But I’m spotting a trend here, hatched with my Ozma’s Delight sweater: the contrasting hem.

that's my berry red hat with the blue/purple hem facing, and my blue/purple sweater with the cherry red hem facing!

I didn’t set out to do this! It just kind of happened. It’s too warm to wear the hat yet, but I’m ready when the chill comes. And as for my Laurayana sweater, the front and back are finished, one sleeve is finished, and the 2nd sleeve is half done. Then I just have to sew the shoulders together, pick up and knit a very few rows to finish the neck (stockinette, so they do a little tight curl), and then sew in the sleeves and sew up the sides. Sewing pieces together is always a bit of magic, and I really kind of like doing it. It’s careful work, close handwork, just my kind of thing.

So the soup-making spree is a memory now, and we have quarts and quarts (and gallons and gallons) of amazing soup in the freezer, ready for the winter. In addition to all that, my husband also made a beautiful batch of gravlax, which we’ve been enjoying.

that's 18 quarts of homemade cabbage soup. I KNOW! 18 QUARTS! and we also have french onion, probably 8 quarts.

here's the cabbage soup, for a close-up. it's thick with yummy cabbage, and shreds of brisket, and chunks of tomato. and the broth is a lovely sweet-sour flavor, deepened (of course) by the complexity of his homemade beef stock.

it's hard to really appreciate this, since it just looks like a piece of salmon; he scraped/rinsed off the salt/sugar/fresh dill blanket that it cured in for a couple days. sliced paper-thin, and either eaten plain (my way) or on pumpernickel bread (his way), it's so fresh and delicious. tastes like the sea, kind of. the delicious salmon sea.

So yeah, it’s been a knitty-foodie several days around here, punctuated by long walks in the park, marathon Breaking Bad watching, and naps and cups of tea and writing. Doesn’t that sound heavenly……..

Happy Sunday, y’all -

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happy! joy!

SUCH a wonderful, happy day for me! I finished the final little details of my old job, tied up every last loose end, left nothing undone, left on a very high note.

I finished grafting the shawl together, and it LOOKS GREAT! I was so worried that the graft would be obvious and weird, but you know the kitchener stitch is really amazing. It really looks seamless. Now I just have to weave in a couple of ends, then soak it for a bit and do the blocking.

Isn’t it great when the things that hang over you are finished? You know that glorious feeling of liberation and accomplishment and exuberance?

Yeah. I’ve got those going. After I finish the blocking, I think I’ll do the next swatch for Peasy, so I can work on it on the flight later this week. To my daughter’s wedding. Two girls happily married, that’s another great relief, you know?

blocking

.

1) because I now know from my Wowie Zowie sock lesson that what seems like a small difference can actually be a very large difference,

2) I need to go down a needle size, and

3) the fabric is going to be absolutely gorgeous, with the most lovely hand and drape ever.

Madelinetosh is not in danger of being toppled from the top of my favorite- yarn- ever list — especially not with tosh merino light in this world — but Rowan Tweed has scootched immediately to a close second. I think I’ll knit a Manu with Rowan Tweed after I finish my beautiful Peasy and an Austin Hoodie with TML. I also have enough yarn for an Inaugural sweater.

Oh dear. I think I’ve just become a sweater knitter.* Good thing I live in a place with a long cold winter.

With a nice long weekend coming up, I have knitting plans that include finishing Marnie’s wedding shawl and getting it blocked, doing some work (you know, instead of saying work I’d rather say ‘fun’) doing some fun on my Wowie Zowie socks, and maybe I’m just sayin maybe getting going on my Peasy. Last night was the first major festivity associated with leaving my job; 20 people I work with came to a little party for me, and it was quite amazing. Much toasting and fete-ing and love; hugs and kisses from each one at the end. Tonight is a drinks farewell with my boss’s boss and my best work friend, Thursday night is my writing group. Not much will happen until the weekend but it’s all going to be fun. When it’s good, life can be really, really good, you know?

*disclaimer and acknowledgment: knitting a swatch does not guarantee becoming a sweater knitter…there is still the ability to be in it for the long haul, the perseverance to finish all the fiddly bits, and (for some sweaters) the ability to assemble pieces. The jury is still out on me with these parts!

I am not against medication, that’s absolutely not my point. I take medication; luckily, I don’t have to deal with something tragic like schizophrenia, or a condition that’s treated by devastating medication. I have a garden variety condition, and medication just allows me to be normal, which means I feel happy now and then, sad now and then, angry now and then, frustrated, joyous, depressed, the whole complement of human emotions. And I’m so grateful for that! Because I want to feel all those things, they’re the electricity of being alive. Even when I’m feeling really terrible, like the emotional floor dropped and I plummeted downward, even then I’m grateful that I get to experience it. I am always relieved when I leave that bleak state, of course, but I’m glad that I am able to feel it now and then.

