Dishes pile in the sink when you're with the one you love.

knit one

I have been working on this piece of knitting for quite a while. It will be a spiral pattern shawl, and it is a gift. I love how the spirals fit together so nicely, and I end up thinking about honeycomb and the center of daisies and soap bubbles and everything that has either the spiral pattern or hexagonally-packed radially symmetrical designs. The practice of knitting says a lot about who I am, and what I do. I get very quiet and still, I work with a focused intent, and I keep a pattern in my mind that represents the whole I am creating. In this state, I will happily untangle snarled yarn, all the time thinking about the mittens I'm going to make. I usually hum wordless tunes, or talk to the person I'm knitting for, or think something nice about them. I watch each stitch carefully as I make it, even if I'm sitting in front of a TV, or in a seminar (I made several seminar scarves. I swear it kept me awake and listening all through senior year). I explore the idea that all the stitches are interconnected, and that a piece of string can become anything with the right guidance, and that patience and craftiness are warmly rewarding. And, slipping into metaphor, if each stitch were a species in an ecosystem, then a slipped stitch, a species going extinct, would create a widening hole in what is meant to be a whole garment, as the species most closely relying on that link in the foodweb are effected and the links begin to crumble. I examine the pattern laid in front of me, counting carefully, and if I see a slipped stitch, my breathing stops for an instant, as I stay perfectly still to keep the run from getting any bigger. I pick up the stitch and work it into the pattern, if there is enough room, and only then do I breathe easy again. Sometimes I undo entire rows, unraveling the mistake and returning to an unbroken pattern. This is what ecological restorationists do for a living, isn't it? Unravel anthropogenic "mistakes" and return to an unbroken pattern, except that there is no knitter, the stitches (species) weave themselves. Which reminds me of a Chinese medicinal text called The Web That Has No Weaver.
At any rate, the study of patterns is necessity to me. If I weren't memorizing carpet squares, I wouldn't have been able to sit through middle school, which moved at a snail's pace, nor even sit in my own room talking on the phone. Out in nature the patterns are so obvious, they have names, aspen, maple, birch, basswood, and I know them the way I recognize voices or handshakes. If you ask me how I know, I will need to think a minute to put it into words, because the patterns do not have words. They have entire stories. But indoors, I compulsively study fabric motifs, wall hangings, and paintings, looking for the same regularity of character or design, looking for something predictable, something that grows and becomes and creates more of itself, as patterns can, and as life can. And so I knit, taking on projects of increasing complexity and scale. Each one I try is a little bit harder than the last, so I keep pushing the envelope. I hang onto the predictability of a pattern in the face of uncertainty. Stories hold patterns that I search for, and they provide an experience of a pattern unfolding and reaching completion. Stories model life. I follow the thread along someone else's pattern, and feel safe and assured, and more confident about my own leavings and tracings, my scribbles, the bits of knotted string that are preparing me for the patchworking of my own life.
This is how knitting is important.

Swedish Saffron Bread

After a lovely weekend class, I felt like making myself a treat. I've always wanted to use saffron in cooking, I wanted to know what it tastes and smells like, and I've heard the color is unparalleled. I spotted the spice when helping a friend clean out an entire kitchen. College is (was, alas!) full of freebies.
It felt wonderful to use and enjoy something so precious, and tell myself that I am worth a half-teaspoon of saffron. I can't wait to have this with poached eggs in the morning. Milk, eggs, a lot of butter and flour went into this recipe, but if I'm going to go all out, they look so good, and I couldn't substitute every single ingredient for something different that might be easier for me to eat. I mostly made this recipe to see if I could. Someone else can eat it.
The saffron turned a deep red when I soaked it (for 12 hours!), and it reminded me of the St. John'swort oil. Both plants are yellow but dye a deep clear red in extraction. In retrospect, maybe all that work with St. John'swort really turned things over for me. All about letting my light shine and directing my energy smoothly outwards. The recipe even called for 7 spiral shaped buns. So there we have it, my chakra healing class represented in food form.

hot off the er, needles

Here's my completed sweater! I've been working on it for two+ years. That is, if 'working' means keeping it hidden in my closet and forgetting about it for a year and a half. AT (=Aunt Teresa) has reassured me that this is still a success, at least it hasn't been sitting around since 1985. That's older than I am. The yarn and pattern are from a Japanese knitting supply company called Noro. I don't have qualms about using their yarn, because the quality is so high, though maybe I should be looking for some local yarn for my next project. I love variegated yarns, and patterns that show off the color changes. I want to try hand-dyeing this summer. Anyway, now I am nice and warm in my (slightly chilly) house, wearing my sweater and my felted elf slippers. At the risk of this turning into a knitting blog, let me post those as well. In order to felt wool, you agitate it in hot soapy water to make the fibers stick. the final stage involved felting the slippers onto my feet. Yes, I sat on my kitchen floor, rubbing soap and soggy wool onto my feet, much to the amazement of my family.
Because knitting projects take me so long, my taste often changes completely from the time I start the project, and the finished product sometimes ends up looking completely different than I envisioned it anyway. Glad to say that I still want to wear these, though the elf slippers don't leave the house.

