stand?

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We saw a number of things on the way home that are listed in Roadside America. Meet St. Urho, who supposedly drove the grasshoppers from Finland. I say supposedly because the whole thing was the creation of Sulo Havumaki, a psychology professor at Bemidji State College (now Bemidji State University). My mother, a first-grade teacher, took a continuing ed course from him in the 1960s. I remember her telling my dad and I how entertaining he was and how he had created a whole legend about a fictional Finnish saint. This statue stands in Menahga. (I had to steal the photo from Roadside America; I forgot to take a picture of him myself.)

In Nevis we saw the world's largest tiger muskie. What a thrill. Or maybe not.

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In Akeley there was Paul Bunyan:

Paul is holding his hand down low so you can sit in it (if you dare; imagine being goosed by Paul).

Everybody loves Paul and Babe:

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Truly the high point of the trip for Smokey, though, was in Proctor, just north of Duluth. Back in the heyday of the Mesabi iron range, Proctor was a big rail center through which the ore trains passed on their way to Duluth harbor, where the ore was transferred to ore boats (remember The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?) that took it to the steel mills in Gary, Indiana and to Cleveland.

Smokey is a big fan of trains.

I tended to look at it more like a massive, very complicated sculpture full of intriguing abstract shapes and unusual textures.

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Smokey explained a lot of the machinery to me. This particular engine holds a number of records for tonnage hauled.

But my favorite image was this one.

I call it "Sgt. Schulz's Hat, With Handle."

Restaurant capital of the world.

While attending my class reunion we stayed with my friend Kathy. She and I were best friends in high school and have stayed in touch through the years. I moved to Minneapolis and eventually Wisconsin, while she returned to Park Rapids after college. I have always been a wage earner; she has always been an entrepreneur. I admire her greatly.

Her current venture is a small store and restaurant in Dorset, Minnesota, the self-proclaimed Restaurant Capital of the World. Population 22, six (6!) restaurants.

If you are ever in the area, check out La Pasta -- the food is wonderful. (Seriously. I'm salivating as I type this.)

Notice how it says "No substitutions" on the menu? She means it. Really, it is more than your life is worth to ask to change something. She may be my best friend, but even I know better than to ask to substitute. You will eat what is put in front of you and like it.

If you arrive during a busy time, which is pretty much anytime they are open, you may have to wait for a table. No problem, walk across the street to one of my favorite bookstores. Small, but good. All trade paperbacks; no mass market.

Pssssst. There's an espresso bar in the back.

If you still have time to kill, wander around back of the restaurant and stroll through the garden.

 

Kathy likes gargoyles, but they haven't all made it into the garden yet.

Have you ever been in the back storeroom of a restaurant? Lots of food.

This is northern Minnesota, so the General Store sells bait. Don't worry, this fridge is as far away from the kitchen as you can get.

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The town has a number of little specialty shops -- stained glass, gifts, clothing, a scoop shop, a B&B -- plus it is on the 49-mile Heartland [bike] Trail. On the first Sunday of August every year the six restaurants cooperate for the Taste of Dorset.

   

If you go to Dorset before August 3, 2008, don't try to order the spaghetti balls. They won't be ready until then.

   

The only bad thing about Dorset? No LYS; in fact, I don't think there is one for 40 or 50 miles. A business opportunity awaits for one of you knitters out there...
 

40 and counting.

On Saturday we drove north to my high school reunion.

Welcome to Stearns County. We're about halfway there.

I was prepared with car knitting. This is actually the second knitting bag. One can never have too many projects in reserve.

Park Rapids has grown some -- it was only about 2,500 when I lived there.

The reunion was held at this golf course near Menahga, the next town south on Highway 71. Menahga means "blueberry" in the Chippewa language.

Who are all these old people? (You can see the top of my head at the right in the third row, to the right and in front of the guy in the orange t-shirt.)

Same as these... plus forty years. That's me in the lower right corner.

Eye candy Friday.

Cape of Good Hope, December, 2005. My boy who is now in Chiapas spent his semester abroad at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. At the end of the semester Matthew and I flew over (22 hours in the air, one-way!) and we all played tourist for 8 days.

