Craft or Bust weekly: keep on keeping on (& decluttering to free creative energy)

The word count rises apace! Well, okay: not quite apace, but it does rise, anyway. ;) 658 words written this week. So far the word count is going up an average of 160 123* words a session — and I've been thinking more and more frequently of writing in between the necessary "oops, gotta absolutely do this to meet my CoB goal" sessions, which pretty much follows the pattern of last year's Craft or Bust project. The more weeks I met my easy minimum, the more I felt capable of exceeding the minimum; and then I did exceed it regularly and by far. Cross fingers that it works that way this year, too — though I'm not even going to whisper in the back of my mind the words "finished" and "novel" consecutively right now, lest I break the fragile confidence that's trying to build. ;)

Anyway, since I've been thinking more about writing, I've also been thinking about why, if I'm thinking about it, I'm not doing it. And the answer came easily this time: I have unfinished business. I'm like a ghost who can't move on, who stays hanging about places where I should have been done long ago.

Believe me, I can put up with some amount of loose ends, for quite some time — but the thickness of loose ends cluttering up my brain is hugely greater than the amount of loose ends floating around my yarn stash. (Har har.) I've been collecting loose ends longer than yarn, after all. I have a staggering amount of loose-endage; no shock that it makes it hard to move, much less move on. But the way through, I know now, is slowly and step by step, like through quicksand.

So I'm stepping and stepping and stepping.

What about you? Taken any steps toward your creative goals lately? :D Please do share — having company on my slow journey makes it seem less lame. ;)

*Average word count increase revised to include the first week I wrote for CoB 2011 ... which I totally forgot to include because it was on a different project than I'm currently writing on. Doh.

(This post is part of Craft or Bust, a weekly creative endurance challenge with a sense of compassion and fun. Check the Craft or Bust tab at the top of the blog, or read more about it here.)

Free knitting pattern: Heel Flap Scarf

I've been working on it since November, but it's finally out — my Heel Flap Scarf pattern! Woohoo! It's freeeeee, and it's a nice quick knit that you can make using pretty much any yarn, to make any size scarf you like. Just watch out: it curls, so you'll probably want to choose a protein fiber yarn that will let you block out some of the curly curling. ;)


Check out the pattern page on Ravelry, or go right ahead and download the pattern by clicking here.

I'd love to hear what you think of the design and the pattern, and of course if you knit it I'd love to see pictures, so come back and share! :D

Craft or Bust weekly: the importance of stories

Today is World Storytelling Day. Since my Craft or Bust goal this year is about writing stories, you might have guessed storytelling is important to me.

When I was younger, I saw the stories in everything. Not only imagined stories based on "What if?" but also true stories that started with "I know why." Everything has a story — has multiple stories; every moment is part of a story.

Some people told me that to think this way is a sign that I couldn't distinguish between reality and fiction; I knew they were wrong, and that telling and listening to stories sharpened my ability to see both truth and fiction for what they are — including truths that people don't want to see and fictions that people believe are true.

But then I lost the thread of my own story because I started listening to the stories other people imagined for me. Little by little I forgot that a story doesn't have to make sense to anyone to be true; and I forgot that a story that convinces everyone is not necessarily a good story, especially for the characters. I forgot that stories speak most to those who need them most — that the goal is not to make sure all people understand, but to allow the right people to understand.

I am now, little by little, reawakening to my own story. This is part of why my goal for CoB this year is to write: I need back my ability to see stories, to feel them, to craft them — and to live my own story truthfully and centeredly and consciously.

It isn't easy to relearn something forgotten when one has also forgotten oneself. At least, it's not easy for me. Progress is still slow ... but progress is progress. And I wrote 482 words today. Still not above the "wimpy" threshold, but more than last week. So yes: it's still progress.

Oh, and happy equinox, too, whether yours is vernal or autumnal. I'd love to hear your stories, true or false, new or old, good or bad — so leave me a comment if you have something to say. :D

(This post is part of Craft or Bust, a weekly creative endurance challenge with a sense of compassion and fun. For more info, check the Craft or Bust tab at the top of the blog, or go here and do a little light reading.)

On creativity as an anti-negative force; and just a little bit (of tawashi)

In an example of using craft as therapy, lately I've been using quick, instant gratification projects like emotional salve. Things have been stressful for the past few days (or more, depending on where you want to count from) — in a Murphy's Law, "Why am I even bothering?" sort of way.

I found myself in the contradictory position of wanting to craft to counteract the destructive powers of all the negative feelings flying around here, but knowing that if I work on anything complex, or anything that requires a fair amount of thinking or paying attention, I'm likely to create more mess — more destruction.

So rather than jump into anything and mess it up, I sat for a while and thought about why I was thinking of crafting to counteract the crappiness. And it occurred to me that while I think of (fruitless) negativity as destructive, crafting is creative — not just in the sense of "imaginative," but in the literal sense: It focuses on creating something rather than destroying something (even if technically some "destruction" is kind of necessary for creation ;)).

Once I realized that, it seemed kind of stupidly obvious, that of course people naturally turn to crafting — or to any creative pursuit — when suffering from an overabundance of negative feelings. Duhhh. ;)

So anyway, my solution to being stuck in a universe governed by Murphy's Law was these little crocheted tawashi — basically, dish scrubbies:



The back:


And one that reminds me of a sea urchin:

They're made with old acrylic yarn that refuses to leave my stash because even though I hate knitting with acrylic, there's some sentimental value attached to this yarn — it was pretty much the first yarn I bought (yes, I fell prey to the bizarrely common idea that the best thing to start beginners with is potentially squeaky, unforgiving acrylic yarn) and I have it in a wide array of colors that I really still love. That is, it's refused to leave the stash until now. Now I can expand my crochet skills and make a bunch of scrubby things!

Of course, I'm a bit iffy about the idea of scrubbing dishes I'm going to eat off of with probably non-food-safe plastic (and I don't particularly want to put more synthetic chemicals into the water supply). Then I started wondering: What the crap is the green side of a standard scrub sponge made of, anyway? Are my acrylic scrubbies better or worse than the mysterious green scrubby side of the sponge?

