« November 2019 | Main | January 2020 »
It is... a dark and stormy night.
I've been working on my sweater and listening to Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippett. Tomorrow the sweater should be finished, just the yoke to go.
The little tree growing by the stump caught my eye yesterday. The big tree came down in a wind storm last year. The tree has mesh around it.
Grow little tree, grow...
Happy New Year
Beginning another stripe for the field note blanket, a winter stripe or perhaps places around me, places close enough to walk to.
The neighborhood park.
Along the bay.
Thinking about location and how it shapes us, makes us who we are.
Baked apples and cream.
Apples + hot buttered rum mix (sugar, butter, spices).
Hat finished for Dad...a day late. '
Knit 2, Purl 2 consumes time.
This rocking chair belonged to one of my great grandmothers. I've had it somewhere between 25-30 years. I'm not sure how long she had it for. I like to think of her sitting in it, maybe other relatives too as they visited with her. It is a favorite place for the cat.
Today I made a new cushion for the seat with chenille that was found at a garage sale. It's stuffed with layers of wool blanket. I need to make a new pad for underneath or maybe just shorten the pieced wool that's been there. A project for another day...
A beautiful sunset...
A conk growing in a cherry tree.
The nuthatch hopping from branch to branch looking for insects.
A little yarn for my fieldnote blanket.
Local wool.
I finished Braiding Sweetgrass.
It is beautiful because, to me, it's about noticing and falling in love with the world.
What we love we want to save.
Sitting at the bus stop for 20 minutes will make a few things clear:
I took the scenic route home from the bookstore today.
Along the water, towards the mountains.
I went to get Terry Tempest Williams new book Erosion.
It's next up on the reading list, although I've already dipped my toe in just a little bit.
Today's project: taking apart a fabric basket that I made a couple years ago and reassembling it into a smaller one. It was too big to hold things well as I never put cardboard in the sides to hold it firmly.
Smaller can be better.
I am listening to Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli (checked out from the library) while I knit. This is from an interview he did for On Being:
"The fascination of science is not what we have learned. It is the process of learning. It’s the discovery. It’s the wonder of what we learn: “Wow.” Then, the wonder creates more curiosity, and then we realize that there is so much we have not learned yet....There is so much to be discovered. And the beauty of the scientific enterprise is that we are in touch with the unknown, what we don’t know, and we try to make steps into it. So, that’s a strength of science, that it works out of beauty, out of intuition, out of imagination, but it has a very solid way, then, of checking. And which also means that some — many beautiful ideas turn out to be wrong."
This years wreath of windfall, gleaning and pruning...pine (from the neighbor's tree), ivy, rose hips, hops, and hazelnut.
I will be choosing a word each day for awhile, randomly, just because...
I think this is rock shield lichen.
Something new I've learned from Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, is that lichens are a fungal/algal symbiotic relationship. I'm going to be sad when I finish this book but luckily have Gathering Moss to read too.
"When times are easy and there's plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. So say the lichens."
From Braiding Sweetgrass
I'm cleaning up my stash of "fabric for work projects" and am making dinosaur pillows.
More details coming soon.
Or let sleeping dogs lay?
Experimenting more with taking pictures when lighting isn't great. Filters are not quite true, but not wrong either.
The bottom image is of two of my current projects.
The netting (from Mo Crow) is being stitched to pre-felt.
The knitting project is a hat and is my current bus project.
2 cups of cooked squash + a small onion + 1 1/2 cups water + a pinch of salt + a pinch of herbs (oregano, basil, sage) = comfort food.