Vacation, part three: camping with a camera.

I mentioned all the electronics gear we brought along. Here are some other things that make camping more pleasant.

The beer cooler.

 

The bed warmer.

 

The cooking crew.

 

I recommend them all highly.

Wildlife sightings are fun. This guy joins us at the campsite for a few minutes every day.

 

There are lots of red squirrels.

 

Lots of deer and antelope, too, although the latter tend to be sighted at great distance.

   

Yesterday #2 went for a long bike ride and was rewarded by a view of the majestic moose. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the camera along.

Scenery.

  

 

   

 

   

Of course, there are a few things [it would be nice] to avoid:

flies,

 

and certain types of weather.

   

   

The tent at left, above, was #2's. The snow was so wet and heavy it collapsed the struts. He was already sleeping in the van, though.

The temperature inside the camper and outside in the snow at 10:30 this morning:

   

I was toasty in my bed, though -- two sweatshirts, two pairs of sweatpants, two pairs of wool socks, two sleeping bags, and (remember above?) a canine bed-warmer. The way Smokey can tell if I'm warm enough over in my end of the camper is whether I have my hoodie over my head or not. No hoodie this morning. I haven't needed one since Lucy remembered that she likes to sleep with me when we go camping.

 

Vacation, part two: We go to Town.

Who knew that the little grocery/dry goods store in Buffalo, Wyoming

 

would have the world’s best selection of Sugar ‘n’ Cream?

 

That is seven -- seven! -- shelves of SnC, carefully displayed by colorway (the top shelf is Paton's wool). I took several photos to study back at the campsite to help me decide what colors to buy. This display has roughly six or eight times the number of colors found in the typical Wal*Mart back home. I see warshcloths and baby bibs in my future, both for gifts and to sell at the library federation’s booth at the fair. Yee-haw!

This variety store is where last year I pondered the limited selection of Lion Brand® wool when I ran out of knitting. The selection of natural fibers is definitely improved this year. There are a number of lovely wools and blends, Paton's and other brands, plus (of course) far more acrylic and novelty yarn than anyone in their right mind would want.

And there is this – I got myself some souvenir yarn.

 

 

 

(The yarn was completely clean. The bits of vegetable matter you see were picked up in the van and the camper after purchase.) The label calls this a 2-ply sport weight, but I’d consider it DK, almost worsted weight. It was also available in an unplied bulky weight. The photos don’t really convey the soft fuzzy texture, which reminds me of a chenille bathrobe. I’ve never touched wool so cottony soft. It probably wouldn’t be good for socks –- my first thought of what to make with it –- because I think it is too soft to wear well. I liked the yarn but not enough to spend $$$ to buy enough for a sweater. I’m also thinking of felted slippers  with leather soles to overcome the wear problem. It’s certainly soft enough for a scarf, but I made one for myself last winter and don’t really need another. For the immediate future this yarn will marinate in the stash until it tells me what it wants to be.

We saw a few interesting sights around town. Around the IGA:

   

   

Parked downtown:

 

Now, I'm not making fun of the folks in Buffalo. FSM knows that you guys could find lots to point fingers at in my life. These are just things that reminded me, once again, that I'm not in Wisconsin any more. And who would have expected to find a pickup truck-driving Tool/Nine Inch Nails fan?

The funniest thing, though, was just now. Here I am in the espresso bar I mentioned in the last post. It's a charming place, funky and friendly and comfortable, although it gets a tad noisy after 3:30 when school gets out. #2 was here, too, with Smokey's computer, IMing with his friends back home. He was sitting at another table, but when I looked for him I couldn't see him. I figured he had taken the van to go explore the town and didn't think too much about it. About an hour later he suddenly called to me from across the room. Turns out he had made some new friends.

 

The boy takes after his father.

* * * * *

And now, the knitting: The Lure of Random.

