Sometimes my daily life is doing, not writing about doing. This past month was pretty much doing: I’ve been knitting like a whirlwind. Socks for a friend; a hat for a COSTCO clerk who liked my hat so much that I had to make her one of her own; 4 tightly-knit birds nests for a North Carolina waterfowl rescue group who had put an SOS for them. Continue reading “Keeping the Yarn Moving”
Category: Making
Knitting. Together.
There were a lot of reasons I decided to start a knitting group this year in my neighborhood outside Washington, DC. Although I’m shy, I had set an intention just before New Year’s to become more engaged socially in 2019. I had seen how my mood in 2018 always picked up while being with others. And I also realized during my New Year’s introspection, that I’m actually really good at getting people together. I’ve been doing it since high school, and people have enjoyed the activities I’ve organized. The biggest reason for starting something was that I wanted to do more things that made a difference to and for people–and I wanted it to be ME who came up with the ideas for how I would contribute. Continue reading “Knitting. Together.”
Creativity Talks: Vicki Teague-Cooper
I met Vicki Teague-Cooper in the 1980s, and bought one of her encaustic paintings while photographing her in her Santa Fe studio. She has been making and showing her art for about 35 years.
Primarily a painter, her work has included oil paintings, encaustic paintings, drawings, watercolors installation art, and monoprints. Continue reading “Creativity Talks: Vicki Teague-Cooper”
Lesson Learned Along The Walk of Shame
How long must a person knit before she accepts a basic–and crucial–understanding about the craft? How many misshapen, unexpected, Star Trek costume-like sweaters does she need to knit before she realizes she is doing something very, very wrong? How many hundreds of dollars must be wasted on good yarn that is turned into shrouds for octopuses? Continue reading “Lesson Learned Along The Walk of Shame”
The Signature of My (Im)perfection
As the daughter of parents who went through the Great Depression of the 20th century, I grew up hearing–and believing–that “just because something broken is no reason to throw it away.”
Continue reading “The Signature of My (Im)perfection”
Creativity Talks: Pamela Viola
In January, I announced a new feature of my blog: Creativity Talks, short interviews with creative people about what drives them to create, how they work, what advice they might give us, and whatever else comes up…
Pamela Viola is a photographer and mixed media artist who lives in Old Town Alexandria, not far from me. I met her about 14 years ago, in creative writing classes at Duke University, in North Carolina. I recently reconnected with her.
Continue reading “Creativity Talks: Pamela Viola”
Wiped Out
Recently, I had to have my computer’s hard drive wiped clean in order to recover some 13,000+ mysteriously missing photographs.
The Apple Genius assured me that wiping out everything and “manually reloading everything” from a previous back-up was “no big deal.”
Continue reading “Wiped Out”
Putting It All Together
My sister was the one who started the idea in my head. “Have you ever heard about a ‘weather scarf’?” she asked. I hadn’t. She explained that she had heard that someone had knit a scarf with colors for daily temperatures and she thought I might want to do that now that climate change has brought my Northern Virginia hometown more wild swings in temperatures. Continue reading “Putting It All Together”
Marathon Knitting
As I posted earlier, I spent a lot of the second half of 2018 trying to recover from a torn tendon and tendonitis in my right hand–that meant no knitting, no hand writing, no bread dough kneading for months. Well, that has changed! Continue reading “Marathon Knitting”
New Year, New Feature
2018 was, for me, a wasted year of missed opportunities and lost ideas. A time of hibernation and suspended animation. Besides the mid-term Blue Wave, there wasn’t much I was happy about. So I’m moving on. It’s a new year. A new focus for the blog. Continue reading “New Year, New Feature”