PROMISES PROMISES....

I promise to tell you all about the trip to Long Beach (the National Needlearts Association convention) this past weekend, complete with photographs -- but tomorrow or Sunday. I now need to go deal with some freshmen. I'd rather eat a bag of nails. svb

Ruminations....

....today, recovering from a brief bout with some kind of stomach ailment, I ran across this wonderful photograph of Ellen Minand, the immensely skilled proprietor of Ellen's Half-Pint Farm in Vermont, standing in front of her hanks of hand-dyed yarn. We have many, many big balls of that yarn, each skein gorgeously priced and enough for a woman's large sweater. SHE DYES IT IN HER KITCHEN!!!!!

....and of course as I thought about her, I remembered her sister Carol Buskey. Carol stood at Ellen's side for years and years; she accompanied Ellen to our old studio location some years ago when Ellen taught a great, great dyeing class (Carol showed people how to make polymer buttons to match their yarn). Carol died this past year of incurable cancer -- I still see the pain in Ellen's eyes, hear the mixture of anger and grief in her voice. Today, my dear, dear friend Elaine told me that one of her colleagues, Sid, is now in hospice. I knew him slightly, but not well enough to feel the kind of pain and exhibit the kind of helplessness I saw today in Elaine's eyes, in her deportment. It reminded me, of course, of Ellen. It reminded me of myself when I lost that lovely man, Edward, in 2000, and when I lost my truly beloved Mother. In the end, it reminds me of all of us at that moment of exquisite confrontation with the contingent place we occupy on this earth. Sometime, find a copy of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "The Solitude of Self," which is one of the most eloquent and true statements ever written about all of this, which makes moee and more sense, the older I get. What are we to do with these reminders, these evidences, of frailty and mortality? We could collapse. We could knit or crochet or sew or tat ourselves into oblivion, never coming up for air. We could buy a mountain and carve some kind of updated Mount Rushmore. I could finish the book I'm trying to finish once and for all so that something of substance could survive me, beyond the stuff already on the shelf (I like this one the best of all). We could all vow, as I did six months ago, to try to do something unexpected for someone else every day -- a kind of homage to my mother who actually practiced this old-fashioned thing until the day she gave up on life (that resourceful, proud woman never got over the humiliation of wearing a diaper). I don't know what will come of these sensations, this contemplative mood. Maybe nothing. I hope not. We should all have days that stop us in our tracks. svb

Photo of Kim Leach

For those of you who are interested, I just found and finally inserted a photograph of Kim Leach (see two posts ago). svb

...and speaking of Jocelynn and crochet...

...and speaking of Jocelynn's craft blog in the Detroit News -- let me put in a plug for her column this coming Friday, the 11th, which will feature some talk about crochet (I really do think that crocheters get short shrift in a very large number of  yarn shops nationwide -- some shops that I know of have actually told crochters that they couldn't help them at all....one of which shops has closed mercifully).  But it will also have a slouchy beret pattern that I did up in "Taiyo" by Noro, an interesting blend of cotton, silk, and wool in Noro's famous long color runs.  So look for it.  There's another hat in the s hop -- a rather more classic stocking-type hat with cute chain loop-ys on the top -- very easy to make.  Larry has patterns for both with yarn purchase.

As to crochet:  I started out as a crocheter (and wool tailor).  In my experience and that of many of my friends, crochet got a kind of second-class reputation because of its long association with domestic items -- doilies, cozies, afghans, pillow-case trim, tablecloths, etc.  It was a craft that was passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, often without any reference to patterns.  I vividly recall sitting with my otherwise-not-nice gramdmother working on curtains in her living room -- thread crochet, the kind you do with steel hooks.  

Those days probably have passed for the most part:  Curtains are now very inexpensive.  But I do think that the long association with working-class families, and especially the idea that crochet was something you did to pretty up cheap goods or cheap furnishings (poverty means you don't buy expensive ANYTHING) has marked crochet as de classe.   Those cheap pillowcases from Woolworths!  What you did, of course, was to try to pretty up the things in your house with lace crochet or tatting of some kind. 

Crochet has changed.  It's now possible to make incredibly beautiful garments from crochet in really spectacular yarns.  All you need to do is to look through one issue of Interweave Crochet to get the drift. The idea that only knitting makes nice fabric, that crochet doesn't drape, etc. etc., is simply not true -- often, crochet is done too tightly, or in unflattering stitches, or in cheap, plastic-y yarns.  It's hard to create drape when you're working basically with colored fishing line.  But that age-old association, which I do think is rooted in class differences, persists.   Some of us are tired of it.

I keep repeating the story behind my cardigan (now retired -- too shopworn).  I was in a workshop  at Stitches Midwest a couple of years ago innocently working on some knitting when a dreadful woman across the table loudly announced that crochet might be good for SOMETHING, though she couldn't think what -- maybe only TRIM on knitted things.   I was furious.  When I came home I made a cardigan with a crocheted body and knitted trim.  It won second prize in garments at the Crochet Guild of America annual convention.  Enough said.  

svb

Kim Leach and Happy Hands

This past week, the wonderful Jocelyn Brown of the Detroit News craft blog (Friday's edition) ran a truly nifty column featuring a crocheted cowl done up in fingering-weight, hand-painted wool yarn by Kim Leach (Wisconsin), a yarn she called Toe Jams.  The line is Happy Hands Yarn.  Jocelyn got it some months ago at Artisan Knitworks -- indeed, I think we're the sole source of Happy Hands Yarn in Michigan.  Jocelyn chose a fabulous green mix with a dash of purple.  We also stock some of Kim's worsted-weight hand-painted wool in great big balls.

