Happy Birthday Blog!

Wow- I have been a blogger for one year now. It went by so quickly. The experience has been fun, but the biggest reward has been connecting with like minded folks both near and far. I am looking forward to what comes next.

Painting Nature

We were all outside enjoying the beautiful spring weather when my small one asked me “Can I paint nature?”. “Sure”, I said. Of course I assumed she would paint a picture of something. But, no. She actually painted nature. She made cool stripey patterns all over the roots of a big pine tree, she painted some rocks and some sticks and some pine cones. Once the big one caught wind of what her little sister was up to she ran for some paint and proceeded to paint a maple tree.

Some red bugs crawling on a root.

Knitting socks

I have been knitting for three years, for half of that time my focus has been primarily on socks. When I first started out it was so complicated. Until I realized that all knitting really comes down to those two stitches, knit and purl. Keeping that in mind I plunged fearlessly on. Now for me knitting in the round is more enjoyable than flat knitting. When the piece starts to take on a real sock shape it’s like magic. I just follow the pattern and pretty soon...there is a foot shape! Socks are small, they don’t take up much yarn which not only makes them a less pricey project then say, a sweater, but It also means that they take less of your time. I love the new self striping sock yarns that are available, they are mathematically figured to automatically stripe themselves as you knit along. That is fun. The self striping prompts you to go on because you want to find out what it’s going to look like.The pair shown here are the socks from my Socks and Bones post. Here I am balancing along on a log in the middle of a marshy place filled with skunk cabbage. I managed to make it across without getting my new socks wet and slimy.  

“And I am hypnotized by knitting socks. Once a sock has been cast on to five double-pointed needles, I adore the mindlessness of going round and round like a hamster in a wheel.”

“The only way to knit a sock in the round is to keep coming back to your starting point. But, almost imperceptibly, progress is made. It’s a pattern, yes, but it’s not really a circle, it’s a spiral and all the stitches and rows, like days and weeks, are linked to form an unbroken chain. We can think we are getting nowhere with the cyclical nature of domesticity, and yet all the time, as with sock knitting we are moving on to a new row or color.”

quotes are from The Gentle Art of Domesticity by Jane Brocket