As a little girl, I had this record album--remember those, black with a hole in the middle?--that told the story of Snow White and Briar Rose. Though I listened to it incessantly, I'm not sure now whether a wolf caused all the mayhem or a billy goat. Had the wicked step mother with the personality disorder entered the picture, or was Snow White dating someone else's boy at the time? Did she prick her finger on a spindle? Was she involved in a homoerotic diad with Briar Rose? It's all a blur.

I have a dim memory of not taking to Briar Rose; I recall a simpering blonde, which as a girl wasn't nearly so fearsome as this “briar“ idea. Not being a gardener, I still think of a “briar“ as a thatch of tangled roses, a weedy thicket of thorns and scratchy spines. I imagined entrapment in such a place, dark and loamy and full of stinging nettles.

Which brings us to yarn. Aloo, which most of you probably know, is spun from Himalayan nettles and this scares me just a bit. Stinging nettles. Briar Rose. Gives you the willies, don't it?

But Interweave's One Skein has a darling pattern for a bath mitt and puffy, which is tempting me to put Freudian issues aside, grab some Knit Lite needles and get over my fear of the dark.