Ultimately I'd like to make scrubbies out of yarn that's both scrub-friendly (i.e., not overly smooth) and natural — hemp and nettle come to mind. And then I'll be left with this darn acrylic yarn again, waiting for some other non-frustration-inducing application.

Anyway, at the very least, my little acrylic tawashi helped me fight the destructive negativity monster. And hey, that's pretty good for cheap acrylic yarn from 10+ years ago.

Craft or Bust weekly: doing a little bit more (and: who won the giveaway)

First off, a little announcement: If you entered the giveaway for a mini shawl pin and a hand-sewn pouch, the winner is ... Silvina Leonnetti! ;D Woohoo! Congrats to her!

Now, on to Craft or Bust. ;D

This week I wrote 320 words of fiction — that's 31 more words than last week, and on a novel project I haven't touched since last year, since before the Debacle (though I didn't realize it had been that long until I looked at my writing log for that project). Last week's writing was also on a random writing prompt, not on an in-progress piece of long-form fiction.

So even though it's still a small number of words written, I did a little more this week than I did last week, and on something a little more personally important. I'd say that's an improvement that counts — more signs of good progress, no matter how small.

Did you make progress on your creative goals this week, even just a tiny bit? Did you work more or less this week on your crafty goals, and how are you feeling about them? I want to hear about how you're doing, so leave me a comment if you feel like sharing. :D

(This post is part of Craft or Bust, a weekly creative endurance challenge with a sense of compassion and fun. Find more info on the Craft or Bust tab at the top of the blog, or just click here.)

Crocheted flower, Blings, and a pair of mystery scissors

Still scratching the crochet bug's bite here. I made a double-layer crocheted flower the other day — my first ever! ;D (Instructions from The Ultimate Sourcebook of Knitting and Crochet Stitches.)


And I've started a Lily Go Tulip Doily that should be done fairly soon. The crochet hooks and yarn are getting rapidly smaller and smaller around here. Guess I just had to take years off crocheting and work on knitting to be able to understand crochet — ha. ;)

Also still working verrrrry slowwwwwly on the Bling socks.


And while organizing sewing supplies the other day, I came across this pair of scissors, inherited along with a bunch of other sewing supplies from the first mate's grandmother:


Anyone know what they're for? They look awfully familiar, but I don't seem to remember ever owning a pair of scissors like this before now, so I'm not precisely sure what to do with them. They do look like they were designed for something pretty specific. ;)

Craft or Bust weekly: taking small steps

289 words. That's what I managed to write today — but it counts. It counts toward my Craft or Bust 2011 goal of writing a piece of fiction every week.

That sounds to me like a wimpy amount compared to how I used to be — but as I said last year with my "wimpy" sounding goal of crafting just one time every week, it's a vast improvement on nothing, which is what I've been doing for a while. So it's a step in the right direction, and that's all I ask of myself, because right now, treating myself with compassion and understanding works better than treating myself like a mean old boss. All I ask of me right now is a step, and then another, and then another — one step every week, and more than that if I feel like it. Which I very likely will once I get my balance again. :D

So what about you? Did you take any steps this week toward a goal you've been putting off? Did you do anything that was hard for you? Did you work on any crafty goals that gave you a sense of accomplishment?

Tell me about what you did this week that nurtures your creativity, and let's celebrate little steps together. ;D

(If you didn't know already, Craft or Bust is a weekly creative endurance challenge with a sense of compassion and fun. Find more info on the Craft or Bust tab at the top of the blog, or just click here for this year's relaunch post.)

A quickie giveaway: Win a mini shawl pin + Eleven Hills hand-sewn pouch!

It's time for another giveaway! Woohoo! ;D

This one's a quick one, compared to my usual: The deadline is Sunday, March 13 at 5 p.m. Eastern time — or rather, that's when we'll be doing the drawing for the winner, so get your entries in before then.

I'm happy to announce this is my first joint giveaway, with the lovely Agnes of Eleven Hills! Yayyy! One winner will receive a lovely hand-sewn sun, moon and stars pouch from Eleven Hills, and one star-shaped handmade copper miniature shawl pin from Star & Crossbones. Here they are, in all their celestial goodness:


A close-up of the star charm pin (a.k.a. the miniature shawl pin):


And the front and back of the pouch:




How to enter the giveaway:

• Visit both the Star and Crossbones Etsy shop and the Eleven Hills Etsy shop and pick a favorite item from each shop — then post your picks in the comments on this blog post for one entry!
• You can also enter by posting your picks as a comment on the giveaway announcement here on the Eleven Hills Facebook page.
• And you get extra entries for posting about the giveaway on Facebook or on Twitter. Just post a comment on this blog post saying you tweeted or posted on Facebook. :)
• Don't forget to leave contact information with each entry so we know how to reach you if you win. :D

Remember, the drawing for the winner will happen at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, March 13!

And feel free to share this with your friends ... Maybe you can split the winnings if one of you wins! ;)

Craft or Bust Redux: Now in even less formal flavor

Craft or Bust 2011: BUST!

Until now. Rarrrr! I re-declare Craft or Bust season open. (I was waiting to get used to the Year of the Metal Rabbit, or until spring sprang, or something. Yeah. Sure. That's it. ;))

Anyway, here's the deal: Rather than be a slacker any longer — because that is Against the spirit of Craft or Bust! — I hereby declare that CoB check-ins from here on out are open to anyone who wants to check in. No sign-ups necessary (but if you want to sign up, you can do it on this post, how about that?). And I hereby declare that my personal 2011 CoB goal is to write a piece of fiction every week.

If you're new to the Craft or Bust thing, here are the official rules from last year, and I will excerpt the most relevant part:

The Craft or Bust Project is a weekly creative endurance challenge. The rules are simple:

1. Join whenever.
2. Stay as long as you like.
3. Create, check in, be inspired, show off your craftigoodness, feel good.

Any art or craft (with one exception) counts: knitting, sewing, wire wrap jewelry, mail art, writing ... Heck, if there are creative bakers, gardeners, or sky-writers out there who want to play along, join up! If you have something creative you'd like to do every week, I'd be happy to have you. :D

You can work on any art/craft projects you want. You can work on a different one each week, or the same one the entire way. The heart of this challenge is to learn to craft regularly; finishing stuff is icing on the cake (and a fairly likely side effect even without trying too hard, I think).