Stripes are easy. Stripes are fun. A knitter can devise a stripe pattern to accommodate any amounts of yarn. If you have 300 yards of color A, 100 yards of color B, 500 yards of color C, and 50 yards of color D, you can, with the judicious application of a little math, make a 900-yard sweater in a stripe pattern that will use pretty much all the yarn without running out of any colors. In that situation I would use color D for a narrow edge or stripe in the ribbing at bottom, cuffs, and neck. I’d probably make the rest of the ribbing from color C, and the body and sleeves in a stripe pattern that was 3/8 color A, 1/8 color B, and 4/8 color C. (300 A + 100 B + 400 C (the amount I’m estimating would be left after all the ribbing) = 800).

I brought along a bit less than eight 200-yard skeins of worsted weight Bernat Lana merino, bought on sale from Smileysyarn.com last fall: 2 skeins each of black, dark brown, light camel, and ivory. I had used some of the camel and black for a Dulaan hat and some of the ivory in the Lopi Lite sweater I just finished, so the only color of which I had the full two skeins was the brown.

My original plan was to make a sweater modeled after one by Elizabeth Zimmerman that Meg Swanson showed us in the Yarnover class. It was a child’s sweater done in four wide bands of color, black at the bottom, dark gray above that, then a lighter gray, then white at the top. It was all stockinette and had eight vertical lines of faux seam stitches evenly spaced around the sweater (one line at center front, one line at center back, one on each side, and the other four evenly spaced between them; I think there was one more on top of each sleeve to take over after the side ones ended at the underarms) that turned into lines of double decreases in the yoke.

The problem was that I was afraid that a, I might run out of one color of yarn, and 2, I might run out of brain trying to figure out the eight-way decrease. (Thinking about it now, I realize that the yoke of a typical raglan has four lines of double decreases every other row, so a sweater with eight lines of double decreases would need them every fourth row. I’ll keep that in mind for a future Dulaan sweater.)

Anyway, back to stripes. After I discarded the EZ idea I decided to make the sweater striped. But my on-vacation brain didn’t want to concentrate long enough to figure out an appropriate stripe pattern. Call me lazy, call me slothful, call me whatever, I just didn’t want to do it. So I hit on the idea of a random stripe pattern. Given the weight of yarn (worsted weight doubled) and the size of the sweater (large child) I decided that the widest stripe should be 6 rows, which would be perfect for using dice. I would roll the die and knit the number of rows that came up. The only problem was we didn’t happen to bring along any dice. How to figure out a random pattern?

Remember all the electronics we brought along? I used the RAND function in Excel. In the first cell I typed “=RAND()*(6-0)”, which will generate a random number between 0 and 6, and copied and pasted it down the first column for a hundred or so rows. The problem was that the numbers generated were ones like 1.47653 and 4.59385. (There is probably a way to tell Excel that I only wanted integers, but I was too lazy to look for it.) It’s hard to knit .47653 of a row. So, in the second column I typed “=ROUND(A1,0)” and copied and pasted it down the column. Perfect. If I had access to a printer I would have printed it out, but I didn’t so I couldn’t.

 

Here you see the four columns of random numbers. At the bottom of each is the cumulative number of rows so far. I’ve written abbreviations for the colors in the first column to help keep it straight. The sequence is black, camel, brown, white; rinse and repeat.

I set up my knitting bag to minimize yarn tangles.

 

Here’s how it looks.

 

I'm going to match the stripes on the sleeves to those on the body for continuity -- the human eye always tries to discern a pattern, even when there is none -- then continue the Excel-determined random sequence on the yoke. I did a couple short rows in the back at the level of the underarm and will do a couple more near the top of the yoke, all to raise the back of the neck. Another cozy warm sweater for Dulaan.

Vacation, part one.

We camped in the Black Hills for the first couple nights. These two boxes, one packed by each son for himself, demonstrate some of the differences between my boys. The upper box is #2's -- lots of clothes.

The lower box is #1's -- 75 pounds of books. His [few] clothes are packed in a small backpack somewhere.

You already saw what I packed for amusement; besides the yarn I've also got six or eight books. Smokey brought a portable DVD player and a 3-disc set of 20 John Wayne movies. #2 brought his bike and Quake and Home World to play on one of the computers.*

* * * * *

Guess what?! We have knitting!

