Shift from a “This works” mentality, to:
“This thrives“.
~ Laura Jean Schneider (cattle ranch owner, New Mexico)
Month: April 2016
Iknitadog
The Iditarod (the famous 1,000 mile Alaskan dog sled race) and its knit-a-long companion, the Iknitarod, are long over now and are well past yesterday’s news. But it’s what I think of whenever I catch sight of this cute, silly hat I created during those events. It always makes me smile, even if I do know the disproportional amount of work that went into making such a small, utilitarian thing, and all it’s various hand spun yarns. I’m especially pleased with the dog that’s knit with Chiengora. Yes, that’s right: I knit the dog on the hat with yarn that I spun from the fur of my dog. The original pattern for this hat did not have a dog. However, I’m not the first person to think it’s a good idea to stage a herding dog among this flock of sheep. Meg Warren did it, and published her version as a separate pattern on Ravelry. Her dogs, however, are very clearly border collies, and well -I wanted the dog in my version of the hat to look like MY dog, a Cardigan Corgi. My thinking was that learning the colorwork technique was enough to manage at one time, without worrying about the pattern, too. I subsequently decided to re-chart the entire pattern for this hat, so I wouldn’t have to think about it while I was knitting. It took me a surprisingly long time to make a digital version of the pattern that was in my head, and creating it on a computer was its own learning process. Here’s how it turned out:
Now I’m working on the accompanying mitts, and as soon as I look up Elizabeth Zimmerman’s method of casting off by casting on, this first one is going to be finished. Here’s ripping out, last week:
Both mitts really should be finished by now, but with things being what they were last week, the mitts were set aside for several days and I made a lot of progress on swatching, instead. My new pattern is nearly done, and then it will be on to knitting a real sample of it. In the meantime, here’s a teaser:
Un-raveling; Re-creating
~on dealing with loss, playing with the cards you’re dealt, and keeping the creation of the fabric going, stitch by stitch
If you’re the kind of person who notices these kinds of things, you’ll have noticed that there was no written post last week. Last week, I had some things come up unexpectedly that needed taken care of immediately. Namely, several people I am close to had, within days of each other, very different varieties of very real, very emotional, life-altering crisis. It was hard to watch them go through what they were dealing with; I made sure I was there, and I did my best.
I also did what I always do when faced with such things dealt out by life – I took all that emotion and re-directed it into a super-focused high beam of intense creativity. I swatched like a fiend, in the car on the way to and from the funeral. I sat on the kitchen floor with the dog and dashed stitch counts out onto the pages of a notebook with a favorite pen. I ripped back the palm of a mitt I was winging the pattern on, and re-engineered the thumb the way it seemed it would work better – and it did.
Then I vacuumed the house, and was glad for the dog fur gathered in the corners on the old hardwood floors. I sipped homemade root beer in someone else’s cozy kitchen and basked in the presence of friends. I stood with my feet planted solidly on my lawn and watched the sunset, and was aware of the absence of hospital walls.
All these things we go through, alone, as individuals. All these things we share the experience of, across all humanity. We unravel, we pick up, and we go on.