The exception to "any craft counts" is blogging, by itself. While blogging can be a creative act, my intent is not to turn the weekly update into a list of who posted what to their blogs. ;)

You can find more info on CoB 2010 on the relevant tab at the top of the blog, if you so desire. ;D

Starting this coming Sunday (March 6) I will be checking in once a week with my own progress. If you want to play, come and tell me about your progress on my check-in post. The next Sunday, I'll mention you in my weekly post.

If you want to be kinda formal about it and sign up somewhere, you can do it using this form. (You may be able to avoid checking anything at all for the "What kind of stuff do you want to hear about?" question, though I haven't tried it.)

Other than that, if you want to play, please please please do join the Flickr pool and add photos (I am Seriously Not Amused by having to stare at my own crap there all the time ;)), and you can leave your name, a relevant Web link, and your CoB 2011 goals in the comments on this post, if you want.

Sound good? :D

New shawl pins in the shop!

Did you see? I finally listed some new shawl pins in the Etsy shop! Yayyyyy!


I really wanted to share pics with you guys earlier — not so much because of the pins themselves, but because the new camera takes photos that are So. Much. Better. than the ones I have of all my previous shawl pins. OMGcameralove. I mean, look:




Anyway, go check the new shawl pins out, if you like, and let me know what you think. The new designs are refinements of past one-of-a-kind designs, so they may look familiar ... but what's neat about these is they're part of a permanent line of shawl pins that will stay in the shop and be made fresh with every order. Do you like? ;D I know I like.

There are more shawl pin ideas bubbling in my brain, too — and a new shawl-pin-related giveaway is coming up Very Soon, hint hint. Keep watching, 'cause it's going to happen in the next couple of weeks, and it'll be a quicker one than my normal month-long giveaways, with extra goodies, too!

A little bit of art on the sewing table

My little sewing table is in use again as something other than a photography surface (which it has served as admirably, being the only flat white surface in the house before I finally got my jewelry-making cutting boards out of storage): Today I worked on some ATCs. That's artist trading cards, for anyone who didn't know — now you do. Hopefully I'll be making more of them in the coming months so no one will be able to forget. ;)

The ATCs in question are actually for a fiber arts art group, so it seemed natural to make them on the sewing table. Plus, I have a chair that's the right height for the sewing table, and if I'd tried to use the crafting table I mentioned in the last post as having been cleaned off, I'd have had to stand. We can't have that! Well, maybe when the area under it is organized enough to be interesting instead of tiresome. For today, the sewing desk was happy to be used again for actual craft work.


The theme for this ATC swap is "lost and found," which translates to: Use found objects on your cards. I ended up using old yarn scraps, old fabric scraps, and a piece of ribbon saved from some gift packaging. Originally I wanted to make three ATCs, but making art degenerated into fighting with the sewing machine, which is still not quite up to snuff even after I cleaned all the accumulated sewing dust out of it (was that last year?) — so I ended up just making one. I ... need to make more ATCs. I am sadly out of practice. But here's the one that came out fibery enough for me to feel comfortable using it in the swap:


Incidentally, no, I have not yet figured out the correct white balance setting for this particular lighting situation. ;)
The first mate says it looks like a decorated jeans pocket, which I think is appropriate for a fiber-arts-ish ATC. And did you see that I made a tiny little loomy square and wove my green yarn scrap into it? If you want to be nice, that's three fiber arts techniques in one spot: I sewed the gold loom warp threads onto the card (I don't want to call it warping, since I did it with a needle ;)), plied the leftover green cotton thread, and then needle-wove it into the warp. There's also some machine stitching on the rest of the card, which was where I got sadly derailed into fighting with the machine.

Alas, my poor machine. I do love it, and I need to take it in to the shop — maybe the arts and crafts fairies will leave money in my shoe tonight so I can take it to be looked at.

Anyway, I did end up finishing the other two ATCS as non-fibery-themed ones. Someday I may feel brave enough to offer them up for trade. Anyone else out there do mail art? :D

A craft room clean for spring seems like a wondrous thing

So. I have not been crafting up a storm since my last update, but I have been decluttering the crap out of the craft room. I've never noticed that I have much of an internal clock for spring cleaning, but I guess it was time, and goshdarn if it doesn't feel something like spring here, so maybe my internal clock just took a really, really long time to set itself properly. Or maybe this is a coincidence.

And ha — "it was time," I say. Considering that I tried to tackle the Craft Room Rescue project in May of last year, maybe it's long past time.

See, I shared a teeny weeny photo of a shelf last year. That was all I was brave enough to share — the secret horrors of the rest of the craft room will remain known only to those of us who lived through it. ;)

About a day after my last blog post (or maybe that same day; I can't remember now), I got it into my head to crochet something. I can't remember what now, because instead, I ended up literally cleaning and reorganizing that entire bookcase.

Perversely, it looks just as cluttered now as it did last year. See?


Though this shelf doesn't look so bad — and all the pretty colors lined up so neatly inspired me to keep organizing:


The important difference between this bookcase last year and this bookcase Right Now is that it (and a small space on the floor in front of it) now holds all of my non-handspun yarn, and it is sorted by fiber type and weight, with an entire shelf just for projects in progress. There are no longer stray irons, knitting looms, or arbitrary plastic bags haunting said shelf. Last year there were just a bunch of disorganized bags full of assorted bits and scraps of projects and balls of yarn and notions and who knows what shoved onto all the shelves just to keep stuff off the floor. Then the floor got taken over by boxes and piles of fabric and such anyway.

Now, I can see the floor.

And that's only the beginning. In the past week and a half or so, I've also pretty much organized all my fiber tools, cleaned off my craft table so there's actual space on it (...a little...), and done a pretty thorough inventory of the slightly horrifying amount of raw fleece and random wool I have sitting and waiting for me to spin it.

