Crazy Crafter

The first sign of the end of our summer has arrived.  Partner returned to work this week after his six-week summer vacation.  I love that he has had this time to hang out with us.  I know that we are very lucky to have this down time.  I also know that the structure of our local school system is what allows this and I support it fully.  I’ve heard all of the arguments for year-round school, and some of them are very good.  But for us, I would not trade summer vacation for anything.  Staying up late, sleeping in late, doing whatever with our time for a while.  It is profoundly soul-nourishing and relaxing.  

(Anyone who might believe that having some time off in the summer makes public school jobs somehow less “real” or less “full time” than jobs that continue throughout the year, please note that Partner will make up for that time before Christmas.  He works enough extra hours supervising sporting events, meeting with parents and community leaders and in general purpose long and emotional days to eat through that six-weeks worth of off-time very quickly.  And yet we still love the job.  Go figure.)

Over the next ten months, his job will slowly deplete our reserves, until, by the time May arrives again, I will not want to hear another story about teenagers. Or parents of teenagers.  Or teachers.  Or the dress code.  Definitely not the (stupid) dress code.  Not one.  

In four more weeks, Sonar X8 and Sonar X5 will go to school as well.  Third grade for the one, and the Kindergarten premier for the other.  We are all very excited.  Ok, maybe Sonar X3 isn’t so excited.  

In the meantime, I’m trying to draw out the indulgences of the summer schedule with a few more summer projects in my queue.  

Four fabrics that will be transformed into Partner shirts over the next week.  The brown and sand are yummy cottons that will be transformed into two complementary two-tone bowling-style shirts.  The copper and the heathery pink are stretch poplins that will become long-sleeved, banded-collar dress shirts (unless I don’t have enough of the coppery one, in which case it will be a short-sleeved shirt of a different style).  He’s trying to get away from white dress shirts.  

Two of these yarns will become two stealth projects.  The other two were just on sale and I couldn’t resist them.  I’m weak sometimes.  Three cottons, one wool.  

Some crazy knitting people have taken to using the Summer Olympics as a time to try to accomplish some challenging knitting project (similar to the Knitting Olympics, held every four years during the Winter Olympics, or the Tour de Fleece for the spinner-types, held during the recent Tour de France).  The idea is to choose a challenging project and start and complete it between the lighting of the torch at the Opening Ceremonies and the dousing of the torch during the closing ceremonies.  (If this interests you, drop over to Ravelry, a social networking/cataloguing/showing-off group for fiber/needle/hook-types, and join up.  Their front page splashes out all the details.)

I have complicated feelings about the political implications of a Chinese Olympic games.   The Sonars and I are taking an opportunity to learn about China (the G-rated, 3-8 year-old version), sports, athletes, and understand the purpose and history of the Olympics.   But I am not choosing to officially participate in the Ravelympics per se.  I am choosing to use the time to motivate myself to plow through the extensive queue of knitting projects piled around me.  

On the needles:

1.  Partner hoodie.  Probably about 75% complete.  (Note to self:  No. More. July. Sweaters.)

2.  Deployment socks for BIL.  10% complete.  This is my porta-knitting.  Needs to be done before November at the latest.  Earlier would be better.  

Up next:

3.  Kilt Hose for uncle.  Pattern TBD.  Yarn on order.

4.  Mystery Stole 4.  This year’s pattern is hosted by Melanie Gibbons again, but her mom, Georgina Bow is the pattern designer.  This one begins in a month and lasts about six weeks.  Yarn on order (some wool/silk blend from Knit Picks), beads are in the stash.  The idea here is that once a week, participants (thousands of us all over the world) will get a clue from Melanie and Georgina.  We won’t know ahead of time what the final Stole will look like, so the project unfolds like a bit of a puzzle.  A Mystery, if you will.  It’s a great knitting adventure, stretching my skills in a direction I don’t usually go (i.e. to lace).  (If this interests you, go join the Yahoo Mystery Stole Group before September 12.  The first clue is released September 5).

5.  Stealth project A.  It’s small and green.

6.  Stealth project B.  It’s also small, but not green.  

7.  Stealth project C.  It will be very very small.  Color and yarn TBD.  

8.  When the weather turns a little cooler (For five days in December.  Maybe.) Sonar X3 wants a new pair of socks.  When the time comes, he’ll choose yarn from the stash, and I bet they’ll be striped. 