#2 modeled it for me.

The sweater is sized for a 10 - 12 year-old child. #2 is 18. The sweater is a tad small on him.

But it should keep some 10-year-old Mongolian child mighty toasty next winter.

Yarn: 1 strand Reynolds Lopi Light held together throughout with 1 strand worsted weight wool: teal Lopi with KnitPicks Wool of the Andes "Artic Pool Heather", creamy white Lopi with the same color of Bernat Lana merino, Oxford gray Lopi with camel-y brown Ella Rae (I couldn't locate a KP WotA the right shade of gray).

Needles: KP Options, US10.

Pattern: seamless yoke raglan from Ann Budd's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, size 34". (My gauge is a bit tight; the sweater doesn't look that big to me. Must measure before I send it.) I didn't use that pattern's yoke decreasing, though. It has you do four decreasing rounds spaced evenly up the yoke. That wouldn't work very well with my planned yoke color work, so instead I used Elizabeth Zimmerman's system of decreasing, which I got from the handout at a class I took from Meg Swanson for EZ's percentage system updated. In that you do three decreasing rounds, at halfway, three-quarters of the way, and at the top of the yoke; that way I could put the decreasing rounds in the two-round strip of solid blue between the color work rounds. (In the photo it looks like those blue strips and decreasing rounds are lower in the yoke; it's because the crew neck makes the top of the yoke look taller.) I made up the fair isle pattern as I went. :-) Simple as it is, I am inordinately proud of it.

Here is a close look at the fair isle (please click to embiggen and truly appreciate the fuzzy wooliness).

Now, y'all have seen fair isle done by really good knitters, where the pattern lies smoothly even before it is blocked and the floats are perfectly even. My knitting is not like that. These are the kind of floats done by a rank beginner. Here is the first set:

And here is the back of the yoke. I can see improvement there, even if you can't see it in the photo.

As I said, I am inordinately proud of the this sweater. Color work no longer scares me. I can slip stitch and I can fair isle. As they say here in the west, yahoo!

* * * * *

After the Black Hills we moved on to our main camping venue in the Big Horn mountains near Buffalo, Wyoming. Friday night we went to a rodeo in nearby Kaycee. There were cowboys

 

and cowgirls.

There was bronc riding, both with and without a saddle.

There was calf roping.

 

There were bull riding and other kinds of roping and trying out some new bucking horses without riders. It was especially interesting to watch the pick-up riders take the bronc rider off the bucking bronco once the whistle had blown.

We are definitely in The West.

* Although we are camping in a National Forest campground with outhouses, no electric hook-ups, and only a hand pump for water, we are not exactly roughing it. We have with us a small generator** with which to power and recharge our two computers, three iPods, DVD player, two cell phones, camera, hair dryer, and waffle iron :)

** If you have ever been camping next to someone with a generator, you are probably shaking your head right now. Let me reassure you that ours is a small and fairly quiet generator, plus we have 120' of extension cord so we set it up f-a-r from the nearest campsite.

* * * * *

ETA: The first hot spot we found here in Buffalo was the McDonald's by the interstate, $2.95 for two hours. The price was very reasonable, but the place was a little lacking in ambience. Today we found that the (sadly website-less) Deerfield Boutique & Espresso Bar, est.1994, on Main Street has excellent cappucinos and scones and comfy couches and little tables and free high-speed internet. Woot! It is a totally charming splace, very spacious and full of plants and works by local artists and a bookcase of paperbacks and games and chess boards and a fenced-off play area full of toys for the littlies. This shows about a third of the space.

My, oh my, oh MoMA!

While we were in New York I spent an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. I had never been there before, so it was one of my avowed goals (besides obtaining the US#1 circ and visiting the famous yarn shops) to go there on this trip.

Mission accomplished.

I started on the top floor and worked my way down, which also seemed to take me through in more or less chronological order. The top floors had the late 19th and early 20th century Impressionists and Expressionists and Cubists.

There was Picasso

and Giacometti

and Brancusi and more Picasso

and Matisse and Cezanne

 

I don't remember who made this statue but I loved the hands.