I even excavated (and that is a technical term! ;)) my long-suffering serger from the double-decker fabric sandwich in which it has been waiting patiently (in its original box) all these ... mumblemumble — let's just say it's been a while since I tried to watch the video and it got stuck in the VCR, leaving me clueless about exactly where to start with this tiny-seeming sewing-machine-type-thing with teeth and multiple spools of thread. Lest you think it's been in hiding for even longer than it has, though, I'll say this much: The VHS format was absolutely not in vogue when I got the serger. I would have much preferred a DVD ... not least because it wouldn't have gotten stuck in the crappy VHS/TV combo I tried to watch it on, and then I might have actually used the thing right away. ;)

Anyway, being able to actually see the serger box suddenly made me want to peek at it. Upon opening the box, these thoughts passed rapidly through my mind: 1) Wow. It's a lot smaller than I thought it was. 2) Holy crap this thing is much heavier than it looks. 3) Why does the inside of this box smell like wool?

Bearing item #1 in mind, after wiping off the strange thin layer of woolly-smelling dust from the serger, I installed it happily on my vintage Singer sewing machine/table.


It seems to make more sense to have it taking up less space in a vaguely usable position than to have it inside a space-hogging box between a stack of thrift store fabric and a pile of clothing that needs various modifications. I haven't dared to plug it in or turn it on yet, much less applied foot to pedal, but maybe when no one is looking, I'll sneak in there and see whether it'll stitch for me. As long as no one watches me too closely — a watched crafter never serges, or something like that.

Besides, now there's fabric on the floor and — again, if nobody looks at me too hard or expects too much ;) — having the serger and the sewing machine both patiently waiting for me in plain sight may prompt me to spontaneously sit down and turn fabric into objects shaped like things that would be useful outside of a pile. There are tons of things in this little condo that would improve with judicious application of textiles ... and I've just realized that the massive amounts of questionable-for-spinning wool I have might make good pillow stuffing. Which means I need to make some pillow forms to stuff.

Just go ahead and have a cup of tea and read a book and pretend you're not watching me for a moment, will you? Of course I'll take pictures of any sneaky craft attacks that happen, I promise. I just don't want to frighten away my delicate, re-budding seamstress self, so I have to go quietly and carefully for a little bit. ;)

A fancy shawl, a simple headband, a wee heart and some epic socks

Time for another crafty photo update, me hearties. ;D

Finished: Hairpin Lace Shawl
Pattern: Woman's Hairpin Lace Shawl from Coats & Clark

So I finally! Finished! My first hairpin lace shawl! As UFOs go, this one wasn't too bad — less than a year old when I finished it off. Ha. ;D And it also conveniently illustrates the fact that with a camera that I can actually change stuff on (you know, like the aperture! And the shutter speed!), I can finally take photos of my projects draped on random other stuff. (I can also fail to remember to take the cluttery porch crap out of the first few photos I take, and then end up liking one of the early photos.)


Finishing this shawl made me want to go crochet other stuff — but most of the hairpin lace projects out there that I want to make involve paying for patterns, and right now I don't have any spare pattern money ... sniffle. I may be forced to design my own hairpin lace something-or-other just to get a fix.


Finished: Three-String Headband
Pattern: Simple Crochet Headband from Creativeyarn

If I want to design my own hairpin lace, though, it'd probably be useful to actually kind of know how to crochet. (Since hairpin lace is a kind of crochet and all. Yeah, yeah. You know it already, right? ;)) So I'm sloooooowly re-teaching myself to crochet by doing easy things, instead of jumping straight to hard things I don't understand that will confuse me and turn into UFOs sitting on the mountainous pile of temporarily abandoned projects. Here's one of the easy things in question (and look! I can take pictures of my own head with the new camera! ::hugs camera::).


Finished: Heart Coaster
Pattern: Heart Sachet from Lily/Sugar'n Cream

One of the things I loved about crochet when I first started doing it is that it's fast. And it's pretty easy to make cute shapes if you actually understand what you're doing (which I didn't then and kinda-sorta do now — a few years of knitting seems to have helped out with my understanding of things like increases and decreases ;)). So having no money + needing a Valentine's Day gift for B = crochet to the rescue! Voila, crocheted heart coaster!



In Progress: Epic Socks
Pattern: "Bling (Arkansas)" by Adrienne Fong, originally published in 50 Socks (50 States & More)

And I finally cast on the second pair of socks I'm knitting as a trade for yarn — officially the pattern is called "Bling," but I'm calling them the Epic Socks because of a comment someone made about how they sound. ;) They're lace and beaded, and can I tell you a secret? Shh — I've never beaded lace before. In fact, I can't remember beading my knitting before ... at least not successfully. Unsuccessfully, sure; I have a bunch of yarn and beads sitting in a basket in the craft room that were meant to turn into a beaded shawl. But both the lace and the beading on these socks are turning out to be way easier than I expected. Is my knitting mojo high this month, or was that just a contrast to the fact that it took me almost three hours to knit the hemmed beaded cuff? Yeah, that's the thing in the photo right here. Three hours, 'cause it's folded in half and knitted to itself with multiple sets of double-pointy objects that had to interact with each other in friendly ways.


So there it is. That's what I've been doing lately. Let's pretend this is a Craft or Bust update and you guys can tell me what you've been making now, too — right? Right??? Talk to me already! ;)

Pics: Crafty Projects I Have (Very Recently) Known

Because I keep sitting down to write blog posts and they keep turning into massively epic expositions on human nature and my experiences as a human being, and then I keep going back to edit them and turning them into almost completely different expository epics, and it has thus far been an endless cycle that's kept me from posting anything here, today I am Buckling Down and just posting some photos of crafts I've been doing. HA! You now have proof that I exist! Feel free to report the discovery to the local newspapers. ;)

So, ahem, to get to that crafty stuff...

Finished: ChiChi Tea Towel
Pattern from Yarnplay at Home by Lisa Shobhana Mason

I finally found the crochet hook that I needed to finish the edging on the ChiChi tea towel, so I went ahead and finished it. Yay!


And here's another photo of the full towel. Please excuse the fact that I kinda sorta made the photo obscenely bright when I was tinkering around with it in Photoshop, and also the fact that I am Too Lazy (or maybe Too Impatient) to go back and fix it right now. Or maybe ever. (I got a new camera for my birthday, and this was taken with the new camera in iffy lighting on a not-quite-white background. Too many variables = wonky photo adjustment. I'll get better, I promise. On future photos. ;))


Finished: Crocheted Organizer Basket
Pattern: Stash Baskets from Bernat (You need to have a free account to see the pattern, by the way.)

