Canadian companies retool for pandemic, why not climate change?

Here's an opinion piece that came out this weekend on the CBC-Manitoba website.
Pandemic proves companies can change in an emergency-so what about that climate crisis?
True confessions:  I actually wrote this at the end of February.  I didn't write this in response to the pandemic.  However, the news was changing so fast at that time, nobody had room to run it.  I was supposed to check back in at the end of March. Well, we all know what happened by then...I was at home, home schooling and so was everyone else.  I forgot all about this piece.

I reread it at the beginning of May...and changed about three sentences. (that's about all I have time for, right now!)  It seemed more likely than ever that Canadians could make fast change if the political will was strong enough...so I resubmitted and it went live this morning.

Value of work

This week got lost entirely.  I've only made slow progress on a variety of work fronts--I had some medical appointments, and it's been cold, which makes everything seem harder and more tiring.  Today my article ran in the Jewish Independent (a version also ran in the Jewish Post & News earlier this week):
What is the worth of work?

I think about this often because much of my work -as a writer, designer, maker or mom-- isn't compensated or valued in the ways that society sees as important.  (That is, I don't earn much.)  For instance, I ordered two pairs of wool tights and by the time they came to Canada, I'd paid an awful lot per pair.  (taxes, fees for postage and handling, etc.)  But one pair arrived with a big hole on this seam!  The shop reimbursed me for the pair of tights, which was great.  I was able to mend the hole, and now I have what amounts to a $90 CDN pair of tights--which I got for free, because I know how to mend.  Whew!

I also got to fix three pairs of little boy jeans this week...iron-on patch, and then I use the sewing machine to stitch the holes up as well.  This sort of reuse and repair is nothing new, but it does seem less common among their classmates than I'd expect.  These skills are less common now, and seen as something special or an important statement about the environment.  And yes, I care about the environment, but I also hate to buy new jeans when my kids wear through them this fast!

If you're a spinner, are you going to any spinning retreats?  For the most part, I don't go to these--I have young kids and they need me.  Also, these events are expensive and usually on Shabbat (Friday night to Saturday night.) But they do look like fun!  I was recently asked if I wanted to contribute to a "goody bag" for Plyaway, which is happening in April.  I thought it might be fun to include special coupon codes for my knitting patterns.  

The coupon needed to be in black and white.

So, part of my work this week?  Creating a fun graphic to include on the coupon.  I transformed the photos for the Due North Mittens into something new.  Here were some of the steps along the way.  If you happy to get a coupon in April, you may recognize where it came from!!

A gift for 2020

This piece ran on the CBC-Manitoba website this morning.  I am proud of it--and hope it could come true.

A gift for 2020: Earth for our great-grandchildren

We're having lots of fun at our house, Hanukah started and we are playing, resting, and celebrating.  Hope you are, too!

The bread machine and the dishwasher

Here's my opinion piece on the CBC-Manitoba webpage today about fixing appliances and why we should do it:
Our disposable culture needs a fix that will help our environment, too

In other, less news-worthy news, we are in the midst of a three day weekend which seems to involve a lot of cold, cloudy flurries outdoors, kids playing in front of the fire, dog walks, warming foods, and very occasional chances for me to knit, spin and sew.  (in between meals, snacks, and everything else!)

Repair

Today was "International Repair Day" and while this link is about fixing electronics, it's relevant to my Vancouver Jewish Independent article which came out on Friday.  I called it "Thanks for the earth...buried under plastic."  (So, fixing electronics would be a good start there!)

The CBC Manitoba online also just ran an opinion piece I wrote, and it's called:
When it comes to inclusion for kids with special needs, Manitoba schools need improvement
It sure would be super if we had a quick fix that restored enough funding to the public schools to help them provide the legally mandated 'appropriate education' that kids with challenges need.

--It does seem like everything I'm working on has a "please fix-it" theme, doesn't it?

Finally, if you've been reading the blog a long time, you may remember the Infinity Sweater.

I wrote that blog post in November of 2016, which means my kid has been wearing and loving this sweater for a while now.  He's worn it for two full Manitoba winters (about once a week) and he doesn't want to give it up.  The good news is that the chest still fits him, although it's more fitted now than when he was pictured here, in 2016.  Also good news?  He's grown quite a bit.

So, we're just adding on a couple of inches of "extension" to the sleeves, and we think it probably will last one more winter.  We hope so, anyhow.  "We"= this kid and me.  Today we shopped for matching yarn in my stash, and we found that I'd used up all the dark blue, but we had both other contrasting colors left.  Here's what he chose.

Our temperatures today were right around freezing. (0C, 32F) so we did a lot of playing indoors this afternoon rather than go outside to play.  Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer and we hope to explore a new playground.

Here's a bigger idea of the living room photo shoot for sleeve extensions...complete with the 'fits Victorian houses but is energy efficient' gas fireplace, pouring out warmth into the room.

And here's Sally the dog, staying warm by the fire.  She will be 14 years old (or so) in November!

Here's to another year of the Infinity Sweater!  I am probably never doing that mind-blowing math to make these symbols in stranded knitting on another kid yoke sweater, so let's enjoy it while we've got it....for a third year of wear.  (From age 5-7, so far)  Here's to Slow Fashion October--which in my house, includes lots of repair, and handmade stuff.

