Stay Busy, Stay Happy!

      There comes a point in time where most of us are just ready to be finished with our works in progress.  There is something Zen about being midway through an ambitious project and being intimately comfortable with stitches and yarn.  That Zen can easily become disrupted by the realization that there's a looooong way to go or, alternately, the end is near and the compulsion to rush sets in.  Blocking is the magical tool that can either amplify or restore the Zen of crafting gorgeous knits.        For example, my current WIP is Marie Greene's Apogean sweater...

(click "readmore" to get to the link) I finally figured out how to provide a link to past newsletters here in the blog.  I think if you come back to this link in the future, it will show an updated list you can read anytime.  Up until I fixed it, you could only see newsletters from 2018, when I must have broken the link.  The one I sent yesterday is at the top of the list, so I guess it's working again.

 I spent years being agitated about felting.  It struck me as odd that any knitter or crocheter would actually want to toss their precious stitches into the wash with the purpose of obscuring work and creating *gasp* a felted piece (and don't even get me started on the "stabby" felting).  My own limited view boxed me in to the incorrect belief that felting was either an accident, or a misguided waste of time. As I'm sure you can predict by now, this is the story of my conversion from resistant grump to happy felter.  It only took a few weeks...

The thing that has surprised me about macrame is that it is done in sections.  You cut alot of cords and hang them in the center, working one (simple!) section at a time, adding more (and more!) cords while building up to the final result.  I had envisioned working with all of those (86 right now) cords hanging at once, making different stitches on each.  Ummmm....hell NO!  Thank goodness. This is my latest in-progress wall hanging, and I am LOVING it, savoring my time on it each day and don't want it to end.  That's a good test of a...

Every now and then one of these Tatting Patterns I wrote 25 years ago pops up.  This one was one of my favorite.  Anyone wanting to make this, come see me and learn to Tat.  My normal teaching fees apply, and the pattern is free (for my tatting students).  Merry Christmas!