Decreasing responsibilities

This weekend was the 2022 Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival, held ten miles away from my house, in Jefferson. The first year I attended it (2008), I started organizing a little get-together on Saturday night of the Festival that came to be called “Unwind.” With a little (okay, a LOT) of help from my friends, I kept this event going for nine years. I would have liked to have done it for ten years, but the venue rented the space without telling me in the tenth year, and I let it go. (It was for a wedding, so I didn’t want to be the *sshole.)

Facebook has spent all weekend sending me reminders of Unwind, from the first, cobbled-together event held at Fireman’s Park in Rome to the more recent events. Those were good times, and I’m glad that I pulled that kind of thing together so many times. I made a lot of good friends and — more importantly — created a social space in which crafters could meet, eat, relax, and have fun.

Door prizes, some of them (2008)

On Saturday morning I did some grocery shopping at the store just on the other side of the fairgrounds, then took the Highway 26 bypass to Johnson Creek to shop at Penzeys before heading home. From the bypass you get a great view of the County Fair Park, where the Festival is held. The camping area was full, and the parking lot was filling up. And in a small field between the fairgrounds and the bypass, I spotted a small herd of sheep that was being driven and guided, incrementally, by a diligent and well-trained little black dog.

The good times don’t last forever, so it’s important to make the memories when you can — to take that leap of faith and see what can happen.

Door prizes (2010)

I didn’t attend the Festival this year, but I knew people who couldn’t wait to be there to take classes, to shop, and to wander around amongst all of the wooly and sheepy fun with their friends. In the weeks that led up to the Festival, I started to receive requests to join a Facebook group that I had set up several years ago to help me plan Unwind. After telling the first few people that my group was no longer active, then trying to steer them to the valid and official group, I finally made my group private and hidden. That door is closed now. I do hope that everyone who was looking for information on the Festival found what they were looking for, made their way to the site, and had a wonderful time.

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One of the door prizes offered at that first Unwind event was an umbrella skein winder built by my father. A woodworker in Stevens Point had published patterns for the winder and for a couple of styles of spinning wheel, and while I was living in Point I bought copies of the patterns from his daughter. My father didn’t try to make a spinning wheel, but he was intrigued by the construction method of the skein winder.

He made two of them. One I kept, and one I gave away 14 years ago. I don’t know if I wrote down who the fortunate recipient was, but I hope they still have it and use it. My father signed it and glued a 2008 US penny to the piece that clamps on to the table (see my penny in the photo below). Fun fact for the owner: Dad held together the wooden slats with sections of plastic-coated cotton that he cut too short. Try twist ties instead!

This afternoon I used my winder to turn the skeins of the Laurenspun Shetland wool (thank you, Leroy!) into paired cakes so I can get closer to starting the cowl project in the fall.

Note twist ties.

Why would I want to start another project when I’m not done with the pink project yet? Well, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that my answer will make sense, but I seem to have gotten closer to finishing it than I had previously thought.

Last weekend while I was watching the Dutch Grand Prix I knitted 16 more rows. Sixteen out of thirty-seven, not bad — one more race and I could get a lot closer. I kept track of the rows on a little index card, and then eventually lost the index card between last weekend and this Saturday. No worries: I kept knitting and counted the rows in my head. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Twenty out of thirty-seven.

So there I was with seventeen rows left to do during Monza — thirty-seven minus twenty, right? — but for some reason I decided to check the work before I started watching the recording, to see how far I really had to go before starting the decrease rows.

Huh. Ready to decrease!

So… I’m now at the decrease point. I can’t explain it, but there I am. And then I promptly put the work aside, as the race was likely to be too exciting to serve as TV knitting when I actually had to pay a tiny bit of attention to the knitting (the pattern will now change to “K2, K2tog, YO, K2tog, K to the end” until I get to approximately 10 stitches on the needles).

“No dyelots,” they said….

It’s time for the home stretch on the pink project, and I can only hope that the color differences in the yarn will magically fade when the project has been finished, washed, and dried. (The cats who will be sleeping on it probably won’t care.) I can’t say that I am looking forward to weaving in all of the ends that I have been craftily keeping out of the shot for these many months, but I must do what must be done.

Starting to write

In the last week, two friends have asked me about blogging. When I first set up this blog, it was because all the “cool kids” — i.e., knitters — were doing it. It was a step up for me from being a regular commenter on somebody else’s blog. I’m not attempting to denigrate the comments section at all; the blog I (and seemingly every other knitter) followed was that of a talented artist, a moving writer, and a very good human being, and she still is. I never signed up for RSS notifications for her blog, because she published her posts on such a regular schedule.

To comment, you needed some sort of handle. I dubbed myself “Beth in WI,” perhaps because at the time I still felt very much like “Beth-not-in-Ohio-any-more.” This blog’s comment section was special. We came to know the key people and close friends in the author’s life, and we would look for their own comments in the feed, which gave the whole extended conversation a special flavor. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time, and I had plenty of time to be reading knitting blogs every day to see what was going on in the larger community. At this particular blog the audience wasn’t simply comprised of fangirls, it included geeks of all stripes (particularly those devoted to “Battlestar Galactica,” the new series, which I am totally going to get around to watching one of these days), professional designers, store owners, indie dyers, and other famous knitting writers and bloggers.

