As do many of their priests. Have you heard the latest joke from Rome? There’s been an “apostolic visit” scheduled to a number of U.S. seminaries looking for ‘evidence of homosexuality’.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel
I honestly don’t think they’ll have to look very far, but the sin of the matter is that for years, gay Catholic men have been encouraged to join the priesthood. Now that child abuse has risen to epidemic proportions in the church, the Vatican seems to be looking for some scapegoat or smokescreen to point blame somehow away from themselves.

Alas, we have another witch hunt sanctioned by the nazi Pope himself.

They think they have trouble recruiting priests now? Wait till they exorcise all the queers. If they get rid of all of them, there will be about half as many priests and seminarians.

Maybe it would be a good thing after all.

Sheep & Fiber Festival
One follow-up to the festival this past weekend. In the one picture of women spinning, you can see reader, May in the background, with her elbow on the table and a blue headband.

Knitting
Despite much relaxation this weekend, I did get some knitting done.

You’ll note I’ve started on my favorite row of color blocks.

This row uses the same pattern stitches as the first row of color blocks, and I’m back to making errors. Damn, I need to pay more attention.

Readers’ Comments/Questions
Michelene asks, “How about quilted stars within the snowballs?

Liza is going to give me a few of her contacts who do finishing. I’m going to ask the person to whom I send it for finishing to suggest something that won’t be too labor-intensive, but will still make a nice quilt. For the snowball quilt in Kaffe’s most recent book, Museum Quilts, Liza quilted circles in each of the snowballs to accentuate the trompe d’œil of roundness. That was quite labor-intensive, so I won’t be doing that. I’m thinking that the busy-ness of the fabrics will allow a much more simple quilting pattern.

Enjay asks, “Is quilting going to edge out the knitting/spinning?”

Much to Liza’s dismay, this site will never be renamed QuiltJoe.com…knitting will always be my primary passion. However, much to Thaddeus’ dismay, I will continue quilting (this last project took up both a lot of our floor space and a lot of my time and attention). I just went back and calculated that the entire quilt took me four weeks to complete, which I consider an excellent time-to-completion ratio.