Apparently finishing the tea towel put me in a crocheting mood — and why not? I went through a crocheting period right before I started knitting regularly, even if I gave up crocheting for the most part because I couldn't figure out how it Really Worked. ;) I am also in dire need of storage solutions uniformly across the house. So I crocheted an easy little basket to help me organize the bathroom, and — wonder of wonders — to match the tea towel. (Matching bathroom decor may not be miraculous to you, but I don't think I've ever owned two towels that matched each other, much less owned bathroom accessories that match. It's, er, my eclectic style, right?)


One ball of the cream-colored yarn didn't manage to be enough to finish the sides of the basket, so my basket has a racing stripe. (The bottom is also blue.)


In Progress: Brigit Socks
Pattern: Brigit from Monkey Toes (Link leads to a Ravelry page where you can download the pattern.)

I've also made some amount of progress on the first Brigit sock, which happens to be the first full-fledged sock I've ever knit for myself. The other socks I've knit for me have been missing bits: One pair has no toes and the other pair has no toes and no heels (because they're yoga socks).


That's a good way to psych yourself into doing socks, by the way ... Or at least, knitting socks with the scary bits missing made me ridiculously aware that a sock is basically two tubes joined by a fiddly bit, with some decreases at the end of one tube. As the decreases aren't any scarier than the ones in a hat, the only scary bit remaining is the fiddly heel bit, and if you slavishly follow the heel directions in a good sock pattern, even the heel isn't very scary.


See, look! I knit this heel differently from the way the pattern said to and I wasn't scared at all! ;)

In Progress: Hairpin Lace Shawl
Pattern: Woman's Hairpin Lace Shawl from Coats & Clark

Finally, I've picked up this poor old abandoned hairpin lace shawl that I started with some recycled yarn last year for the first HPL-Along on my Ravelry hairpin lace group.


The crochet hook for the tea towel was hiding in the hairpin lace project bag (because hairpin lace is actually a form of crochet, even though I forgot that while I was puzzling over where the Size G hook had gone), and after I borrowed the hook to use for the tea towel, I couldn't just leave the poor shawl alone again. Only one more strip to go ... or maybe two. And then more joining. Uh ... I should stop thinking about that or the shawl might end up in the UFO mountain again. ;)

And ta-da! That's it for the stuff I've been doing that has to do with yarn. I do have about 4,000 photos of food I've made and/or consumed in the past couple of months, though. To post another photo-riffic post, or not ... That is the question. ;)

On the relationship of physical and emotional clutter; and on loving both

Last year I tried to clean the craft room. It was an abortive attempt.

Does that make the craft room sound like a hopeless wreck? (Are you thinking, Holy cow, she didn't clean it at all last year?)

Hold those horses! ;) It's not exactly a hopeless wreck, and I didn't not-clean it at all last year. I did have a few spastic bouts of rearranging and occasional miniature spasms of actual cleaning. Realistically, though, I didn't get much organization done, and, okay ... it is kind of a wreck. But I promise it's far too lame of a wreck to show up on a reality TV show about messes or hoarding. ;)

Last year I also bought myself a tiny little copy of the Love That Room clutter-clearing workshop from Lisa at Zen at Play. I made it about as far into the workshop as I made it into "fixing" the craft room: not terribly far.

(By the way, the above link to Zen at Play is an affiliate link, just in case you love Lisa's philosophy so much you feel compelled to buy her current offering ... but Love That Room doesn't appear to be available any more. So feel safe in the knowledge that this isn't a sales pitch. ;) Moving on...)

My failure to organize the craft room probably meant I wasn't ready. Ready for what? Frankly, for a lot, and I'll talk about that in a bit, because maybe I'm ready now, or getting close to it. I hope so, because I'm going to try again to clean the craft room this year. Decluttering in an honest and non-judgemental way seems to go hand in hand with casting off the negative self-bindings that were keeping me from truly expressing myself, don't you think? One is emotional decluttering, and the other is a physical decluttering ... but they're both related to creativity and safe space and letting myself be me.

And here's a funny thing. I know that's all true. But it's nice to have someone else say it independently of my prompting, which Lisa does in Love That Room. Some of the points she makes on the very first page:

There will be no declaring war, attacking, or whipping into shape. If that worked for me, it would have worked already.

Clutter clearing is an act of self-care: It means creating an environment that supports me and contains space for me to be me, to express what I want to express.

Clutter clearing is letting go of what doesn't serve me any more and making way for what brings me joy. In terms of emotional decluttering, like I mentioned in my last post, I am letting go of self-denial and making room for being honest. I like how she puts it: "You're clearing away everything that obscures your view of what matters most to you." I totally know that my half-abandoned, messy craft room is a direct reflection of my neglected self-expression and the repression of my self.

Another quote I like: "Clutter clearing is a journey of self-discovery because you learn about yourself through the decisions you make, and explore your past, present and future through your possessions. Your history, your hopes, your struggles — they're all expressed through the things around you." So my objective when I organize the craft room isn't just "to have a clean space." It's also to reflect on my identity and my journey, and that helps me feel like I don't have to rush it to get to an end result. Reflection takes time and reflection is an objective of its own; there is no Big Thing at the end of reflection that I need to rush toward.

"Clearing can be an opportunity to practice kindness and mindfulness." I have been very, very neglectful of self-kindness and mindfulness for the past few years. If cleaning the craft room is an opportunity to get better at those things, then it's worth doing for the practice of those things alone.

"Rather than just chucking stuff out, you can be interacting consciously with your physical environment, your belongings, and the stories behind them." This is something I've felt is missing from other approaches to decluttering — the respect for your past decisions to keep these things that have now become clutter and blockage, and the respect for the stories behind the things you have kept.

Tossing things indiscriminately, to me, is like performing surgery without respect for how you affect the bits and pieces around the piece you're taking out, or fixing. Uhh ... I wouldn't do that to my physical body, so why the crap would I do that to my emotional self? Maybe that suits other people out there, but the fact that I can tolerate the pain doesn't mean I should inflict it.