When I moved from Stevens Point to Jefferson, one of the reasons that I was excited was that, by attending a late-night knitting session at a particular shop south of Madison, I could meet — in person! — a fellow comments-section citizen, “Dale-Harriet in WI.” (Now that I think of it, I may have been, um, inspired by her handle when I chose my own.) D-H has become so much more to me since then, and I feel privileged to call her Mama Bear, even though I may not have seen her in about a year. She’s the kind of person with whom that sort of thing Doesn’t Matter. Another person I met through the comments section was Lauren, who I call my cyber sister but have never met in person. We have exchanged gifts, blogrolled each other, and spent the last several years playing each other in Words With Friends first in English, now exclusively in Spanish now that she is living as an expat in Mexico. Through the comments I also met an incredibly talented knitting designer who would probably scare the crap out of me in person when confronted with her extreme intensity of talent. She let me borrow her invitation to Ravelry to check it out for her, though she was convinced she’d never use it. I can’t claim that her joining Rav was solely upon my recommendation, but Lisa lived on it for quite a while and posted more frequently than anyone else I knew.

The three friends I described in the previous paragraph were also bloggers, and they are all linked in my blogroll even though I don’t read knitting blogs any more. (I should.) At the time that I started my blog, there were several platforms from which to choose. Another friend and knitblogger used Blogger; I didn’t find it intuitive, though I did consider it. LiveJournal was another platform that was big at the time, but it seemed to be either for particular communities or for extremely private writing. If I wanted to write something nobody would ever see, I could pull out one of a dozen blank books I had started, but never finished, writing in. I wanted to have my own space but be able to connect to others. Somehow I ended up checking out WordPress. I liked it, I got the name I wanted for my blog, and now I have been here for twelve years.

What’s so good about WordPress?

First of all, it’s free. In twelve years I have never spent a penny on this platform. That may mean that there are ads at the end of the post, but you don’t have to click on them. I don’t see them when I write. If you become a blogger, you won’t see them when you write, either. WordPress does offer me a discount every so often on upgrading to a paid platform, but I see no need for it. It would be only $5 a month to transition to an ad-free site, but since not one single reader has ever complained about the ads they see, that saves me at least $60 a year.

Second, there is an amazing variety of layouts and templates from which to choose. For me, half the fun is setting the blog up just the way I like it. I have…many blogs, most of which no one will ever see. I really enjoy the process of deciding what “look” is appropriate for the new content I am putting together. WordPress adds new templates all the time, and it’s easy to start a new one (as long as you can come up with a name that’s not already taken).

Third, I can decide who sees what I write, as I addressed tangentially in my second point above, by setting the privacy level of the blog. You can even make your blog inaccessible by search engines, if you so choose. Of course, it can be completely private if that is what you want or need. I actually have twelve blogs in addition to this one. Some are private. At least two of my blogs were group efforts with other bloggers; we all had admin rights as well as writing and editing privileges. (Another blog was a joint project with my now-ex husband; I think it contains two posts. (As we used to say, “moment over.”) Yet another blog was a test for a publishing company I might have run if I had had to make a living as a freelance editor. Fortunately I have not needed to do that, but it is there and waiting should I ever need to activate it.

Fourth, the writing and editing processes are fairly intuitive in the WordPress interface, to the point where they may have become the de facto standard. The university campus where I work is in the process of transitioning from the D2L (Desire 2 Learn) content management system to the Canvas CMS, and when I went to my first Canvas training session I realized that the content entry dashboard was almost exactly the same as what I’ve become accustomed to using at WordPress. It’s subtle — I had to point it out to a couple of instructors — but it’s there. If you start a blog you may recognize the interface from some other piece of software with which you are already familiar. Let me just say this: if you have ever worked with Adobe Illustrator, this experience is the opposite of that!

Are there drawbacks? The only issue I can think of is that it can be a bit tricky to include photos from a Flickr account. (I do pay for the Flickr Pro account, which provides unlimited photo storage, and that has proven to be a wise decision now that Flickr has been purchased by another company and the standard, free, Flickr accounts are now limited to the most recent 1000 photos, of which I may have taken slightly more in the last dozen years.) But when I am uploading a photo by its URL I know which characters to delete so that the photo will import correctly. You figure it out and get used to it. The more often you write and publish, the more easily it comes to you.

If you want to write and are thinking about starting a blog, I do recommend WordPress. I can’t say a word about their customer service because I have never had to use it. But if you have a question, feel free to ask me. I’m not being paid by WordPress, yet I endorse this message.

2016: Where did the words go?

Tonight I had intended to write about my NaNoWriMo story (for those of you who aren’t word-obsessed creative types, that stands for National Novel Writing Month, or “November”). I was all fired up to tell you how I wrote more than 22,000 words of the first draft of a novel in just three weeks. Then I took a closer look at my file data and realized that I did NaNoWriMo in November 2014. I worked on an old laptop that year and transferred the files to the big computer later.

