The Rain in Maine Stays Mainly in the Marsh

I'm back up in Maine again. After a harrowing time at the airport... Unlike millions of Americans, I didn't watch t.v. yesterday. Had I, I would have known flights were delayed all across the country. In my defense, Orbitz usually calls me to tell me that the plane I'm on has been delayed. But we went for the no-frill price of $39 each way, and Southwest figures you can call them for travel advisories, thankyouverymuch.

Our flight was supposed to be at 9:25 pm. I got on a train in Exton at 5:47. I was a little nervous when we stopped just shy of 30th St Station, where I would meet the dude and we'd get the train to the airport. I only had eight minutes to make the transfer. We got there with time to spare, but... Well, to make a long story short, at 7:35 we were still waiting for the 7:04 train to the airport. Even the dude agreed we needed a cab. We got there in 10 minutes, plenty of time to make the flight. Except our plane had just left Los Angeles. Yup, we were five hours late. And when we got to NH (2:00 am instead of 10:30 pm) we still had an hour to go to get to Maine. We fell into bed at four.

I couldn't sleep past eight--even with the silk sleep mask in the guest room...Too much sun. I can't do anything today except flip idly through magazines.

SBQ: Converting

Have you ever done a color conversion? If so, what did you think about your results and would you do it again?
My first ever conversion was in Sue Stokes's class, gosh I wish the piece weren't in storage because I can't remember which one it is... The colors she had were Needle Necessities Victorian Christmas and greens in the 502 range of DMC. It was very early 90s, all that mauve and green. I was tired of mauve and green, so I went to the mall at Spirit...or was it another festival?...and found a blue and green NN to replace it with. The color combination I ended up with was much more complimentary than contrasting. I liked it, but I could tell Sue didn't think much of it, although she did emphasize that I should do what made me happy.

Now I do it all the time. If I don't like how something looks or am missing a color, I'll just swap things out...sometimes one color, sometimes the whole palette

Thinking about color reminds me of the time my mother was making a quilt for me. It was the early 80s, and the quilters among us will remember the dearth of cotton fabrics that were available to them. It was all calico and solids. (If you love the selection of quilting fabrics available now, thank the women who were quilting in the early 80s who demanded more!) I had a rainbow painted on my wall. (Remember, the late 70s/early 80s were the time of geometric wall paintings. My parents had a sunset on the family room wall, but I digress...) Even though my quilt was going to college with me, I wanted it to have all the colors of the rainbow. I went around the Blue Goose in Bedford, NH picking out fabrics: a blue calico on white for the background, red, orange with white flowers, yellow, blue, green, and purple. My mother thought the colors were awful, but the shop owner said I had an eye for color because they were all the same tone. And it came out great. I just wish I had taken better care of it; there's a huge tear in the border. Maybe when it's out of storage, I can post a picture. I still love that quilt.

And so it begins...

I've put 4 hours into the "scissor rest," part of the Needles and Pins smalls.
If you think of the pattern as having rounds instead of bands, as in a band sampler, I have completed three of the six rounds. Wow, that's a long way of saying I'm half done! At this rate, I should get to the needlebook before my ten hours are done. Then, it's on to sissy's poncho. I swear.

While I was working on this, my cousin asked what a scissor rest is for. Now, that's a good question. The designer had told us it was to prevent the points of your scissors from coming in contact with your finely finished furniture. Then my cousin asked why you'd put the points of your scissors on the needlework instead. She makes a good point. I'm guessing that the scissor rest can be used for somethings else. Any ideas?

More weirdness at Wegman's: someone is singing America the Beautiful. Loudly. Having never been moved to sing publicly myself--or patriotically--I marvel.

Pins and Needles

On Monday night, I took out Lauren Sauer's Pins and Needles. And I finished the scissor fob in no time at all. I took this as a class ages ago--1995?6? I finished the pin cushion, which is in storage, but never completed the other pieces. Last night, I started the scissor rest, which is the same pattern as the fob but with 44 eyelets instead of 4.