9.  I want to make myself an Urban Aran, Cardiganized.  We’ll see if I ever get to this one.  Purple.  I want it to be purple, I think.  Or a rich, jewely blue.  For some reason, most people making this one are sticking to browns and greys, with a couple of notable exceptions.  I’ve seen gorgeous ones in blue and red.  

Anyway, here’s the “Plan,” inasmuch as I ever do such a thing as plan:

Finish the Partner Sweater before the Olympics start (two sleeves and eight inches of body, all stockinette).  Then do the three stealth projects during the Olympics (I told you, they’re small).  Then finish the deployment socks and start the Kilt Hose before Mystery Stole opens.  Hopefully I can knit the Kilt Hose alongside the Stole, and be finished with those in time to make the Sonar socks before he wants them.  

I’ll wait for you to stop laughing.  

All this and four shirts, a novel in November, Christmas (it’s out there), oh, and I forgot a bag I was going to make for a friend, and the regular maintenance of myself and my family.  No problem.  I’m making sure the freezer is full of ice, in the event (ahem, likelihood) of knitter’s injury.

Pic-less, sort of

My digital camera is broken.  I have procrastinated the fixing of it for no good reason.  

I could chat you up about all of the stuff I’ve been making.  I finished Sonar X5’s Ravenclaw-ish socks.  Started a pair of ballet slippers for me.  And have worked nearly a foot of the red mohair scarf.  I’ve recently decimated the mending pile, made a pair of shorts (also for Sonar X5), and will today cut fabric on a dress for me (Simplicity 3877, the sleeveless v-neck style).  

But there is nothing more boring than crafty chat with no pictures.  I can tell you about the fabulous floral print for the dress, with it’s splashy combination of orange and red and hot pink, but without a picture to catch your attention, to show you just how yummy it is, well…  *sigh*  It’s not even any fun to write about without the pictures.  

Ok, so, actually, I do have a picture of the fabric (and my reading stack from last October).  You may have seen it before.  Halloween costumes must have intervened.  

This fabric came from Hawaii, purchased by my grandmother, and shared begrudgingly a few years ago.  

I will take 12 pattern pieces, cut no fewer than 30 separate bits of fabric, and magically assemble them into a smoking hot dress to wear—well, perhaps to the grocery store or the library?  I hope I have enough fabric.

Now, I just need to clean the drying fennel blossoms off the sewing table.  Either that or make a fennel-scented dress. 

Licorice anyone?

Stash Toss

I may have mentioned that I have too many hobbies.  I sew—clothes, quilts, household goods, toys, costumes.  I knit—socks, lace, sweaters, toys, apple jackets.  I make crafty little weird things from time to time.  I encourage my children to do the same.  Their projects often involve small pieces of wood and copious amounts of scotch tape and glue.  And also sometimes paint.  I write—yes, I think right now this counts as a hobby, so seldom do I do it, but I aspire to shift this from hobby to, well, to something more involved at some point.  Oh, and I used to be a runner, and hope someday to be one again.  

That doesn’t count reading, which isn’t so much a hobby as a need.  And cooking, ditto need.  And gardening, which truthfully doesn’t involve me as often as it does Partner, but I’m there in a pinch.  

Each of these activities has accumulated stuff.  Reading: books.  Gardening:  uh, dirt, and vegetables, gloves, tools, blisters.  Knitting:  yarn, needles, scissors, patterns.  Sewing: boxes and boxes of fabric, and stuffing, elastic, buttons, snaps, velcro, thread, patterns and two sewing machines (ok, one is a serger and I haven’t actually used it successfully yet, but I’m hopeful).  

The craft stuff has filled an entire closet in my house.  I’ve admitted to my yarn stash being fairly reasonable and modest.  After tossing the craft closet, the yarn now occupies two plastic file boxes and one plastic blanket bag.  The fabric is another story altogether—several bins, a couple of garbage bags, and slouchy stacks.  

All of this stuff wears down my brain.  Even when it is successfully crammed into the closet with the door shut, I know it is there, occupying space.  Making me feel guilty with the unfulfilled promise and possibility that all of those raw materials represent.  

Before his death, trying to finish one last album before cancer finished him off, Warren Zevon noted about his love of reading that buying new books does not buy the time it takes to read them.  Not the happiest thought, but it is a realistic assessment that each of us has only a limited amount of time in any day, week or life, and that the accumulation of stuff does not magically expand our hours.  

