Little Ugg on the Prairies...

I grew up in a small town in the Canadian Prairies, right smack dab in the middle of the prairies...Saskatchewan. It's a land of achingly cold winters (one year we had forty days that were under -40 degrees Celsius), and dry, hot summers. The landscape is a study in simplicity; it always brings to mind Rothko paintings, with their bold use of shape and colour.
As a land that is so dictated by its climate, the way people dress is characterized by necessity. When it is -40 (-55 with the wind chill), and exposed flesh freezes in less than a minute, who really cares what you're wearing outside?

Thumbing through the new Interweave Knits, I spied the Mowat Mukluks*, and the picture took me back to grade seven. All the cool girls had mukluks. They were crafted out of leather and rabbit fur, with intricate beading on the instep. They were the Uggs of that time. Expensive, warm, and kind of bordering on ugly. I remember one pair in particular...Shannon had them, and she wore them constantly...they were black with turquoise beading. I wanted them.

So when I saw the pattern in Interweave, the thirteen-year-old inside me jumped up and down, squealing. And then I priced out the materials...Plymouth Foxy is $28 a skein. And the pattern calls for six skeins. Sigh....a little much for something I would wear as slippers around the house.

*The 'Mowat' reference is to Farley Mowat, a Canadian author of such books as 'Lost in the Barrens'. A great book if you like to read three hundred pages of two boys wandering around in the Tundra. Required reading when I was in grade seven.