That story began with a 49-year-old man who was literally up a tree and fearing for his life. Then I started the main story when he was five years old, and took him up to his high school graduation. Unfortunately, as the month ran out I also ran out of my research, and four years later Herman is still up a tree — wondering if the bears will get him before his angry girlfriend does.

I have collected more research material to support the story, but other ideas have since come out of the woodwork (as it were), waved their virtual arms, and distracted me with Shiny Things. So those 22,000 words sit in a three-ring binder on my shelf until I’m able to figure out what happens next and find the time to write it all down. They also “sit” in a folder on my hard drive, taking up considerably less space.

In the fall of 2015 through the winter of 2016, I started working on a piece of writing for a collection of essays related to Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t know the editor, but I knew a friend of the editor, and there was a romantic sense of urgency to the whole project. I worked my comparison of Basil Rathbone’s and Robert Downey Jr.’s versions of Holmes up to 3,000 words before I submitted it. I haven’t heard from the editor since the day I sent her the file. It may be safe to presume that the project, like the draft of my prior story, has been shelved. It would have been nice to be published — I’m not sure that there was any pay involved — but the stars don’t line up perfectly every time. In fact, they rarely do. But it was flattering to be asked to contribute a piece of writing, and it got me typing again.

In the summer of 2016 I started another story, one I could easily see as a novel. At the time it helped me channel some personal frustrations into the type of complex plot over which I could have some control. I worked busily on it over the course of a few months, proofreading the existing draft to get a good running start on new copy, and adding new characters and plot twists to the outline. By March 2017 I had written more than 5,000 words. Ever since then, the printed work in progress has been sitting in a leather satchel along with the yellow legal pads containing the handwritten first drafts of new scenes, clumps of dialogue, and chapter titles. I would like to have more time to spend on it, but there really isn’t a sense of urgency with this particular project. I add to it when I feel driven to do so, and when I re-read it I make some good rewrites. It just so happens that I haven’t touched it in almost two years.

Curiously enough, in 2016 I did not write or publish a single blog post.

In 2017 I published 3 blog posts for a total of 2,799 words.

And this year, on the storytelling shtick of a (my) lifetime, I have published 50 posts for 53,580 words. (Including this post, #50, it’s now 55,122 words.)

What does it all mean? Does it mean anything? Would you like to take a look at the data?

CS data picture

Some Conclusions

1. Clearly, I had a lot of time on my hands in 2007. Also, I was knitblogging and doing a lot of blogrolling — reading other knitters’ blogs, commenting on their posts, and linking to them. They did the same for me. But many of us had small children at the time. When our children grew bigger and busier, we had less time for blogging — at least about our knitting projects.

2. Posts couldn’t be “liked” until 2009. At least, I hope not.

3. When I had either a lot of time or a plan to write on a structured schedule, I wrote a lot of words. I’m looking at you, 2007, 2008, 2013, and 2018.

However, take a look at the average words per post over the years. That number shows me that I have endured, I have something to say, and I am saying it. Thank you for reading it.

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Knitwise, I haven’t done a darned thing about starting the second slipper for my grandmother. And the laceweight shawl is still sitting in a project bag on those very small metal circular needles that hurt my hands so much. On the contrary, I have been working on the One-Row Handspun Shawl-stitched purple scarf, which is worked with thick (well, US 10) bamboo needles that aren’t a chore to hold and worsted weight yarn that isn’t teeny and splitty. I’m almost to the point where I should ball up the rest of the yarn, but not quite.

I’ve actually been taking the knitting with me to places like hair salons (where my son recently got a nice cut) and coffee shops (where I waited while my son worked on a school project) and the couch (where I can finally watch months-old F1 free practice coverage and finally delete it from the DVR). As much as knitters complain that their simple knitting still doesn’t knit itself, it’s a truism. You have to find a project that moves you and needles that you can move, but knitting still requires a knitter.

And it occurred to me (as I was knitting) that when you begin to knit, you classify knitting projects in different ways than you do when you are a more experienced knitter. Before you learn to knit, you may divide knitting into groups such as Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced Intermediate, and Advanced. Or you could divide your knitting by project type, such as Shawls, Socks, Sweaters, and Miscellaneous (as I have organized my knitting patterns). But now that I have been knitting for a while, I have different classifications.

1. TV knitting. Totally mindless. You can catch up on 14 seasons of “Supernatural” without looking at your hands.
2. Social knitting. You can take this project to knit night, enjoy a chai latte, participate in conversations, and make progress you won’t have to rip out.
3. Car knitting. You can work this yarn while your partner (or carpool captain) drives the car, or when you’re stuck in a traffic jam.
4. Office knitting. It’s something you can pick up when you have a minute or two, and set down as soon as you don’t.
5. Vacation knitting. This would be all the projects you pack before you even pack your suitcase. It isn’t necessarily simple knitting, and it requires a lot of self-knowledge and some combinatorial mathematics to pack only the supplies you know you’ll actually use.
6. Gift knitting. This could be a simple project or a complicated one, but it gets worked on because it has a Deadline — the baptism, the wedding, the birthday, or Christmas.
7. Antisocial knitting. This is a project that you can’t take to knit night, or on the bus — it requires your full attention (and will reward it). You can bring it to knit night for Show and Tell.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about instead of Actually Knitting. Maybe I’d better go ball up some yarn.

