I remember these!

Now that my weaving appetite has been whetted, at least on a mini-scale, I remembered a kind of weaving I did long ago. I mean LONG ago, like, probably as a teenager in the 70s? I went on a search for weaving sticks and I found them! Over the last few several decades I'd occasionally remember them and wonder if they were still around, but I didn't wonder hard enough to really look. I do recall browsing the racks at places like JoAnn's without success. Weaving sticks are back on the rack at my local JoAnn's. (I was there to buy picture frames, not yarn. I have enough yarn. Really.)

I remember using these sticks as a kid, and being absolutely addicted to the meditative act of wrapping yarn. This was the 70s after all, so wall hangings and woven belts and all that hippie stuff was everywhere, and weaving sticks were soo relaxing and easy, I loved them. Then I moved on to other crafts and physically moved around as well, and my old time vintage weaving sticks vanished along the way. They may have to come back into my life one of these days, but not until I finish the Great Log Cabin Afghan Project of 2016.

I wove two more squares today, while watching "The Big Short", now available on Netflix. It's really, really hard to make complicated financial voodoo accessible to the average liberal arts major, but this movie did a great job of explaining what the hell happened with a generous layer of snark. I knew quite a bit of this story already because I was employed in an industry that was very directly affected. I saw the crash coming when we were selling houses to "investors" who were buying three properties at a time to flip the next day. These weren't fabulously wealthy people, they were people taking advantage of the ridiculously lax mortgage qualification requirements of the era. I will never forget the moment I knew it was about to turn to shit. I was on a treadmill at the gym and a guy next to me was telling the guy on the other side of him about how he was flipping houses, because it was so insanely easy to get financing! You buy a new home, you close, you turn around and put a sign in the yard and somebody buys it from YOU! You've gotta get in on this, I'm making shitloads of money! And I knew a lot of our buyers were guys like him; we couldn't get the plats recorded fast enough, they wanted to buy and flip, because all the cool kids were doing it! And then it hit overload, as it had to do, and my employer went under. But hey, let's blame "those people" who "shouldn't have gotten a mortgage," for a house they wanted to raise their kids in, not the Donald Trump wannabes who actually drove up the market with shit like that.

On second thought, perhaps "The Big Short" wasn't the best choice of movie for a relaxing Sunday afternoon. It was a stroll down memory lane I could really have done without.

Zootopia, now, that's a movie! I LOVED it!