happy independence day!

Happy 4th of July, everyone! I hope you're enjoying a fun summer day with your beloveds.

In honor of Independence Day, here are 5 ways to celebrate your independence today:

1. Spend the day without spending. Try not to buy anything all day today. Leaving the car in the driveway all day would make this a lot easier!

2. Make a special treat with stuff you already have in your cupboards. Some suggestions: popcorn balls, fancy brownies (decorated with those jimmies you've had in the back of the cabinet for eons), or some smashing toppings for your tofu dogs (more here and here!).

3. Spend the day on a "use what you have" craft project. The one on my waiting list is a refashioned shirt, but the list is endless... here are some fun 4th of July suggestions from whipup.

4. Design a knitting project for yourself. Is there something you've been wanting to make, even have the yarn for, but just can't find the right pattern? Now's the time! Check out some design resources to get you started, like Jenna Wilson's great column, "Thinking Beyond the Pattern," on Knitty.

5. Make yourself happy. Make a list of five people that you're grateful to have in your life, and why. You can spread the happiness around by sending one (or all) of them a sweet little note telling them how great they are.

I hope you all have a great day!

little pea

The little one has finally arrived! Today is her one-week birthday.

Forgive the brevity of this post; I am snatching a moment between feeding and napping to eat some lunch and say hello.

The baby, mom and dad are all healthy and doing great. It feels like the three of us are surrounded in a protective cocoon of love and support. As we get to know each other and learn to be a family, it seems we don't have to worry about a thing. Our dinners show up every evening just when it's time to eat; there are stacks and stacks of clean baby clothes and blankets and burp cloths thanks to hand-me-downs from friends; there are so many sweet voices and hearts wishing us well; and there are wise, wise grandmothers by our side helping us find our way into parenthood.

Little Pea is also a wise teacher. I wasn't expecting that. She is patient, loving, persistent, and gives the most incredible positive feedback, even when you're doing something only half-right. She is humbling, and to our dazzled eyes, exquisitely beautiful.

Thanks to all of you for your kind and supportive words, especially at the end of what was a rather long pregnancy! She is more than worth waiting for. Hopefully soon I'll be knitting for her (and others) again, and there will be plenty to say about that.

sew green is back!

Hi all,

This is a very quick post to say hooray! Sew Green is back.

I think that some of you who read my blog came over here from Sew Green in the first place - it's a great group of artists, crafters and designers who write about greening their craft (I am one of the contributors). We really slacked off and had been AWOL for a while, but as of this week, Sew Green is back in action! yay!

I'll be writing there again, and most of the past contributors are back, with some new voices too. Please do visit and check out our weekly posts!

distracting socks

One of the downsides of stockinette stitch is that it doesn't do much to occupy one's mind.

The baby is getting to be rather overdue (almost 2 weeks now), and I am doing my best (which isn't always very effective) to find things to keep my mind occupied. Work threw some interesting things my way last week, but they don't fill every minute. I have a good book, but it's going to end eventually. Both the sloth and the little baby top I'm making are basically nothing but endless rounds of stockinette stitch at this point - no help at all.

The color patterns I was working on last week were a lot of fun, and very distracting, but then I finished what I was doing with them and that was the end of that (I made a bunch of beer cozies and coasters as a birthday prize for a friend - and I will say that they came out quite cute).

So I looked through my queue on Ravelry to find something do-able (because I have no creative brain cells available at the moment), but complicated enough to keep my mind occupied. Then it hit me - fancy socks! Komet is the answer. And a handy opportunity to de-stash a little sock yarn.

This is a great pattern - it's an absolutely wonderful design with alternating panels of cables and lace that you do actually have to pay attention to to keep from screwing up, but straightforward enough that I also don't have to think too hard to do it. Just right!

I dug out a couple of balls of Plymouth Happy Feet in a wonderful variegated plum color that provides nice eye candy while working, and I have been happily knitting away on these since last night. Thank you, fancy socks! Maybe vigorous sock knitting will help induce labor...

messing around with color

Color has always been challenging for me in knitting. I do fine with large blocks of color, or with stripes, but when it comes to the fancy colorwork department, I stay away.