2008: Unwinding

The summer of 2008 brought violent weather and threatening conditions to our area. We had just finished the school year and my husband was away on a business trip when a tornado watch turned into a tornado warning. My nine-year-old helped to bring toys and furniture to the basement as I rounded up his younger siblings (five, four, and two years old), where we established a temporary tornado shelter in what had probably been the root cellar of the original house when it was built in the 1850s. It seemed odd to take shelter in the oldest part of the house, but that was what we had (and still have).

I had recently acquired a cell phone but there was no signal in the basement, so to get current weather information I left the Weather Channel playing in the TV room and ran upstairs to check it once in a while. As the sirens wailed we passed the time reading books, huddled up together in blankets.

At last the sirens stopped, and we began moving our people and things back upstairs. One of the last items to be brought up was a bench my father had made years ago. After successfully wrangling it up the stairs my oldest son reported, “Mom, there’s a lot of water coming in.” I checked it out; sure enough, water had come under the cellar doors and was flowing like a waterfall down the steps into the basement. We had moved out of the way just in time. By the next morning there were two inches of water in the basement, and the water would rise higher before it would fall and fade away.

The storm rains combined with a heavy spring thaw and sent every river in the county above flood stage. It was an unfortunate coincidence that this was also the summer that Highway 18, the main east-west route through Jefferson,was being torn up and completely resurfaced. The bridges were closed one by one as the flood waters rose almost to their decks; parks and playgrounds were submerged. Eventually the floodwaters were high enough that portions of I-94 closed in Jefferson County and long detours had to be established to keep highway shipping traffic moving between Milwaukee and Madison. With the Interstate closed down, Highway B partially flooded and not robust enough to handle the traffic, and Highway 18 closed at a key juncture, the detour directed semis on I-43 all the way to Beloit before coming northward on I-90. It was a ridiculously lengthy detour of hundreds of miles, but there was no other safe route to take.

After several days of watching Weather Channel and local news reports, I was itching to get out of the house. I decided to drive the kids on the southern detour and make a loop back up to the house from the west. By the time I got to the I-94 bridge over the Crawfish River — just days before it was closed, and with emergency vehicles lining each shoulder — I wished that I had just stayed home and watched TV with the kids. I made a brief cellphone video of our bridge crossing and it ranks as the third scariest bridge crossing I have made.

Here is someone else’s video of my Number One Scary Bridge, the St. Francisville Bridge over the Wabash River. When we lived in Vincennes we made a special trip to drive over this bridge. Yikes!

Here is a video of my Number Two Scary Bridge, which a lot of other people also find scary, particularly in snowy weather, wet weather, high winds, or the dark:

This one lets you experience agoraphobia and claustrophobia all at the same time.

My home video of I-94 over the Crawfish is not quite so spectacular, and it’s probably a good thing that I can’t retrieve it from the old phone. But my nerve-wracking trip did make me grateful to be back home again.

As summer ended, the waters gradually receded and Labor Day loomed with its promise of the new school year’s beginning and the next Sheep and Wool Festival’s arrival on the following week. This year I had a plan for the Saturday night of the Festival, when everything was closed. Why, I’d host a party where people could relax, knit (or crochet), and show off what they had bought at the show. It would be a Saturday Night Afterparty!

I talked my fellow knitblogger Cheesehead with Sticks (hi, Brandy!) into helping me out with signage and PR. I rented a space at a local park, contacted local vendors for door prize donations, ordered some pizzas, and baked up some catering: chocolate chip cookie pizzas and a cheesecake bar. Brandy and I talked one of the organizers of the Sheep and Wool Festival into letting us have some table space at the end of one of the vendor barns and we talked up the event all day, handing out maps to anyone who would take one.

Thanks, Brandy!

A few people assured me that they didn’t need any map; we never saw them again. The combination of nightfall, the closure of Highway 18, and the location of the event being in one of two Romes in Wisconsin made it difficult to find. Add to that Wisconsin’s tendency to have a Highway A, B, D, N, and P in almost every county, and it can be a challenge to rely on your GPS.

As it happened, we had forty attendees and forty door prizes. Everyone was fed, everybody won something, and everyone seemed to have a good time. I was so pleased that all I could do was sit off by myself and knit while I watched everyone else having that good time, including Brandy playing the emcee.

Here, have a chocolate dipped pretzel stick. Next year will be even better when it’s called Unwind.

Knitwise, I have made progress on the shawl; I’m even on the second skein. There’s a slight problem, however, with how I’ll actually finish the shawl. It calls for a ruffle, which I’m happy to make — it’s just that I don’t know exactly how much yarn it will take. And I don’t know when the shawl will be “big enough” and how much yarn will then be left for the ruffle. After some consultations at last week’s knit night, the hivemind decided that I should knit up all the yarn I have, then get more yarn for the ruffle. That way I’m assured that the shawl will be big enough.

However. The yarn I’m using is from a local dyer (hi, Lael!) who stopped making this colorway and working with this particular yarn base years ago. I did ask if she could please dye me up a little more, pretty please, pretty please with quiviut on top, but the answer was still, sadly, no. It just wasn’t possible.