And I know that most of the things I've acquired have emotional value to me. If they didn't, they'd be gone already. Duh. If I just had a problem throwing anything out I'd have every single cereal box I've ever emptied still sitting around the house. Sure, I have some things that some people would consider trash, but they're not — they're things that have at some point had emotional value (an idea Lisa also addressed in a blog post at one point). To treat those things like they have the same value as a piece of junk mail is disrespectful of myself. That's part of why it was so traumatic last year when someone came in and threw out a bunch of my belongings while I was on vacation.

So here's to treating myself, my things, and the stories behind everything with respect. No wonder I haven't been able to write effectively for years. I've been ignoring and devaluing stories left and right. How silly of me. ;)

Wouldn't it be funny if cleaning the craft room made me a better writer again? ;)

One thing it probably will do is bring me closer to being a happy, comfortable, self-aware person again.

So hey! If anyone else out there is trying to declutter their own space and you're thinking along the same lines as I am, feel free to clean along with me and post comments on your own progress! As is pretty obvious from the success of the Craft or Bust project, it does help me to have like-minded people along with me for the journey, even if there's baton-swapping and tagging in and out. ;)

On the loss of self and emotion; or, how honesty, pain and creativity are intrinsically related

So what do you do when you're so angry you're almost physically incandescent? Or when you're so disappointed, so disgusted by someone's blindness or self-righteousness or selfishness, that you're surprised the feelings aren't transmuting magically into radioactive sludge and oozing out your pores?

Some people do their best to hide their feelings ... even from themselves. Some of them are visible to the naked eye as emotional wrecks and still hide their feelings from themselves — just not from anyone else who bothers paying a wee bit of attention. I've seen cases of this that make me wonder where the stick could be shoved in so far that I can't see it.

I am not a fan of the "hide your emotions because it's more seemly" approach.

I am a fan of honesty — with oneself, at the very minimum. Honesty that isn't just the flip side of self-indulgent, fear-driven silence. I'm fairly against people running rampant at every tiny insult, screaming at length about their enemies and their enemies' ancestors and their enemies' future progeny and the unavoidable end of the world if people like this continue to exist; and by "fairly against," I mean I'm as close to dead-set against that kind of behavior as I can get without becoming a mindless zombie slave to the opinion.

But I'm in favor of honesty with that same intensity. And the most important person to be honest with is yourself. That comes before everything. Because seriously. When people can't be honest with themselves about themselves, chances are good that they have a problem being honest with themselves about large chunks of the rest of reality. And I'm kinda sorta a gigantic fan of that whole "being able to deal with reality" thing. It helps with solving all kinds of problems. ;)

So what do I do when I'm so full of negative emotion that the energy is barely short of perceptible to human senses?

What I do these days is, to be honest (See? I'm being honest with me and you! ;)), pretty much completely crap for me. It is perilously, soul-endangeringly close to the opposite of what I should do. I don't actively try to hide emotions from myself, but frequently, I suppress expressing my emotions to avoid hurting someone by telling them what a completely hurtful git they're being. (Yes. I have people hurt me and then consciously avoid hurting them back even by being straightforwardly honest.) That's a pretty appalling thing to do to myself, and anyone who's known me for longer than five years or so should probably be about as appalled as I am.

Because one of the other things to which I am devoted almost to an obsessive level is truth. And one of the things I used to do was call people out as soon as I noticed their hurtful behavior, if I was face to face with them at the time. And "as soon as I noticed" was really really soon. Because I had a lot of practice paying attention and smacking. That. Crap. Down. Before it could get out of hand.

Obviously people who are determined to be gits really hate it when you do this. But people who don't devote themselves to being assholes (and that's often, though not always, their word for it) are often surprisingly grateful when they finally realize they really were being horribly disrespectful and that you stopped them. Even though I saw it many, many times, it was always a little bit surprising to have people tell me "You weren't rude. It was totally justified, and I'm glad you did it" when I was, uh, yeah, quite arguably being rude. Even if it was justified and for the honorable purpose of making someone stop hurting someone else.

The other thing I did when I encountered something that absolutely incensed me, or depressed me, or wounded me intensely in some way, was that I would write that crap out. If the person who did the dastardly deed was not immediately accessible for me to stop them, I'd open a fresh ClarisWorks (or AppleWorks, those being things that existed on Macs before Microsoft Word for Mac ;)) document and spit out a lightning-fast rant poem. Or an opinion essay. Or a fantasy story. Or a letter (never to be sent) to the person who was acting horrible. Or I would get out the sketchbook and draw pictures of huge, awesome dragons spitting fire at tiny silhouettes that I imagined were the people I hated.

Then the anger (or fear, or depression, or whatever) had a home. It had an expression that treated it with respect.

What the "smack down" approach and the "write/draw it out" approaches have in common is just that: They both treat emotions with respect and recognize them for what they are. What they are is reasonable reactions to reality, not made-up, invalid pieces of mental/emotional trash. By regularly acknowledging my emotions and handling them with respect, I had control over them, rather than them controlling me, or them doing things beyond my control. I could choose how to use them.

Whether or not you agree with how I use(d) my emotions, emotional self-honesty has the same potential for everyone. If you have control of how your emotional energy gets used, then you can have emotions (you know, like, you can be a whole human being), but have them affect you in ways that are in line with your values. If you ignore your emotions, they do things you can't see. If you suppress them, you risk them running around in your heart secretly doing things you don't agree with. Because pretending they aren't there doesn't actually make them go away. It just makes them go underground. Until they burst out like the man-eating scarabs in The Mummy and terrorize random people. ;)

An important thing to explain at this point is what I said earlier about my devotion to truth. I really, really care about the truth. More than I care about being right for my ego's sake. I want to be right so I can deal with the cards that are actually on the table — not to be right for the sake of feeling good or superior. I fully admit that when I first started my campaign to Know Truth, it was largely for the sake of preserving my ego. I hated being wrong. When I was like ten years old. By the time I was thirteen or so, I was pretty much over the ego-driven thing and into the idea that truth is useful because it's useful, not just because it keeps me from being embarrassed.

So by the time I was thirteen, I had spent significant time and energy on making sure I could distinguish truth from illusion. I felt (because I had tested this repeatedly) I could trust my emotions were based on things that really existed. If I thought someone sounded condescending, then I could say exactly why I thought that, which proved it was a sound decision, not a random one. (And I was, and still am, very open to changing my opinion based on new information.)