Okay, this is weird. About 30 Asian kids just came in the door (they've stopped there too, blocking traffic into the store). It's especially strange because Downingtown is not known for its ethnic diversity. Which is why I have to get a job--so we can move to the city. Okay, they've just all walked back out too, quick as they came. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

Toy Gatherer

You'll notice the progress on the marionette and the sled. I think I have about 20 more hours before I start beading. That will, of course, take forever, but I'm excited nevertheless--this has been a UFO for about ten years!

The Thing Is...

You'll notice the low volume of output lately. The dude is working from home three days a week and using the computer. I can post text uploading with my cousin's computer with dial-up. But photos...fugget about it.

I've put aside Toy Gatherer after doing far more than 10 hours on it. I have picked up Pins and Needles, a class project that I took with Lauren Sauer of Forget-Me-Knots in Stitches. (Was that name supposed to roll off the tongue?) It's a group of sewing smalls stitched mostly with silk floss. It's a joy to stitch with, but not much to look at judging by the photos I've taken. Will post tomorrow, when the dude goes back to the office for two days.

SBQ: Obligations

What do you do when you have some sort of obligation stitching to do, but don’t want to do it?
This may be a rather obvious answer but the truth is I procrastinate until it needs to be done. I mean, look at all the years of posts I got out of avoiding the obligation of stitching the afghan. The other option is that I just suck it up. When I've had to work on unappealing round robin stitching, I work on it as soon as possible until it's done. It's like taking medicine--just do it in one shot and get it over with.

Obligation stitching can be a real drag. I'm definitely not signing up for any more round robins after the ones I am in are done. First, I haven't been impressed with the level of commitment people have to them. They generally sign up for more than they can handle, so the deadlines get postponed to accomodate them. What about accomodating the people who are committed? Secondly, I'm not generally impressed with the people in the round robins. I keep getting these reactionary and conservative letters from the other stitchers, and I just think, "I have to stitch a piece for this woman?" That is, when you get any letter at all. It's just not creating the kind of community I was hoping for. Can I really suggest that I was optimistic on this? (Those who know me know I tend toward the cynical...)

The Question of Miss Peel...

What should I do with these? They're cool, but I don't have any clever sayings to make some coherent statement.

A Treat

Yesterday, I had my first interview. It was just a telephone interview, but it went so well, I decided to treat myself by going to the LNS. So I checked the website, and off I went. When I arrived, I was greeted by a handlettered sign saying that beginning July 1, they would be closed on Sunday and Monday. Yesterday, you will remember was Monday. I was severely disappointed. That information would be so easy to throw up on the website. Don't have a website if you are incapable of maintaining it on at least a weekly basis. It's not as if websites are crazy-hard to maintain once they are up.

Today I went back. I bought frames for Vous et Nul Autre and last year's anniversary present. And a pattern: Call of the Ocean. I have to frame the anniversary present soon, so I'll have something for you to look at soon.

I [Heart] my Library

The dude and I are on a budgetary diet while I am unemployed. Our biggest expense seems to be books. (Okay, it's really his SEPTA pass, but that's so much less interesting.) So we've been hoofing it over to the local libary. It's only about a mile away, but you'd think we were aliens the way people look at us as we walk through the Exton Mall parking lot. (The dude really is an alien, but I digress.) I've discovered the joys of living with books without owning them. I've loved being able to page through craft books before deciding just to make the one project before I bring it back. (How many craft books did I own just to make one project out of each? Oh yeah, it was five boxes.) I've checked out Simple Knits for Sophisticated Living (how stupid is knitting an off-white floor runner?), Yarn Girls' Guide to Simple Knits (I see a sweater in the dude's future), and Stitch 'n Bitch Nation (and it doesn't have flames on the sleeves).

But I also want to read by the pool. So I picked up Knitting Sutra, which I have been meaning to read for years. And I forgot I meant to read it in the pool, and read it the moment I got home. In one go. I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I'm not what you would call a spiritual person by any stretch of the imagination. In the mind-body-spirit connection, I'm so mind-oriented that my body often throws itself in the way of furniture so that my brain feels the pain and remembers that it's attached. Spirit? Dude, I'm postmodern.