No problem, I thought. I went to Knitcircus last Sunday and I can go to Knitcircus this Sunday. They have a yarn in the same base and a color close to what I’m looking for; I’ll take my project along and commission a skein just for the ruffle.

However. Knitcircus was only open last Sunday because of the Madison Shop Hop; that isn’t a normal store day.

No problem, I thought. I’ll go to Knitcircus this Saturday, bring my project, and explain my clever plan.

However. It’s not Saturday yet.

No problem — I’ll keep knitting.

Mellow Yellow

Recently I welcomed home a dozen or so knitting projects that had taken kind of an extended vacation at a friend’s house. You know that feeling you get when you pick up a half-read book and must scan through it to see what you’ve read, to guess how far you got before the bookmark fell out? Try looking at something you started making, and realizing that not only do you not know when you started it, but also have no idea what it was going to be, where the pattern is, or what convinced you to venture down this path in the first place.

Some projects, of course, I recognized right away. I didn’t even have to open my Apple-store string pack to know that there was a Season 18 Doctor Who scarf in progress inside, on now-out-of-production Lion Brand Chenille Thick & Quick of Purple, Wine, and Terracotta. (I’m still looking for three more skeins of Terracotta or I can’t ever finish this scarf. Does anyone have some?)

Other projects never got past their yarn (and sometimes pattern) being stuffed into a project bag. Those got quickly sorted out and the yarn returned to stash.

A few projects, barely started, had lost their fire. I gave each one a moment of silence, pulled out and stored their needles, then frogged the project (pulled out all the stitches and rewound the yarn ball) and returned its components to stash.

Most of the projects that were well underway seemed to be worth finishing at some point, so they went back into a mesh pop-up laundry basket I had purchased specifically for WIP (work-in-progress) storage. Yes, TARDIS cowl-redesigned-into-lace-scarf, I will finish you someday.

But Brandy, between chuckles at me, was knitting on something and I wanted to knit something too. None of my current projects seemed to fit the bill — Drunken Octopus Sweater and Cozy Slippers were both at the seaming stage and I wanted to knit and talk, not seam new things in poor light in the evening. So I looked over my prodigal projects and found Citron.

A little slice o’ lemon.

Citron is a semicircular shawl pattern that came out in the winter of 2009. It’s a distinctive pattern and actually quite simple to make, but it is done with laceweight yarn. Working on it is pretty much like knitting with slightly thick sewing thread. And there are hundreds of stitches on your needle, so you need a long circular needle, preferably with very pointy metal tips so you don’t split your yarn. I have bought some quantities of laceweight over the years, but Citron is the only project I’ve ever used any with.

But first, what row was I on when I stopped?

Check your pattern notes.

The pattern isn’t in the project bag.

Well… check your pattern binders, the shawl volume.

The pattern isn’t in there.

Well… check your Ravelry library.

I got out a laptop and checked. Well, it’s technically in my Ravelry library, but since it’s a pattern from an online source, it’s not a separate PDF.

Well… check the knitting pattern folder on your laptop.

Lots of shawl patterns there, but not Citron.

Well… print it out again from the Knitty site.

I tried, but the laptop was so old and slow it never managed to load Knitty.

Fine then, use the big computer and print it out from that one.

So I did. Now I had the pattern in hand (and soon in a sheet protector). From my Ravelry project file I saw that I’d made it to (or through) Row Six of Section Three. (“You kept notes?” said Brandy. “Good girl!”)

And as quick as that, I was back knitting on a five-year-old pattern that my notes said I hadn’t touched since the fall of 2011. I’m now at the end of Section Three. There are two more sections knit in the same way, then a ruffled edging that is not really my thing but is most definitely the pattern’s thing, and I shall knit it as specified. The joke is that I’m halfway done now, and if you measure by project segments (done with three, three more to go) you could come to that conclusion. But since the middle of each section adds 23 more stitches (twice), the row I’m on has me at 177 stitches and increasing to 348, and the ruffled edging produces 540 stitches that I then must knit in stockinette for 11 more rows before binding off… there’s a lot of knitting left and I’m nowhere near halfway done in terms of time or stitches.

But I’m knitting on it again and I shall finish it. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have bought fresh Peace Fleece yarn for a project to knit during the Winter Olympics at Sochi.

What will it be? Not socks.

Week Fifty-Two: All Good Things

This week WordPress sent me a little “happy anniversary” notice. It was seven years ago when I registered my first blog with them — the one you’re reading now. I’ve started several other blogs since then, to focus on different fringe interests, but this is the blog that keeps going and growing, and gradually absorbing the other topics back into itself. I wonder why December 23 was the special day, when I had a six-month-old baby Tommy and three older children to take care of. It was probably time to switch to a blog from my e-mail newsletter, Wisconsin Crafter, because it was the end of a year.  I like starting new things on January 1, on Sundays or Mondays, or on the first day of a month. Launching a new initiative on, say, May 17 just wouldn’t make sense to me. How would I ever keep track of it?