Adventure Parts 2-6

What more could I add?  New friends.  A club with lighting like stars exploding all over my skin, dancing through supernovas.  Being sorely tempted by the ice cage, which required donning Russian hats, fur coats and drinking vodka.  Riding trains, always my favorite thing to do, and running through a train station, weaving around posts and between people to get on the subway just before the doors close, Felicia in high heels, everyone out of breath, hearts racing.  

Late night snacks and feeling like a complete teenager, extending, unculrling conversation in the smoky pale dawn, being too excited and full of party to sleep, keeping each other awake and cuddling, pretending to yell at the guy with the lawn mower, 'people are trying to sleep'.  Breakfast at 4pm (and I'm the only one who eats breakfast food, coke and cigarettes are not for me). 

Frivolous underwear shopping which turned into trying on dresses, which turned into buying the dress I wasn't looking for but should have been.  The deal-clincher was getting locked out of my changing room stall and being able to wriggle under the door in said dress.  

An adventure in making dinner, or was it lunch? And of course pie.  Apple pie.  And being too tired and leaving dishes in the sink (what a luxury!).  And speaking of luxury, a hot tub in a place where the houses have columns and big porches.  Very impressive lighting fixtures.  

Bacon.  

A smallish road trip with a new-to-me musical playing on the tape deck, and my bare feet out the window.  It could be better, it could be raining, and just as we were about to reach our destination, the weather obliged.

A very merry undeathday to you (part 1)

This weekend I went into the city and celebrated Felicia still not being dead, and Elias too come to think of it. I knew it was going to a fabulous weekend when I saw the giant cube. Sitting and waiting for the evening to begin, I came to the realization that my way of participating in New York city is to blow bubbles (but I don't need to put out a hat for collecting change). Some guys across the street were playing really terrible jazz music, and the traffic was going by, while people waited to meet up with friends. My supply of personalized bubbles from Jeni's wedding came in handy, and I gave them out to people who were really excited about it. But what was amazing was the way that the wind blew the bubbles everywhere, out into the street, swirling around the statue, up into the sky. For some reason, skyscrapers make so much sense if there are bubbles floating up up up beside them. If I just blow bubbles in my own backyard, it makes only a few people happy, but in a city, the effects of living your life in a joyful way spread so much further. It made me rethink living in a hobbit house in the woods, because cities are where people connect.
And if you ever want someone to find you, leave them a trail of bubbles (but you have to keep blowing them faster than they pop).
This was such a real feeling of summer, and the East Village, and anticipation.

a sample of my knitting

One of my qualifications should the zombie apocalypse come: I can knit and sew. Also one of my qualifications for marriage, but hope chests are a bit outdated, and no one really gives a damn anymore about needlepoint (which is good because I've been getting rusty). This took several hours. It's lamb's wool and I am making it into a pouch, note loose ends, it's not finished. It will have tassels.
The design I came up with for a gift! It's sort of every spirally thing I've ever thought about. Also the triskelion, which might be a Celtic symbol? There should be more elaborate interpretations in the future, this first spiral leads to smaller spirals on the edges, and they all circle back around. If we are thinking about symbolically portraying the cosmic dance, for me it would be something like this. There's a lot of focused energy and intensity, but also a bubbling sense of humor and intelligence, of consciously playing the Game.
Textiles do something to my brain. Something good. I have yet to find a metaphor for ecology that I can become so immersed in as the task of knitting. This is the way I see problems. I have a hole, or a dropped stitch, and first I sit very still and figure out what happened, a matter of temporospatial observation, what is the pattern, and how did it change, and take it back to the root cause of the problem, giving it enough slack so that I don't undo it further. Each stitch on its own is very loose, but put them all together and you have something flexible and whole. Miss one stitch, all the others start to fall apart around it. From a tangle of yarn I can create (or help coax into existence) something that will hold together. Turning holes into wholes. That is why I'm optimistic about the environment. I have patience to sit undoing a knot for hours after most people would give up and cut it apart.