When I shop (which I really dislike doing), I often ask myself the basic question, ‘Do I need this?’  That’s fairly easy to answer, but harder often is the next question, ‘Do I have time for this?’  I can cascade from there into sub-questions about whether I’m willing to make time for something that I need or something that I will find fulfilling for other reasons.  This basic personal consumption questioning has helped to keep the stashes under some semblance of control.  

Fabric and yarn are difficult for me though.  I can see the possibility in every piece of fabric I have.  The things that I could make.  I have the skill, the creativity, the enthusiasm.  So when someone says, ‘Hey, I don’t need this fabric/these bedsheets/this old quilt/this yarn, would you like to have it?’  I often can’t say no, especially if they are walking to the trash can as they say it.  When the yarn or fabric is super-cheap, I often can’t say no.  But the generosity of neighbors, the lure of a good deal, the infinite possibilities that those materials could become, do not give me the extra time to actually use them.  

So, in the interest of simplifying my closets, life, brain/clutter distress, I tossed my craft closet last night.  I wanted to be firm.  I planned ahead.  I had decided to keep all yarn, but sort it (and, oh, did I find some of the flashiest, sluttiest red mohair yarn that I did not know I had—I would link to a pic, but it’s discontinued and I can’t find it online: Pingouin Panache Mohair.  I don’t even know where it came from.  Yarn fairies?  There are at least two lace scarves coming out of that).  I had decided to keep fabric that I like that would be useful in the creation of quilts (I will quilt again.  I will.  I feel a moral compunction here.  I made quilts for some friends/family for their babies, and feel certain that I will want to do the same again for future babies.  Also, my sonars are outgrowing their kid quilts, and one day I will want to make them growing-up quilts that fit their big bodies.)  I had decided to keep any garment fabric that was already cut or paired with a specific pattern.  In other words, I would finish what I’d started in there.  

Out the door I had planned to throw all other apparel fabric, all weird fabric, all upholstery fabric, all stinky fabric (I inherited a bunch of stuff from my grandmother’s garage), all ugly fabric, and any clothes that were beyond reasonable mending.  

The will is strong in theory and weak in the face of the actual stuff.  

As I started to unload the closet, I was struck by how much more stuff was in there than I realized.  It really was worse than I thought.  Some things were easy:  8 yards of stinky, yellow, knit terry cloth.  Gone.  Ditto the 50 yards of stinky, navy, woven terry.  I fudged a bit, keeping the old sheets because I thought they might make a good bottom layer for summer quilts.  I completely faltered at the fleece-lined neoprene.  I mean, seriously, I know it’s red and black, and I know I bought it for a ridiculously low price, but what if one of the Sonars needs a wet-suit one day?  I could make it!!  It could happen.  We do live on the coast.  Maybe one of them will become a surfer.  Or a kiteboarder.  

It was painful.  Two hours later I had two large trashbags full of fabric to freecycle.  Which is good.  But I really did want to get rid of more.  I am left with one giant bin full of quilting fabric (loosely defined).  A giant bin of various works in progress, and apparel fabric that I just couldn’t get rid of (the pink/orange/drapey Hawaiian print that my grandma bought a whole bolt of on vacation 800 years ago and which she begrudgingly shared 3 yards with me, among other things).  A smaller bin full of upholstery fabric, which is really just too handy and versatile to part with (and oh, what if I need drapes sometime?).  In there is also about half of the array of lining fabrics that I inherited from my mother-in-law (seriously, we could have lined anything to match.  The woman had collected everything from shell pink to blood red to chocolate brown to caramel paisley—I kept the caramel paisley).  There is a file box full of patterns.  Ditto a file box full of notions (which really needs its own toss, but I was too drained to do it last night).  

Remind me not to look in the garbage bags again before I get rid of it.  I might take stuff out.  

Do I have time now to knit the slutty red lace?  

Therapy, Phase One

In times of acute emotional distress, I tend to follow a fairly predictable recovery pattern. Phase One begins when the crying and plate-throwing has (mostly) stopped.* This is the phase in which I Make things.

Ok, I make things all the time, but Phase One usually involves a slightly maniacal construction of something new. (On rare occasions, the recovery of a long abandoned project occurs in cases when Phase One is prolongued).

So today, I made bandanas. And a cape. And I knit on Owl 2 (the colors of which were selected by Sonar X5 and which has been named Hedwig—go read the books). And I pondered buttons for Owl 1 (which is purple and grey, a birthday gift for a wee friend, and which has been named Errol by the Sonars, probably because he’s a bit squashy looking—again, go read the books). And there is a very good chance I will work on the abandoned socks for Partner.