That doesn't mean my perceptions were always accurate reflections of what was actually going on, of course, and I knew that — but I could trust that I wasn't seeing things in order to feel what I felt. I wasn't feeling something first, then creating a reason out of thin air to justify the feeling. (We all know someone who alters their idea of reality to justify what they feel, and gets all self-righteous about it ... right? Yeah. I hate that. I've hated it since I was thirteen.)

I was very young when I started losing trust in emotion, but learning to trust my judgement and perceptions allowed me to trust my emotions again. (Emotions are part of Self, so really, I'd lost trust in me and then earned it back. Yay. ;)) Even if I mistakenly got upset over something that I didn't quite understand properly, I knew I wasn't merely emotional. I was emotional with reason. I also knew that if my perceptions and understanding were wrong, there was an easy way to stop me from being upset: Giving me information to change my understanding.

This is not the same thing as telling me I'm wrong and expecting me to believe you. Presenting me with factual, reasonable information acknowledges that my initial perception deserves to be treated with respect, as if I might be (OMG! Noway!) a rational but non-omniscient human being with reasons for having emotions, but who merely doesn't have all the information. Basically it's the opposite approach from telling me "You're wrong, your emotions are pointless and if you don't take my word for it that makes you a selfish, irrational, overemotional freak." (What, I should believe you because you're just that much smarter and better than I am? Because you have no emotions and you're never wrong? I should just bow down to your battle aura because you're so cool you don't need to give evidence as to why you're right? Yeah, no.) That's the kind of thing that gets you targeted for a riled-up smackdown.

Soooooooooo. This has to do with crafting because, oddly enough, once I got broken a few years ago (I keep referencing this and not explaining it, don't I? ;)), I stopped being able to write and draw with any real inspiration or emotion. I'd spent so much energy on disrespecting my emotions, had suppressed them for so long, that I lost the heart to give creation life. Now, when I tried to write or draw or make any kind of art, what I created was a pallid glance at a badly-shot black and white photo of life. Technically, my slide out of true creative ability was a long, slow, painful process of losing pieces of myself and my passion, and I fought it as hard as I could...

...short of fixing the real problem. Which was that I was disrespecting my own emotions for the sake of not hurting other people. I was hurting myself to avoid hurting them. That's not only really, seriously unfair, it completely kills your ability to make art that means something to you.

Because art is emotion. Creation is emotion. Any emotion. Good ones, bad ones, whatever. Art and creation aren't about judging your emotions; they're about expressing your emotions, for better or for worse. The better you get at any art, the better you are at expressing what you really mean, what you really feel.

For more than a decade, yes, more than a decade, and that is more than a third of my entire life, I have been slowly destroying my own ability to create. By pretending that my emotions are not important and not valid, and that expressing them is bad.

I am going to stop.

If you are afraid of emotions, I apologize, and I expect you'll probably be leaving, and I wish you well. I also think you should consider exploring ways to stop being afraid of emotions, but really, that's not my business (unless you make it my business ;)). And everyone proceeds at their own pace, and I expect someday you'll understand where I'm coming from.

As for me, I have been the weight on my own wings that has kept me from flying far and fast as I once did. I really, really, really want to fly again, you guys. Not flying is killing me.

And while I used to write and draw out the pain to take that weight off, crafting (almost my sole creative expression for the past five to seven years) has never served that purpose for me. I can't remember ever letting myself "taint" crafting by expressing negative emotions with it. The closest I can remember coming is with sewing costumes; the idea of wearing a "negative" character's costume never bothered me. But most of my costuming happened before I got broken. So maybe there were other things I did back then, that came closer to using craft as emotional expression, but that was a long, long emotional way away, and I don't remember it.

With the crafts I've learned more recently than sewing — knitting, weaving, spinning — I've kept to this inane idea that crafting is sacredly connected to the ideas of hearth, of nourishment, that it should always be positive and wholesome. I've been consciously avoiding ever associating it with negativity, which is probably because when I first starting knitting, I was using it specifically to avoid thinking of the negative situation I was in. That was the first of the fiber arts, sewing aside, that I really learned. Weaving and spinning came after, like offshoots, and inherited the same imagined sacredness, the same rule that it was taboo to be negative through them.

Unconscious habits, anyone? Oy.

It's time to let that one go. It's bad for me. I don't know yet if that means I'm going to cut down on knitting (and maybe the other fiber arts — *cringe*), or if it means I'm going to have to experiment with transforming knitting and the other fibery things I do into an art form that's allowed to express negative feelings without being pathetically self-indulgent or tasteless (and the idea of creating evocative but beautiful fiber arts products has a lot of appeal — that's what I was going for to begin with, starting my little crafty business). What I do know is: Something's gotta give.

To answer my own question again: What do I do when I'm so angry I can almost breathe fire?

I take the clamp off my pointy dragon snout and I point the flames where they can do the most good.

By God, Goddess, the Tao, or Whatever you believe in — pick your Powers That Be — it feels good to be honest again. Even if it means 2,000+ words of blog post at once.

But ten years of feelings takes a long time to write.

In which I, like, babble about yarn, Craft or Bust, gratitude and snow — in video!

Everyone take a deep breath with me; I ask you for moral support! I'm doing something brave that I have literally never done before, even though I've been on the Internet for oh mumblemumble years. And I've videotaped myself and other things for years (though of late I haven't had a real video camera, just the one in my computer and the one in my phone, which has dampened my enthusiasm somewhat...).

Maybe you can guess by that last sentence that What I've Done is make a video. GASP! Yes. I'm live-ish here on the blog at last.

I give you fair warning that this video was the last one made in several hours of taping and it is unedited (except to take out the two seconds of me holding up a piece of paper as a pseudo-clapperboard — meaning to visually mark the beginning of the video clip). I also say "like" a lot, which bothers me, largely because I took acting classes in high school (and I did actually go back and start to count the number of "likes," but I stopped once I got to a number I forbid myself to think about because it will irk me seriously ;)), but also because I promise I do not say "like" that much in person (though I do say it a fair amount — it's fair!), and because it seems to be the most "like"-ful video I recorded today. HMPH.