But since WordPress is keeping track of it for me, well, happy anniversary to me! Hallmark’s website tells me that the traditional gifts for a seventh anniversary are wool or copper. (The modern gift is a desk set. I do have an antique desk at which I sit in front of my modern computer and write, and I do have a desk set somewhere; maybe I’ll tidy it up and use it.) I think I have bought enough wool for myself that I could knit up a little something special just for me. Copper is a bit trickier. Jewelry seems like an obvious path to take, but I don’t have pierced ears and I don’t wear rings, watches, or necklaces. I do have a few friends who make custom jewelry, and maybe they can give me some suggestions for some sort of commemorative item. A copper pen? A little hand-hammered copper bowl? I’m not sure.

Scratch that; I just found and ordered a hank of wool/silk laceweight yarn in a gorgeous tonal copper colorway. As my son James would say, “Achievement get!”

Well, now, since I’m closing out the year, I’d better be honest and take one last look at those resolutions I published 52 weeks ago.

Thusly, I resolve that, in 2013 (!!!) I shall:

1. Blog on Chocolate Sheep again, and regularly. Dare I say, weekly?
2. Finish the Doctor Who scarf I’m knitting for my friend Ginnie.
   
3. Complete my calculus class.
4. Learn one new cast-on.
5. Find a Most Excellent Job in my chosen field of technical and scientific editing.
6. Learn one new cast-off.
7. Help my kids be awesome.

Seven looks like a good number, don’t you think?

I think I can honestly say I accomplished numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7. Number 6 just didn’t get much attention, and Number 3, as mentioned in greater detail a few weeks ago, was a spectacular failure. Overall, though, I think I did pretty well. The weekly blogging was sometimes a challenge, but I did learn how to use the Schedule function for posts so that I could publish pre-written ones when I was traveling. After a while I got used to the rhythm of writing what was essentially a weekly column, and I found I could usually produce something mildly entertaining by Thursday (sometimes Friday).

So, do I have any new and impressive resolutions ready for 2014?

No… not really. I still have a lot of unfinished business around here. I would like to become more monogamous with my knitting, and finish the really large projects I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. I’d like to start quilting again and make some more durable and functional quilts that the kids and I can use. I’d like to deepen my friendships. I’d like to be braver. I’d like to be a better cook. I’d like to study more math and physics. And most of all, I’d like to keep writing. I can’t (and won’t) promise that I will keep to a regular weekly schedule for my posts here, but it’s quite possible that I’ve picked up a very good habit and that’s when the writing will appear.

All in all, it’s been a pretty good year for me. See you on the other side!

Week Twenty-Nine: The Big 4-0-0

This post is my 400th post on this blog, which I started on December 21, 2006. I also note that on Ravelry I have 198 projects listed, and I’m sure I will cast on for two more very soon — just because.

I’ve been oft accused of always starting and never finishing, but those numbers demonstrate that I’ve been putting in a lot of work over the years, from weaving sentences and stories to knitting everything from celery to blankets and even (gasp!) doing a bit of crochet. In that time I also learned to spin on a wheel, started a local knitting group, and initiated an annual social event to coincide with the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival. Cybersocially I’ve joined Facebook, G+ (for all the good that does), LinkedIn, and goodness knows what else. I have also started a bunch of other blogs, but since I haven’t finished them, I won’t speak of them now. So there.

My first knitted item, from 2005.

So, what action befits a 400th post? Casting on for a 200th project? Knitting something from all the scraps of the previous 199? Trying something completely new? Or just saying “happy accomplishment to me” on the blog?

It may be time for a poll. (“A poll! A poll!”)

Note that you can add your own unique reply, and/or vote for as many existing answers as you like. I will monitor the results and respond appropriately.

Week Twenty-Six: We Shall Never Speak of This Again

I started this blog somewhere around 2006. We were innocent knitbloggers then. We posted pictures of our kids and used their real names, talked about where we lived and when we were going on vacation, and basically shared all kinds of details about our lives. That changed for me the day I was checking my statistics page and noticed that people were using my firstborn son’s full name as the search term for finding my blog. All right, Search Engine Optimization is one thing, but there are very few people who are on a “need to know” basis for my firstborn’s middle name. At that point I removed a lot of kidly photos from my blog, and tried to share personal information more thoughtfully.

These days I spend quite a lot of time on Facebook, and I wince at the ways people leave themselves bare and vulnerable. They announce with great fanfare when they will be away from home for extended periods of time. They post pictures of their children for all the Public to see. They advertise their preferred bedroom activities in one post, then complain about their stalking ex in another. They complain about their jobs, then complain that they’ve been “let go.” They issue vague, passive-aggressive status reports so that cyberfriends will rush to their emotional rescue. It’s tough stuff to watch, and it makes me that much more aware of any details I post about my own life.

That being said, I marked a very personal milestone last week, and I thought it needed to be mentioned — once and only once. Last week I was divorced. Now, I have been married before, and counting from the date of my first wedding, I have spent 80 percent of the time from then to now in a married state. But I am single now and intend to stay that way.