I have known for some time that the amazing Kim -- a self-taught dyer with an astonishingly interesting sense of color, a witty dyer who tossed a bit of purple into almost everything she did -- had life-threatening, congenital liver disease.  When last I saw her at a fiber festival, Kim's husband confided that he was not at all sure she would be all right, and very sure she could eventually require a liver transplant.  Now, I learn she has died.

Kim was young -- in her 50s, a bouncing little bundle of joy.  That description only sounds trite if you didn't know her.  She bounced.  She was always, always full of joy.  And I will miss her.  We have assembled a large basket of her yarn near the seating area -- obviously, when it's gone, we're done.  So come look.  There is more in the fingering district.   This has not been a good day.  Tomorrow will be better.    Love to all.    Here's Kim.      svb

Approaching the New Year

I just got back from a 5-day trip to my own nativity scene -- that is, the place of my birth, the Twin Cities in Minnesota.  Some years ago, I was appalled to learn that St. Paul's Elders had seen fit to tear down Miller Hospital, the actual nativity scene wayyyyy back in 1944, without so much as a call to ask me whether it was all right.......and now I see that the Minneapolis Elders have radically revised my beloved University of Minnesota campus, the source of the MA and Ph.D. and the site of all of those memories (some of which involve poverty, etc.) that fundamentally have to do with who we are.........they built HUUUGE buildings, moved roads, erected a Frank Gehry building that looks for all the world like a pile of crumpled aluminal foil -- and, again, without so much as a note to ask my opinion.  I got LOST, for god's sake.   It was just unbelievable    And to make thngs worse, it seemed to me that they have erased Dinkytown, the area on the so-called East Bank where everyone hung out in small cafes and galleries and junky little book stores....GONE.   Or maybe not.  I was lost, remember.  When you're lost, you're unable to judge where things might be!!!!!

There's some kind of parable here.  It has to do with going home again.......and it's not always bad.  For one thing, we found a huge pile of truly amazing vintage buttons -- handpainted, etc. -- in an obscure Wisconsin town's antique shop.  I got to see my gorgeous (TRULY) great niece, Milana, the daughter of niece Natalie and her handsome partner, David Carbonara.   Yes.  He's not Irish.  And, yes, the family was from Milan.  And I got to have breakfast with my old old old friend Ken Moss, with whom I went to grad school, who hadn't yet screwed up the nerve to go look at the campus (he now lives and works in Washington, DC).  And then I got to visit my friend Julie Larson, the one who goes back the furthest in memory -- about 45 years, which is really scary -- who is happily living in a neat townhouse in New Brighton, Minnesota -- which, I should add, wasn't where I thought it was.  What a disaster. 

I wonder if it makes more sense, under the circumstances -- by which I mean, the fact, however outrageous, that I just keep getting older  and older and older (!!!) -- to stop trying to identify old things, to perhaps be satisfied with memories, and instead seek out new pathways, new possibilities, perhaps new cities and countries.  Why visit Rome, for example, when Rome lives in memory and can only be sullied if you go back and stay in the same hotel, retrace old byways, eat in the same old (now seedy) cafes?  Why be upset (as I was some years ago) to learn that the best yarn shop in FLorence (Beatrice Galli's lovely place on the Arno River) was no longer there? 

Interestingly, I didn't look for NEW shops when I learned about Beatrice, so shattered was I by her absence.  So in the New Year, the idea will be to settle for memories and to push into new territory -- intellectual territory, physical territory, social territory.  There are worlds, entire universes, out there that can become new memories, worlds that can't disappoint us because we don't know about them yet.  Happy 2013 to everyone.

svb

Smash the Pastel Prison!!!

I'm making a little sweater for my great niece for the holidays, if I can only find time to finish -- and I have been intersted in the response.  I bought some chunky Universal Yarn Co. acrylic one day when visiting my friends' yarn shop in Ann Arbor (Knit A'Round), but of course it's jewel tones, not those blah-blah pastels.  Twice now, I've brought out the little pieces (it will be one of my Grand Circus hoodies made out of modular squares) and an observer in the shop has said, basically, "Oh my -- isn't that for a little GIRL?" Always, I'm told that I should be working in pink, blue, insipid yellows and greens or maybe (MAYBE) pale lilac.  Even variegated pastels are suspect; something unwelcome, like the aforementioned lilac, might creep into a BOY'S sweater. 

I do think that most knitters and crocheters are moving beyond the pastel straitjacket.  But not all.  So here is why I don't pay attention to the supposed 'rule,' and wish others would do the same.  First, the pink-blue routine is no older than the 1930s.  It was originally a marketing schtick -- and then it became a kind of gender marker, like the earrings people put into little girl's ears at age X or Y to forever mark them as girls.  The gender anxiety in our culture has ebbed, mercifully, but you can still find it -- as when someone stops a parent in a grocery store to comment on the cute "little boy," and gets rebuked for masculinizing a little girl.

But, second, kids of that age can't see pastels.  So we really are doing this for us. Why not make things in colors they can actually see?  Bright colors.  Red.  Indigo.  Yellow.  Kelly Green.  Etc.

So I will continue to cook up this little hoodie, which in any case is going to be too big for little Milana, and collect some more comments.  Stay tuned.

svb