But while the earlier videos were less full of "like," they were also more full of tangent. That will probably be hard to believe when you watch the video, but believe it. Someday I will post a video that is not the final one in a long series, and you will see ... oh, yes, you will see! Besides, you should be used to my tangents my by now. Right?

Next time I will consider writing an outline for myself and going off that so I don't repeat myself so much, too. I hope it at least entertains you.

Without further ado, here it is. My video debut on the Internet — may it not come back to bite me. ;D


Edited to add: Duhhhh. I forgot to actually link you guys to the mailing list I keep talking about at the end. Maybe recording four hours of video eats your brain. Here's the link to the mailing list sign-up for Craft or Bust. Go forth and craaaaaaaft!

Edited again to add: And here are the links to Velma's blog (on which she has not indeed posted in a while, but you can always leave her comments begging for her to come back), and to her shop on Etsy. Ta-da!

Baking binge of dooooom! (and the best pie crust recipe ever)

The baking bug bit yesterday. The final tally: two loaves of bread, a blueberry pie, four cookies, two pastries and a kitchen strewn with bowls, spoons, baking pans and cookie sheets. Oh, yeah, and two happy crafty pirates. Let's start with the two loaves:


If you read along with my captions on Flickr, you'll know that I got a copy of the book The Bread Baker's Apprentice for Christmas (and I love its scholarly obsessiveness; now, if only I could find an equivalent book for making Asian-style noodles, or pasta in general...). This bread is emphatically not made using the formulas in that book. I started to browse it yesterday and quickly realized I would get sucked into trying to absorb all the important but technically-not-essential-for-making-edible-bread details if I attempted to use it for immediate baking purposes. So rather than fail to make bread because I was too busy reading about bread, I basically glanced at the recipes on the back of the flour package and kinda-sorta-but-not-really followed them/made something up.

The result was a little flat, but it's definitely better than not getting to eat bread that night. ;)


And now I have an admission, and a rather reluctant one, but I share it with you for the sake of all those out there who have done what I did: I made pie crust dough mumblemumble ago and then left it languishing, wrapped in plastic, in the fridge until it (for shame!) got a very very few telltale specks of mold on it.

Now, I am not advising that you do what I did. However, I will tell you what I did, and since I am sitting here now typing this post, clearly I did not die from it. ;) This is what I, horror of horrors, did yesterday: I cut off all the outside bits of the pie crust dough, rolled it out, and baked it anyway. With some questionable also-languishing blueberries that I combined with the juice of one questionable and languishing Kaffir lime. The result was probably far better than I deserve for disrespecting my ingredients.


That, folks, is my first double-crust pie ever. I used a star-shaped cookie cutter to cut out part of the top crust. Conveniently, this made star-shaped leftover bits for me to bake with my mangled but unbelievably good jam pastries.


What's that you say? There are only three cookies and I said there were four? Hmm, wonder where the fourth one went ... ;)
Breakfast this morning? PIE! The best blueberry pie I have ever eaten. I share with you now the God of All Pie Crust Recipes, courtesy of Smitten Kitchen. Try it at your peril — it may provoke incurable urges to conquer pie-crust-based recipes you have never tried before, and you may never again want to eat pie crust from any other recipe. (At least, it was that good for me. Just the leftover bits with a bit of jam smeared inside them were so good I swear to you I teared up.)

So now I'm a-gonna go have me some dinner, and for dessert? You guessed it.

It's Roc Day again! So have some llama yarn + LED sheep art

This year, once more there will be no traditional Distaff Day fire-setting or water-throwing in the Star & Crossbones studio (crossing fingers as I type this — at least mentally ;)), and I'm not even sure I'm going to make it to the spinning wheel, as I'm knitting some Brigit socks — but I can at least post photos of some yarn I spun earlier this week.

A whole 8+ oz of chunky llama yarn (it's the yarn that's chunky, not the llamas ... as far as I know) spun out of some of the first fiber I bought when I started spinning, which has been sitting in my stash waiting for the right project:


Pretty sure most, if not all, of the fiber is from Bahr Creek Llamas and Fiber Studio. (Half the fiber was actually labeled as such, and if the rest is from elsewhere, I can't think of where it came from.)

And actually, right now the yarn exists as two skeins of two-ply that I don't have photos of yet. Eventually it will be a Capucine hat, hopefully to come with me to Vogue Knitting Live later this month.


If you look closely, you can see that the center of the light-colored ball is beige rather than off-white. I used four different bags of fiber to spin the yarn, but I'm reasonably sure it's all llama. It's definitely camelid and not sheep's wool, at least. ;)


Edited to add: Shout-out to Linda for sending me this kinda hilarious video called "Extreme sheep LED art." Because everyone needs to see sheep wearing Christmas lights and playing Pong. Happy Roc Day. ;)

10-minute semi-homemade wrap chips

Let's say there are times when you have a craving for a food that's not in the house. And maybe, like me, you try to ignore it for a while, but the craving just keeps coming back. And then finally, after staring desperately into the pantry (or the fridge), you throw some likely-looking ingredients together, apply your current best level of kitchen skill, and hope for the best.

Sometimes this leads to miserable failures. (Remember my jury-rigged desperation noodles?)

And sometimes you pull off a win. :D This is one of mine:



The craving: crackers.

The result:

10-Minute Semi-Homemade Wrap Chips

Ingredients:

• wraps — the kind you stuff with sandwich-type fillings and roll up to eat (I used a leftover Toufayan wrap)
• olive oil
• sea salt
• freshly-ground pepper
• garlic powder
• paprika

Now, I don't want to make this seem more complicated than it is. Really, you need only three basic ingredients: something resembling a wrap or burrito skin (soft taco shells would also work), some form of oil you don't mind baking and eating, and your seasoning of choice.

How to make them:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Spread some olive oil on the wrap. This doesn't need to be very precise; I poured some on one side and used a spoon and the wrap itself to spread it around.

Sprinkle seasonings on.

Cut up the wrap into chip-shaped pieces. (I cut mine into wedges.)

Place wrap pieces on a baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes (or a little less — check around 8 min to make sure they don't burn).

Remove from oven, let cool a bit, and EAT!

Mine were super-crispy, and good both by themselves and also with lemon hummus. Bet you can come up with your own awesome seasonings ... and you could even make dessert chips. Nom nom nom.