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Fall '98 Preview

Not unlike the Detroit Car Manufacturers, Yossel lives by one credo alone: Bigger is Better. Never before has it been more evident than in his Fall '98 Fashion preview. Yossel is threatening no fewer than three major innovations to the world of kintting. The first is apparent to even the most untrained eye: the point. Look for "The Kaiser" to be a runaway style for next season.

But what are these other styles, the mane and the button? Rest assured that we are not messing with you when we say ... These two features are going to be HUGE. The mane is nothing less than a Lion's pride of hair, flowing down the nape of your neck in full acrylic splendor. Go ahead, stroke it. It's yours. Luxury and freedom go hand in hand, however, and, left to its own, that mane would get in your eyes and obstruct the art of making love.

Which is why we came up with the button. No ordinary button this, but rather a collector's item in its own right: handcrafted fimo clay, lovingly formed to not only complement the toessel aesthetically, but functionally as well. The button alone you would be lucky to find for under 200 dollars. But to get it thrown in for free? These truly are amazing times.

I have two words for you: cro-chet. I long mocked the practice of crochet as retrograde. While it, just as knitting, works with loops and yarn, it uses only one needle (or hook), while knitting uses two. obviously, knitting is the superior of the two. At least that's what the old ladies in the yarn shops taught me.

It took a young Rastafarian on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley to teach me the error of my ways. This man, Roosevelt by name, had a new deal of his own: he could sell hand-crafted hats for only ten dollars - because he could make one in only a half hour. Watching his skilled hand work faster than I could think, I was intrigued. I bugged him enough that he allowed me to hang out with him for a couple of hours, at the end of which I had absolutely nothing but a bunch of torn yarn and tendonitis.

So then I went home and picked up some crochet books from my dear Mum. Excited by the very prospect of mastering this new science, I opened one up - to a section on the triple half crochet double loop. Made no bloody sense at all. I cast it to the floor in a fit of fury and disgust, picked my hook back up, and just went with what Roosevelt had shown me. What dons the head of the lovely Alex here is what came of my first ever attempt with crochet needles. Who knows what the Summer will bring?