It’s been a long time since I last called myself single. I’m finding that no matter how much time I think I need to have in order to understand myself, I’m underestimating. (Sheesh. I have a lot of me to understand. No wonder I’m hard to live with.) I also have children to co-parent for the rest of my life. Because they are important to me, and their mental and emotional health is important to me, my blog is not going to be a space where you will see me bash an ex, any ex. Life is tough enough to handle without making it hard on other people with open wounds, petty jealousy, and juvenile revenge fantasies. I may struggle sometimes, but I’m doing my best to be decent to everyone in this situation, including myself. I trust that if I hold myself to that standard, others may eventually reciprocate. (Sadly, I have some prior experience with this type of thing.) But even if they don’t… I won’t regret walking the high road.

Now it’s time to move on. Want to see an artsy shot of the geeked-up Tardisvan?

oooo-WEEEE-oooo…..

In the last week I’ve driven another thousand miles, attended a family reunion, finished a pair of socks, knitted one slipper for my grandmother, grilled hamburgers (and portabella caps), cleaned and reorganized my rental house’s laundry room (well, I’m almost done), and maybe done another thing or two here and there.

Redskin, I mean, Redhawk hockey socks!

This weekend I have a big plan: to support my knitting friend Bonnie Stedman Dahnert. She’s the honorary chairperson for — oh, heck, read all about it here. Come back when you’re done, and I’ll put the rest in my own words.

I started our local knitting group, but Bonnie is our rock. She seems to know everyone in the county, know what to do on every occasion, and know how to teach any knitting technique you need to learn. She has taught some people to knit, and others how to crochet, and others how to spin. She has given advice, yarn, driving directions, restaurant reviews, prayers, and compassion to everyone who needed them. We half-joke that whenever we don’t know what to do, we call Bonnie. When my youngest son had a stitches-requiring accident last summer and my husband was away, I instinctively called Bonnie and she immediately said “bring the kids here.” She watched my other kids until after midnight, when Tommy finally had his stitches in.

In return we have shared her joys and tried our feeble best to help bear her own fears and sorrows. I don’t know if the newspaper article I linked to fully describes the anxiety our group felt when we realized the toll this second round of chemotherapy was taking on her, and how close we came to losing her. The CaringBridge site that her daughter Brigitta set up for her allowed us a glimpse into the minute-by-minute fight that she gave this second round of cancer. I do know that “she responded well to the treatment” is not the most accurate description of Bonnie’s fall and winter of 2012.

So, Saturday. I’ll be there for her as leads the lap of cancer survivors around the track, and as she speaks to the crowd. This morning at knitting-group she gave us pink-ribbon buttons that say, “No one fights alone!” And she’s right. We all have to fight for each other. It’s a bumpy ride, this short life, and we need to spend our time making it easier for each other.

Week Fourteen: Art Imitates Art

I am turning to writing more and more often in order to express myself. Given that I have a degree in writing, this should come as no surprise to anyone, especially myself.

However.

I am now journaling every day when I wake up, and just before I fall asleep.

I am now composing my blog posts over the course of several days, and editing them.

I have recently written A Poem. (Be afraid. Be very afraid.)

These are things I have not done for some time. For over a decade I have been occupying my time with (and defining myself by) my children. As important as child-raising and human-socializing and person-educating can be, it doesn’t take away from the importance of my Prime Directive, which is to treat yourself kindly and use the resulting energy to treat others kindly. This life is a bumpy ride, for which I believe we are each issued only one ticket, and we need to be each other’s shock absorbers. (And I’m finding out as I proceed through life that there is a lot of shock to absorb. There is a lot of pain out there, both having been suffered and awaiting the suffering of.)

I have found it interesting over the last few years that when I meet virtually with old friends, they don’t ask if I’m married. They don’t ask if I have kids. They don’t ask if I’m working or studying. Without memorable exception, they have all asked the same question of me: “Are you still writing?”

It gave me pause.

Was I?

Did journaling count? I have kept journals off and on over the years — but mostly off in recent years. (So I was kind of hoping that journaling didn’t count.)

Did scrapbooking count? For a while there I was designing pages and describing events so our memories would be easier to summon in the future.

Did blogging count? I started Chocolate Sheep in 2006? 2007? after writing a monthly e-mail newsletter called Wisconsin Crafter.

Did social media count? I have posted approximately 12,300 posts on Ravelry since I joined the site on September 27, 2007. On that site, which now has over 3 million members, I have started groups, adminned groups, modded groups, participated in groups, and lurked in groups. I have been on Facebook since (apparently, according to Facebook) sometime in 2009. I can’t even count how many notes, status updates, private messages, and comments I’ve written there.

Did they mean, Had I written a novel? or Had I published my short stories? or Had a written something else, something “official”?

I think what they really meant to ask was whether or not I was still myself — whether I had kept on doing the thing that defined me as “me” to them. They were checking in to find out if I were the same person they had known years ago, and whether or not time had changed me. I’m pretty sure they didn’t want to see my unfinished novel (and I’m certain I didn’t want to show it to them). They didn’t want to read my scrapbooks or see the hand-stamped cards I’d made. They were touching base about one thing they were certain was still true.

I didn’t want to disappoint them, so I said “yes.” It seemed very important that I say “yes.”

Exactly why was it important that I live up to [what I thought were] their expectations?