I rationalize, of course, that the preponderance of birthdays we have among our family and friends here in the middle of March is justification enough of such a craft frenzy. Some of the bandanas are for pure whimsy, to be used locally by the Sonars for whatever a bandana can do (cape, mask, pirate scarf, apron, wee blanket, handkerchief, mini-toga, halter top, insert your own bandana use here). Two others are destined for a six-year-old friend, to be accompanied by a compass, flashlight, string, and bandaids for a gift inspired by The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls. Call it an adventure pack. The cape will be wrapped around Errol for environmentally friendly wrapping and surprise super-hero garb for a three-year-old friend.

Side note: When I mentioned last night that I was thinking of making bandanas, Sonar X7 said, “Hey, we can tie one around the end of a stick and run away from home now!!” Nearly killing the bandana project before it got off the ground.

Normally, I just think making things is fun. There is something very satisfying about knowing that I have used my hands to craft something fun or useful or interesting.

In times of stress, I find comfort in being a creator as opposed to a consumer or a destroyer. The practice of craft is a good analogy for the way I want to function socially and emotionally. And by taking fabric, or yarn or paper or glue and making something and pondering the idea of creating healthy connections and emotions among people, I find that I am able to calm myself from the inside out, to feel stronger and more stable and more able to fulfill my roles and responsibilities in a healthy, sane and satisfying way.

The craft doesn’t take me all the way though. At some point, when I am sitting in a puddle of fabric clippings and bits of thread and yarn, with glue in my hair, I will decide that I can no longer tolerate the mess.

Thus begins Phase Two, in which I clean with a slightly maniacal vengeance, thus exerting a sense of control and organization. Stressful experiences often feel outside the realm of our control. Another good analogy here. Cleaning and organizing the tangible objects that are around me gives me a sense of control over at least one part of my life. It has the added benefit of creating a serene space in which to contemplate my emotions. I often find that as I organize the stuff and sweep away the debris, that feelings start making sense, that ideas fall into line, and that I feel more calm. A clean house does not necessarily change the stressful issues themselves, but it does create a reserve inside me that feels healthy and strong. Plus, it’s one of the rare occasions in which our house is really and truly and fastidiously clean.

People are sometimes freaked out by both phases. Not the actions themselves, but the, uh, shall we say Enthusiasm (aka Single Minded Vengeance) with which I take on the creation and the cleaning. The Sonars seem to enjoy Phase One. No one likes Phase Two. But I reassure them, that the mama who doesn’t care whether the living room table is covered with ten gallons of K’Nex as long as none of them is on the floor to hurt her feet will return soon.

*No, I have not actually ever thrown plates, but I’ve wanted to. I’m really more of a slammer, which has, of occasion, resulted in broken things. Just this morning I happened to close the dishwasher in a particularly enthusiastic manner and managed to smash a glass.

Lest You Think I Only Obsess About Running

I obsess about many things. Case in point, this musing, crafted a couple of weeks ago.

***

Partner has these two old polo shirts. Once upon a time, we tie-dyed them with pale blue circles and lines to freshen them up a bit. Very pretty. But now they’re stained up, mostly because he used them as gardening shirts. Have you ever tried to wash banana sap out of clothes? Seriously.

The integrity of the fabric is still good, and since they’re extra-large shirts, they offer up large swathes to work with. I wondered what I could do with them.

Then I read an article about Whole Foods Markets. Apparently they’re not going to use plastic grocery bags anymore, instead offering customers the choice between recycled paper bags and 99-cent canvas bags.

Idea.

I took apart a plastic grocery bag at its heat sealed seams and examined its architecture. It has a folded pleat down each side, from handle to bottom that allows the bag to be folded flat and then expand volume-wise to hold stuff.

I cut out the sleeves and the collar of one of the shirts. (I know from previous experience that I can make rather cute underwear for myself from a pair of his sleeves. And the kids love to play with the collars, so until I come up with some clever redeployment of them, into the dress-up bin they go). This left me with the front and back of the shirt. The front already bore a general resemblance to the dismantled grocery bag, so I trimmed things up, folded things just so, seamed the bottom and handle tops, and sort of hemmed the remaining exposed top edge. Voila. Free reusable grocery bag. Slightly larger than the plastic ones from our grocer and prestained.

Shirt A (still a shirt) and Shirt B (now a grocery bag) hanging in the grapefruit tree.