Supporting change through knitting

At the beginning of August, our family took a trip together.  We flew to Montreal and saw some good friends there. They were just returning overseas from a sabbatical (with a two year old) and our flight left Winnipeg at 5AM, so we were all sort of a mess, but had a big meal together and enjoyed seeing each other very much.

Then, we headed to northern Vermont, to a big family& friend celebration.  My best friend from childhood got married quietly last year, but we all gathered for an informal weekend to celebrate their big decision.  It was held at her folks' farm, and we picked many many raspberries and blueberries, played in the apple orchard treehouse, swam in the farm pond, and had fun together.  We stayed at a hotel near a glacial lake...and had a fairly big canoe tip over, too.  (All was fine, only parents fell out and it was still shallow where it happened!)  I'd seen the farm in winter  and in May, and maybe other times, too, but every season is a stunner on a well-maintained farm! (click on the links for more photos)

After that, we drove to upstate NY and visited the Professor's family vacation place, an old dairy farm.  While there, we shot more photos of Fissure.  I now wish I'd waited to release the pattern until I had these photos as I think they are much better than the first ones I featured in the pattern.  However, something more important followed.

My sister-in-law bought me this lovely yak yarn as a present a while ago.  She lives in Manhattan, and lovely high-end yarns are not hard to come by there!  However, in the meanwhile, she has been working very hard.  She is a lawyer, and is about to become a judge in New York City.

I'm enormously proud of her.  It's so important to have women in democratically elected positions of authority in our society.  Women are half of our population, but often never manage to get into positions where they can make such a big difference in the lives of others.

 While we were at the farm, our nephew, age 1, got sick with a virus and she took him home-so I could not feature her in the photos.  We stayed on with our niece (the same age as our twins), brother-in-law, the Professor's father and his wife, and spent a day or two more out and about.  Climbing on hay bales, going to Lake George, and hanging out.  We also caught a few more glimpses of Fissure before it went off to its new big city Manhattan home.

 I finish things very slowly these days...so I have only turned out one of these...but was so pleased to find out that the second completed version of this pattern is going to support Chase the Chill, a charity that donates hand knits scarves to people in Winnipeg who might need them.

I wanted to say in words how important and exciting it was to me that my (younger) relative will take on such an important and powerful position in the near future.  Words failed me, and anyway, there were three 6 and 7 year olds racing around, a toddler crying, and well, too much noise for adult communication.  Instead, I could hand her something I'd made.  So I did.

The pattern for knitting Fissure is now available on both Ravelry and Loveknitting.com.  
Let's make a break (a fissure?!) for good....making change is important.

A real New York moment

My sister-in-law, a lawyer (smart cookie!) took a day off work to give us a day on the town.

We went to the Folk Art Museum where we saw some interesting crazy quilts and samplers and an exhibit featuring Henry Darger's work--he seemed to have had an inappropriate focus on little girls in his art, in my opinion. The professor's words? "That man was mental."

Then we went to Anthropologie for 20 minutes of sale rack shopping. --what can I say? My sister-in-law has great taste... Although she didn't find a formal dress right away, a pair of pants jumped off the rack into my hands. At $9.95 for a $118 pair of trousers? Well, I'm wearing those pants right now. Don't know how that happened...

Then another jump on the subway cross town to Kalustyan's, an amazing spice and speciality store. Loaded up with aleppo pepper, decaffeinated Turkish coffee, and some fabulous Middle Eastern sweets to fortify ourselves, we headed back up the island of Manhattan.

We met other family members for lunch at Community Food and Juice where we had sustainable, local and delicious meals. Oh, and we sat near another table where I recognized a famous actor. Mark Feuerstein had his sweet potato fries right near us. (Whoa.)

Then we all bundled into the car later in the day to go to an intimate family party in New Jersey. Not everybody could come--there were only maybe 40 of us from the professor's family--on a school night, no less, just so we could all see each other before the professor and I came south to DC and Virginia to see my family.

OK, no pictures here, but just one snapshot of the whirlwind adventure. Hope you can get a vicarious taste of our experiences from this!