knitting.

leaves, knitting awesomeness and the marshall tucker band.

| Betsy

Above you will see a photo from the November issue of Ode magazine, which I took in the bookstore, while it was on the shelf with people looking at me weird. You can read the review online right here. Thank you Ode! Thanks also to my friend Jeff for taking this photo of me on his front porch one afternoon in Durham!


Today is one of those days when it’s lovely and perfect to sit outside drinking tea with your feet up and no shoes on, even if your neighbor insists on listening to The Marshall Tucker Band* really loud and leaves keep falling on your keyboard and in your tea. I secretly wish it was like this outside everyday.

In knitting news, I found the most amazing article about how knitting can change lives today! It’s the story of my new favorite knitter, Tonks (aka Jessi Rose), and how knitting both saved and changed her life.

After battling mental health issues for years, Tonks saw a way out as she planned to commit suicide one night after the mandatory group therapy class at the halfway house where she was living. What she didn’t plan, however, was to learn how to knit during the class. As she watched the slow and steady progress of the instructor’s work and picked up the needles herself, she began to see how she could slowly rebuild her life bit by bit, just as the scarf progressed row by row. That was 7 years ago.

She is now preparing for her full knitted wedding vow renewal ceremony in 2010. You can follow her progress on this project on her blog! Go Tonks! Her story is one of hope and persistence and love and creativity that makes my heart smile.


*“In My Own Way” seems to his favorite, generally closely followed by his second favorite, Can’t You See.

rebel, rebel in the rain.

| Betsy


It’s raining and I’m sleepy and trying to enjoy the last few minutes of my Sunday night. I’m lucky enough to have a wide view from my room of the lightning show above me, and I’m thinking it’s the perfect way to end the day. Although I know that if we had thunderstorms every night, I would soon take them for granted and resent them, cursing the sound of the rain instead of allowing it to lull me to sleep.

I’m wearing paint-stained jeans, my grandfather’s belt, a thrifted Kern River t-shirt from 1986 and a shrug to keep the chill off which seems damn near inexplicable in North Carolina in late July. I know that changing into my pajamas signals the official end of the weekend, so I’m protesting.

It’s been one of those hot, sticky, summer weekends perfect in its simplicity and sweetness, with lovely late nights, good friends, homegrown tomatoes, getting lost in tiny towns, lengthy shavasanas, strong cups of coffee and long talks with the cicadas battling to drown out our voices.

Also this weekend, The Guardian had a knitting supplement today! I was happy to be one of the 13 knitters chosen to knit a pattern created by Mazz (Marisa Turmaine) who was profiled. Mazz made the news a few months ago after the BBC told her she couldn’t offer her knitted Dr. Who patterns on her website thus making the theme for the supplement “rebel knitting.” The photographs and blurbs of those of us asked to knit one of Mazz’s patterns for the supplement, are here.

Lately:
*Making sheets into skirts
*Dreaming of abstract knitting
*Happy to see people I know learn new things
*Listening to Lykke Li and The Gossip entirely too loud
*For the Love of Light: A Tribute to the Art of the Polaroid
*Finding time to watch Randy Pausch’s last lecture. (Thanks for the reminder, Garth!)
*Getting ready to cheer on the Olympics in just a few short weeks! Yay! (Especially excited to root for a good friend’s little sis, Margaret Hoelzer!)
*Fabric of Resistance, an amazing herstory project by the people who brought you Radicalcrossstitch.com! Awesome!

And now, to fall asleep to the sound of rain.

public transportation, summer reading.

| Betsy

Public transportation is a joy to me (when I manage to get up early enough to catch the bus to work) as not only does it allow me the luxury of traveling and knitting but we’re also lucky enough to have a free local bus system! There’s something lovely about industrial/institutional design that grabs me. Around here, the interior of buses are either blue or orange, in those blocky clunky colors of my 70s childhood.

One of my current challenges is to get myself out of the habit of looking at my hands as I knit, so I’m back to taking my knitting with me wherever I go again. Usually I’m such in a rush that I don’t have time to enjoy just sitting and knitting- I’m always working on a project with a deadline or fighting off sleep! While selling zines this past weekend at a local craft fair, I was reminded of how much I enjoy knitting simple squares for afghans or scarves in public and the dialogue it never fails to envelop me in. I hope I never stop adoring the conversations with children, the elderly and everyone in between that occur when I bring out my craftwork, as it is one of craft’s most magical qualities.

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As work slows down for the summer here at the university, that means a bit more time for online reading. (Unlike the bus, the coffeeshop or the bars, I can’t knit at my desk!)

Recently, I have been enamoured by the likes of:

Craft Culture (esp. this by Tanya Harrod)
Collective
Craftresearch.blogspot
Graffiti Archaeology
MAKE zine
Radical Craft Conference (so sad I wasn’t there!)
Studio Incite

Not to mention daydreaming about the knitting images here.

