knitting a story

Hello there. Long time no blog!

We’ve had Family Things going on. You know the sort, the Stuff that comes up and smacks ya in the face, and says, “well, hellllooo, there, how’d you like to have your brain (and your heart) eaten for a while?” Yep. That sort of Family Thing.

We’ve all been there. And it’s interesting to me how different folks deal with difficult times, times where the challenges are not just close to home, but part of home. This time, I knew the challenge was coming, and then we were in the middle of it, and now we’re in the Aftermath section of our story…and every single day along the way, I’ve been saying to myself: Today, I’m going to blog.

And I never did. I couldn’t bring myself to post some sort of falsely cheerful bit of writing, with sweet photos of kitties and pretty snippets of fibre. And the Family Stuff wasn’t the sort of thing I could talk about on the interwebs. Every day, then, I was torn between my desire to write, and my inability to write about what was really going on.

And so, I poured my heart out into the rest of my creative life. I knit. I designed. I charted. I spun. I drumcarded. I wired beads onto tiara bases. I sang in the house, I sorted my yarn and fibre bins. (Well. some of my yarn and fibre bins…)

I have a shawl that I cast on at the beginning of The Challenge, and I just bound it off this past week. Every stitch of that shawl is part of the story, the story I could not tell you in the written word, but the story that nonetheless needed telling, from the depths of a storyteller’s heart.

It’s the Caliz shawl, by Rosemary Hill. The multi-coloured yarn is Socks that Rock, and the magenta is Koigu. I did an extra repeat of the lace pattern and thus ran out of the Socks that Rock before I was ready to be done with the shawl. I managed to Use My Brain long enough to set aside enough SthatR to use in the last couple of rows and the bind-off, which I think ties the whole thing together rather nicely. Ordinarily, I do not like stripes in shawls (except for when I do, of course), but I like the way this came out.

This shawl, in a very real way, is all the blog posts I did not write. It’s a story shawl; it’s still a story shawl even if only a few folks know what the story is.

I love that the work of our hands can tell stories.

Chispas

• Let’s start off with the requisite cute animal photo, shall we? Tiny baby squirrel Violet wears a tiny purple cast…looks like she is in good hands, however.

• The doves have come back to nest in the little basket I put up for them two years ago.

• It had to happen. A motorized flyer and bobbin for spinning yarn…made of Legos. Lego spinning wheel, anyone?

• Six crime-stopping cats. Really, what more is there to say?

• OK, let’s stay with that cat theme for a minute. This is Dottie. Dottie loves to wear hats and costumes, so after her mom took my make-your-own-tiara class last weekend, Dottie used her psychic cat powers to convince mom to make her a tiara.

Reportedly, if you take off Dottie’s sparkly crown, she will attempt to nudge it back onto her head.

• Meanwhile, back at the Wiseheart Zoo, Tim declares that a drumcarder is a perfectly grand place to nap.

That’s all I’ve got today. Maybe next time I’ll even bust out a puppy photo or three. Or a baby bird. Who knows what lurks in the mind of Sandi?