I wanted to be the same person. I wanted to be someone who hadn’t given up her dreams in the face of life and its challenges. I wanted to be that writer who kept on writing, no matter what life had thrown at her. And since nobody was demanding to see any evidence — such as links to articles I’d written for The New Yorker, perhaps — nobody was the wiser.

But really…. I really wanted to be that person. So over time, I have started writing again. I started different blogs in order to focus on different topics. (And I also discovered that I really enjoy the creative process of setting up a new blog. I have set up ten of them. Really, I can stop anytime I want to. It’s totally under control.)

So here I am, writing about writing. And while you can call yourself anything that you want, I personally find it easier to accept the label “writer” after I’ve clicked on the “publish” button.

Myself, many moons ago (1987), editing my own writing with a red pen.

I’ve also started reading again — new books, classic books, fiction, nonfiction, intriguing books on display at the library, my kids’ books. I’m getting new stories, words, and writers into my head. Instead of comforting myself by reading my favorite stories over and over, I’m gently reading my way out of my box. I’m also reading books about new ways to think about life, the universe, and everything — including thinking itself. I have purchased three new bookcases for my personal space alone (and applied Eminent Domain to acquire one from my eldest son’s room), and they are spilling over before I’ve even had the chance to bring up the many boxes of books that have been stored in the basement for the last several years. Probably for several years too long. Anyway, they can’t come up into the light until I have somewhere safe to put them, and we’re still pretty crowded here, topside.

So much to read, so little time.

And yes, I’m still knitting…. looky here! This week it became increasingly obvious that I wasn’t going to have nearly enough yarn to complete Wingspan with even the two skeins I had, so on Tuesday one of my errands was to find a complementary color in the same weight to do the neckline edging. I didn’t get any college scholarship money on my color-matching talents, so I was a little nervous about the skein I’d picked. I took the project and the extra yarn to knit night to set some groupthink on it, and lo! and behold! they said that it was good! I proceeded to join the new yarn and knit six rows as quickly as I could, but with each row taking about 30 minutes, I knew I wouldn’t have time to cast off right then. I took care of that task on Wednesday afternoon, then ever so promptly wove in all the ends. I threw it around my neck and fell in love with it immediately.

And ah, there is so much more to knit… and to write. But tomorrow I’m going back to campus to study my calculus before it’s too late.

One sad Hufflepuff

It is with a heavy heart that I pass along the news that some of my most treasured handknits have expired. Yes, I know there are greater losses. But these knitted items were kind of a benchmark for me in a lot of ways.

First off, I didn’t knit them. They were the first handknits I ever received, from the first knitting swap in which I ever participated. It was the summer of 2007 and Harry Potter mania was in mid-swing. One night I’d probably had half a glass of wine too many, clicked on a link, and Bam! I was in a Harry Potter themed knitting swap. We had fake wizarding names and everything.

I remember the timing because it was when I was starting to knit the Ravenclaw-colored socks for my downstream swap partner, my youngest child was admitted to the hospital and being fed some high-calorie meals around the clock in an effort to pack some pounds on him. I was pretty stressed out and struggling with the double-pointed bamboo needles and actual Sock Weight Yarn, but I was making a game effort of it sitting on the hospital bed until the afternoon I pulled too hard on the wrong needle and yanked it out of about 25 stitches. I knew then it was time to quit without really quitting. I called in a favor to my cyber sister Lauren in Scottsdale, frogged the project, and sent her the yarn so she could make socks for my partner. I did make some beaded stitch markers and get other goodies for my downstream partner, but in the end she barely acknowledged receipt of my packages.

My upstream pal, however, was a whole different story. Jules sent me a pair of striped Hufflepuff socks, a drawstring bag with lotion and goodies, and my favorite type of Ritter brand chocolate — dark chocolate with marzipan. You can relive that happy moment here at my One Happy Hufflepuff post from June 21, 2007.

Jules was also the first long-distance knitter I met in person. We got together once at a cool yarn/fiber shop near Springfield, Ohio, that had, among other things, a claw-foot tub FILLED with yarn. It was on that day that I bought my first package of stitch markers, and a hank of yarn I just KNEW I would make into mittens someday (and I eventually did). It was that first meeting when I told Jules she had the hair of a spinner. Do you believe me now, Jules?

We met up again a couple of years later to visit a yarn store in Dublin, Ohio, and get some Jeni’s Ice Cream while I finished Those Noro Socks.

Many things have changed since then. Tommy put on a few pounds and got discharged from the hospital. I learned to knit socks and even more intricate items. I had meetups with other knitters, created a little knitting get-together we like to call Unwind, and started a local knitting group that’s been meeting for almost three years now. I’ve done another Harry Potter related knitting event, and got re-sorted; I’m no longer classified as a hardworking, loyal Hufflepuff but a brainy, clever Ravenclaw who has gone on to knit herself some nice ‘claw-colored items.

When you knit…. people don’t often give you knitted things. But other knitters know this, and the kindest of them make sure that the handknits keep getting parceled out. I cherished those socks, and this winter I was wearing them to bed when I felt especially cold. One morning a couple of weeks ago I took them off to discover that they had given their all.

I’m sorry, Madame Pomfrey / Jules / Crafty Peach. But they were loved.