And for more on the definition of craftivism, here’s a link to a recent piece I wrote for Knitchicks.

roots.

| Betsy

Back from the beach, where I had the pleasure of watching dolphins swim in the quiet Southern Georgia ocean waters and the displeasure of talking really loud to my grandfather (who my grandmother states is “deaf as a post”). It was wonderful to spend time with them (I’m of the frame of mind that grandparents are magical) and just talk.

My grandfather delights in telling stories of growing up in rural Georgia, starting out as a young lawyer in a segregated South and later on becoming a judge. As a child, I was always amazed as we would drive around their town and everyone would stop and wave at him like he was royalty. Later on, I would go and watch him hold court, completely weirded out by the fact that my grandfather (the kindest sweetest man) held the power to put people in jail. He still works some of the time, and I’m amazed at his ability to make fair and just judgements regarding any possible situation.

My grandmother and I have graduated from just talking about school or how I had my hair cut. And it is secretly one of the best gifts I have ever received from knitting. Yesterday we drove around town, took a walk down the pier, cooed over the variety of yarns available in the local stitching shop. You see, I don’t knit because it’s trendy or even because I’m fascinated with historical methods of needlecraft. I knit because I can finally talk to my grandmother. After our afternoon out, she sat next to me on the couch and showed me how to deftly wield a crochet hook, and it was so simple and beautiful that it almost brought tears to my eyes.

In the stitching shop, I was fascinated at her fascination with the way that knitting has gained popularity over the past few years. She kept eyeing the yarns and books and pointing interesting things out to me. Although I was ogling all the beautiful craft supplies around me, I kept getting distracted thinking about how very glad I am that something as simple as knitting as increased my vocabulary with my grandmother tenfold.

Often people say something to me along the lines of “I don’t have the patience to knit/embroider/craft,” “It’s too hard,” “I could never do that.” To which I always reply, “Of course you can, it’s easy.” But what I keep forgetting is that sometimes there’s a reason why we learn to certain lessons when.

Every morning I read a passage from Everday Mind: 366 Reflections on the Buddhist Path. The one that keeps popping in my head is from February 8 by Pema Chodron,

We try so hard to hang on to the teachings and “get it,” but actually the truth sinks in like rain into very hard earth. The rain is very gentle, and we soften up slowly at our own speed. But when that happens, something has fundamentally changed in us. That hard earth has softened. It doesn’t seem to happen by trying to get it or capture it. It happens by letting go; it happens by relaxing your mind, and it happens by the aspiration and the longing to want to communicate with yourself and others. Each of us finds our own way.

On my drive down to Georgia after writing the previous post, I was reminded of this. And how sometimes it’s okay not to officially have a Plan B. As long as you remember to be aware of where you are, what you’re doing and what’s around you. Because sometimes the most amazing options uncover themselves. But only when you’re ready.

because sometimes rules are made to be broken.

| Betsy

It is my opinion that one of the reasons why needlecraft has such a long history is due to its ability to be stopped and started frequently as well as its versatility. And one only has to go as far as to read Anne Macdonald’s No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting to find that I am not alone.

In the first instance, regarding mid-century knitters, from pp. 142-143:
“Being without work” remained so unthinkable that knitting was still encouraged to employ “minutes which would otherwise be wasted.” Knitting was endorsed for housewives already exhausted from other chores: “A woman who has been at the washtub or at housework all day cannot easily sit down to plain needlework; her hands are ‘out of tune’; she cannot, perhaps, even feel the needle, it is too small; but let her be able to knit readily (having been taught at school), and she will add many an inch, at spare moments, to her husband’s or her children’s stockings, which lies ready to be taken up at any time.”

Trade the words “washtub” and “housework” for “computer” and “the office” and you have today’s milieu. But, by finding something that can be abandoned and worked on at one’s convenience, we have found a way to shrug off the drudgery and banality, if only for a row or line or sleeve. Time spent crafting often takes on a meditative quality for me as I start thinking in colors and patterns and stop thinking about memos and phonecalls. Unlike other pursuits, needlecraft allows you to be able to work for a few minutes on a project and then get back to another (often more tedious) task, feeling a bit more rejuvenated, accomplished and perhaps even, useful.

In the second instance, see p. 330:
“…as huffily as late nineteenth-century women had derided products of the new industrialization; another begged the young to assure that their garments bore their own personal, creative stamp in “this plastic, manufactured world…”

On a more personal note, I turn to “the jerk hat,” as you can see me wearing below.

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The joy of this particular garment is that after I made it and didn’t want to waste my efforts on the proposed recipient, I could allow on a 3rd grade sense of creativity to nurse my wounds. Juvenile? Of course. But, it reminded me that at the end of the day, it’s my knitting. And that I can do whatever I want to do with it. (In the end, it was properly restored sans snark, and now lives in Philadelphia.)

I think that people sometimes forget that.

Don’t you, okay?

This entry was fueled as I kicked it old school with Teenbeat 50. I can’t believe that Teenbeat is 20! Rad!