It mystifies me. I've always wanted to be able to knit amazing colorwork like this or this, but I never really felt like I had the knitting chops (or the patience) to manage multiple balls of yarn and all those floats and color changes and whatnot.

Instead, I have always stuck with texture and structure to make my knitting interesting. But my most favorite vintage styles manage to combine both color and texture, like this.

Lately I've been really feeling the need to get over this hangup and just learn how to knit what I want to. So I got a good book (it was on sale!) and spent some time reading it, and realized that this is not rocket science. (Duh - of course it's not! It's knitting! Nothing in knitting is as hard as you think it will be before you try it - when will I learn this??).

I grabbed some inexpensive-yet-colorful craft store yarn (see above) for some small projects that will let me try out some colorwork techniques. Preliminary indications are that this is going to be fun.

trying not to wait

waiting for cucumbers

What I'm doing right now instead of waiting around...

writing grant proposals

cooking, a little, with tasty things from the garden

clearing out the freezer

enjoying the garden with HWWLLB (he works, I watch)

knitting diaper covers

reading a lot:

• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
  
• Michael Cunningham, The Hours
• Willa Cather, One of Ours
• Pam England & Rob Horowitz, Birthing from Within
• George Downing, The Massage Book
  
• Monica Ali, Brick Lane

sleeping a lot

practicing yoga

practicing meditation

finding little chances to enjoy friends (between grant proposals and naps)

writing in my journal

fantasizing about craft projects (but mostly not doing them)

So far so good. I feel very patient. Now if only the well-meaning phone calls would stop interrupting my non-waiting ("Hi, are you in labor yet?"), maybe I could get some of these craft projects underway...

tie-dye, chickens, and nothing to report.

Hi all. Sorry I've been such a slack blogger lately. Down to the last few weeks of pregnancy, and we are getting a lot of phone calls to which our standard response is, "No, nothing to report."

Lately I am back to my old routine of collapsing into bed by 9 PM or so, which doesn't leave much spare time for other pursuits. Even knitting has become kind of tiring. Instead I'm gobbling up books (I just finished Monica Ali's Brick Lane, if you're looking for a good read - it was great).

Saturday I did not manage to go on the Henside the Beltline Tour d' Coop, but I did hang out over at Mr & Mrs Love Party's house to keep them company during the tour for a little while. They had about 150 people come through their backyard to check out their chickens and ask the same dozen or so questions over and over again. A friend of ours on the tour in a very popular part of town had over 600 people come through! Backyard chickens have become a big thing in Raleigh, and every spring the fever spreads a little more via the Tour d'Coop. If you're a chicken fan, check out this local news video full of great chicken coop pictures and a short interview with tour founder Bob Davis.



I grew up with chickens and fresh eggs, and I would love to have them again - especially for the poop. I think they would do our garden right. But HWWLLB is seriously not into this idea, and it seems that fresh eggs are becoming pretty abundant in our neighborhood without any contributions from us. I sure wouldn't mind going co-op with someone who wants the chickens-as-pets-and-for-eggs part, who would let me have the poop.

On a totally different topic, I did want to share a morsel of the previous weekend, which was a wonderful two days of family, friends, food, surprises, gifts, crafts... you get the idea. I should have written about it then. Anyway, my wonderful sister threw us a surprise (and very green) baby shower. There were out-of-town friends and family, and it turned into a whole weekend of fun. Bugheart and Grub came down from D.C., and after breakfast on Sunday morning we went out into the backyard and tie-dyed a big stack of onesies.



HWWLLB has been plotting this project for a while. It was very messy and fun, and now our baby will feel right at home when he cranks up the Dead on a Saturday afternoon. More pics here. I love how bright they all are. And it really got me itching to dye the bundle of sock yarn I've had in the closet for so long...