I am also not saying that creativity requires mental illness (or alcoholism). Perhaps because my own emotional life is so complex, I do suspect that people who have to deal with emotional disturbances have a closer connection to the experience, and talk about it with greater richness. When I’m extremely happy, I just don’t have a lot of language to describe it. I say this again and again, but The Inferno is a much more interesting read than Paradiso. How many ways can you say “light, warm, love, happy”? Which is not to discount the experience of that at all! I love to feel that, too.

Part of my job involves acquiring books in positive psychology, and I have a complicated response to that field of research. On one hand, I value research and writing about what makes us strong, about what characterizes resilient people, about the very real strengths that humans often display. On the other hand, though, it slips too easily into life coaching, into “just think your way to happiness!”, into “clean out your closets and you’ll be happy!” I just did an Amazon book search for “happy” and found 34,467 results. It wasn’t a very refined search; some books in the list were against the simple concept of ‘just be happy,’ to be sure, but the vast majority were in the “just be happy” category. There are some outstanding books that take on this whole project, such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. She got breast cancer, and found that so many people told her she just needed to think positively and she’d be cured. Of course the flip side of that is that if you’re not cured, you must not have thought positively enough. I love this book, and love her approach to the whole magilla. She says it all with much more clarity and verve than I could say it.

I do think it’s a giant mistake, our cultural move towards believing that we should all just be happy. It’s right there from our beginnings, right: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Let’s all pursue happiness, get the hell out of my way you’re seriously interfering with my happiness. Somewhere along the way, the concept shifted from the one Aristotle developed (using reason well over the course of a full life is happiness. Doing anything well requires virtue or excellence, and therefore living well consists of activities caused by the rational soul in accordance with virtue or excellence.) Happiness is about being thoughtful in the action of life. It doesn’t say that happiness is creating a trouble-free life; it doesn’t say that happiness is about refining your life so all you do is the fun stuff; it doesn’t say that happiness simply equals living exclusively with the feeling of happy. Maybe that’s one of the problems; “happy” is a feeling, and it’s great! But happiness does not equal living in that state all the time.

We all have to figure this out for ourselves. For me, happiness and well-being is patchwork; some of this, some of that, more of this, a splash of red, some black to make the colors pop, and you can only really see the picture from far away.

The side table has a drawer, and it’s full of all kinds of junk – random knitting tools like a cable needle, a pair of scissors, my iPod cable for syncing it to my laptop, my card reader for my camera, an external hard drive, stuff like that. On top of the table is a stack of magazines – FiberArts, Threads, Craft. My laptop on top of them. Enough space (but not more!) for a cup of coffee. The table is squeezed in between the couch and my sewing table, so when I sit on the couch, I’m kind of in the midst of my creative space, even though it’s just a tiny corner of a relatively small living room that’s crowded with other stuff. Ah, Manhattan.

Since I don’t have very much time to knit, it tends toward an exact routine: In the mornings, around 5am, I put on a pot of coffee, pour a bowl of cereal, and go to the couch. I open the laptop, and while I’m eating my cereal and waiting for the coffee, I open iTunes and download podcast updates and sync my iPod, and read a now-tiny set of sites: gmail, statcounter, and ravelry (I check the forums and look at my friends activity). Now the coffee is finished and so is my cereal, so I pour a mug, return to the couch, close the laptop, and knit in the deep quiet for about an hour, maybe less, depending on the hair situation. I’m usually wearing a pair of socks I knit, and I usually pull a blanket I knit over my legs. And I knit. Knitting in this hour is a very important experience; I don’t think I’m actually thinking about anything, and I’m not knitting anything that requires the strictest concentration and/or struggle. I do that knitting on the weekend. But in the mornings, I think I am in some kind of meditative state, where everything disappears, my mind and even my self sort of disappears, and I’m just kind of floating. My fingers are making their small repetitive movements with a gentle and even rhythm, the yarn is flowing between my fingers, and rows are finished. It’s always a bad moment when I happen to notice that it’s 6:00; it’s kind of like crashing into a brick wall in some way, now I have to leave this state and get busy, get ready, get going, get to work, get at it, don’t stop. The pleasure is primarily in the knitting, but it’s also in the spot. My cozy spot, surrounded by my creative stuff, my little safe and textured corner of the world.

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