The book reminded me of when I taught the writing course associated with Gloria Orenstein's Feminist Theory course. During the course introduction, she was reliving--and I mean that almost literally--the early days of the woman's movement. I thought, how wonderful that we're going to get this firsthand account, with, of course, additional intellectual content. (And it was, for the most part.) But then Professor O started talking about her recent shamanistic journey. "The spirits can hurt you," she told the Orange County teens. Fuck, I thought, we've lost them now. (And I was right, for the most part.)

I like the idea of connecting with my spirit, so long as it has nothing to do with a higher power. I like the idea that the repetitive and introspective actions of knitting or cross-stitch could be the place I connect with my spirit. I'm not much for the shamanistic, but nature I can do. I loved the early parts of the book when she connected craft to contemplation, "like the counting of the rosary, the motions of needlework are singularly well suited to the practice of contemplation" (4). And connected us to the others:

with each piece of handwork that I do, I connect with the centuries of women who cultivated their inner lives and expressed them through the humble works of their hands. The making of crafts can be, at the same time, both solitary and communal in equal measure. (5)

I didn't even mind when she speculated about women we know nothing about. But there was something about the way she dabbled in spirituality--shamanism, Sufi, Arica--that really bothered me. I guess in some way it's the "Orientalism" of it--the way she chases after the exotic other--and in some cases does that literally. [I find it more than a little coincidental that both Susan Gordon Lydon and Gloria Orenstein are post-diaspora Jews. Makes you think. Is it their disconnection from their homeland that causes them to seek? And why in traditions that are "less intellectual" than Judaism?] While it's sort of obvious to connect knitters to "Spider Woman"--both Lydon and Deborah Bergman do--why is it so necessary? Why not Philomela? That is, why an origin myth and not a story about the silencing of women? Oh right, spirituality is about The Beginning. Or is it?

See? Ambivalent.

Shepherd's Bush Toy Gatherer

Haven't shown my progress in a while. So far, I've added two hours toward my goal. 

Le Petit Berger

I've changed Anne into Ted. All that I have left to do is the birth announcement stats. 

SBQ: Begginings 6/29

When starting a new project, do you start in the middle? If you do, once you’ve worked down to the bottom, do you turn your chart and fabric around so that you are stitching the top section downwards again or do you just stitch upwards from the middle?

I almost always start in the middle. I find I am incapable of measuring in 3" and down 3"--there always seems to be some jog in the pattern that I neglect to take into account. So, I stick with the safe way. I usually move out to the right and down, but when I get bored of stitching those colors, I'll flip the chart and fabric 180 degrees and stitch right and down again (actually stitching the upper left of the pattern). This method assures that I never have to count. Who says counted cross-stitch is about math?

SBQ: Neatness Counts

Do you think that you stitch neater on Evenweave than you do on Aida cloth? If so, why? I think I stitch about the same. I have noticed, while stitching on round robins, that I become a horribly sloppy stitcher when evenweave is begun in the wrong place. Wrong place? Of course, variations are limitless in craft, but I find it a whole lot easier to keep track if I start my stitches next to a vertical leg. Kathy Dyer's exactly right when she says it's easier to show than to explain. Because I am such a, er, loose stitcher, my stitches have a tendency to roll under the fabric if there's not a good vertical anchor. I get lost counting as well--if you expect to see the vertical thread at two (as opposed to one or three) your needle comes up there automatically. So I think it is more doing things right than doing them on aida or evenweave.

Goals

You know, it's been ages since I made a list of my stitching goals. I think not working is part of the problem. When you work, you have so much time that is accounted for by other people. Then, it's easy to say, "now I'm home and this is my time to stitch." I can stitch whenever, and it seems like I hardly stitch. That's inelegant, but I hope you know what I mean. I think the end of the television season might account for it too. Now I don't have time scheduled for me to sit on my fat ass, unless I watch some reruns.

I'm hoping, though, that coming up with some goals will help me focus.

* stitch last ornament in JCS rr
* complete Le Petit Berger
* complete Camp needlecase
* ten hours on Sissy's poncho (Remember that one? Still not done!)
* ten hours on Toy Gatherer
* ten hours on Pins and Needles (sounds painful)
* finishing on three projects, including Vous et Nul Autre