Getting their goat...

Here's my newest piece on the CBC:
Getting their goat: Manitoba Hydro could save money, energy with grazing animals

Other good news:
--My friends in Houston, mentioned in the last post, are ok.  Their home didn't flood and they are helping others whose homes have flooded.  I expect everyone in that area of the US will have some hair-raising stories to tell the rest of us.  (Perhaps more people will catch on to climate change now?  That it is a real thing?!)

--We picked some apples locally..but there weren't a lot this year because we had some bad caterpillar problems in the spring that ate many apple trees' blossoms and leaves. Thank you, Aurora Pizzeria, for letting us raid the unpicked apple trees in your patio garden!)

Yesterday, we drove out to Plum Ridge Farm, which is near Teulon, Manitoba.  (about 20 minutes from Gimli)  We came home with a lot of apples, plums, and cucumbers.  To give you an idea of how much?  Well, I've canned 14 pints of pickles (dills and bread & butter) today, about 9 lbs of cukes, but there is still maybe more than 5 lbs left.  We gave away two large bags of apples this morning, some crab apples last night and we still have so many that there is no room in the fridge for it all!  We've made some apple chips and applesauce already.  Chutney, frozen apple slices, and jams will happen too, I hope.

--Putting up food means there is more "fast food" off the shelf when it's cold this winter.  It's easy to make apple crumble, applesauce or pie when the apples are washed, cut up, and ready to go from the freezer.

--It's been hard to do any canning at all with two little boys home, but they will be starting Grade 1 at a new school on Wednesday.  Whew!  Very exciting stuff, but also, I know some guys are sort of nervous, too.  (I get that--I never slept before the first day of school either!)

--In an odd twist, I am not teaching at the Manitoba Fibre Festival this year.  I'd been scheduled to do one workshop, but not enough students signed up.  (too many spinning classes scheduled at once, perhaps?)  Anyhow, it ends up being a relief, because the Professor (aka, the twins' dad) is going to be away that week, so now I can just hang out with my guys.  I love teaching, don't get me wrong, but sometimes things just work out to make things easier, and I cannot complain about that!  Hopefully there will be other times to teach in the future...down the road.

Our air has been a bit smoky from fires burning in Northern Manitoba, and today, we've dodged a few thunderstorms, but we're all remarkably busy and cheerful, considering.  I will miss the warmth of summer but I'm also ready for little boys to be in school again. :)

It's also a little brisk...is it time to make and wear knits again soon?

 Pictured:
The Spire Smock (in Saffron)
Gigadistal (in Variegated blue/periwinkle)
Ploughed Acre Socks 

Why polar fleece isn't as good as real (wool) fleece

Here's a link to my latest CBC piece:

Make green clothing choices to protect Lake Winnipeg from microplastics

Always a bonus-- it has a sheep shearing picture!

Otherwise, we're super busy over here...getting ready for a big holiday, and with kids on vacation, so posts may be few and far between for the next few weeks.  We'll just have to see how it goes!  Wishing you lots of wonderful spring holidays/events with your family, too!

Additions and deletions

So, I think the whole #slowfashionoctober movement has passed me by, because I'm not on instagram.  I'm a bit retro: when we moved to Canada, we didn't get cell phones here, and I eventually gave up on the US one I had.  I haven't kept up with the smartphone, texting, selfie stuff that I see people doing all around me.

In fact, I found it to be a relief.  We don't get a lot of phone calls and to be honest, I don't miss it, mostly.  Life with twins and two dogs is noisy.  I don't think I always have to be available--and juggling the folks in my household takes all of my attention a lot of the time.  Truthfully, the only time I really thought I should have a phone was back in the spring time, when I had my little surprise trip to the ER and was too sick to use one myself anyhow.

Although I have dropped in on the instagram conversation as a lurker, I realized I wasn't debating things in the way others have.  I haven't been wondering how I could make all my own t-shirts, or spelling out the origins of every piece of fabric or yarn in my stash.  I haven't sworn off anything much, either.  On the other hand, I don't buy a lot new in the first place.

My only recent purchases have been out of necessity.  I bought another pair of All Birds Wool sneakers when I visited the US.  They are all wool and biodegradable materials, and I have fallen in love with how comfortable they are...and since I am not really up for making my own shoes right now, I'll settle for an ethically made pair, ready for next spring, summer and fall, instead. (winter time in Winnipeg = boots from November to April)

Then, I had (gasp) an underwire pop out of one of those essential female undergarments.  I was down to way too few of those anyway, and had to go to The Bay and check out their lingerie sale.  Now, I think I bought all of "last year's models" and saved a lot of money.  Were all those bras and pairs of underwear made in a place with good working conditions?  With a decent minimum wage?  I just don't know...but Rome wasn't built in a day.  I have to take a middle path about this.  There's no way I'll have time to figure out how to make underwear this month.  It's just not in the schedule.

This month, as usual, I've fixed lots of things.  I mended and patched many pairs of little boy pants.  I knit up an extension on this sweater.  Instead of cutting off the old ribbing, I left it in place, picked up stitches right above it, and knit down.  Luckily, I had matching yarn left over, although I have a feeling the kid in question would have been fine with contrasting yarn, if that were on offer!

I debated cutting off the ribbing at the end, but felt it was risky.  This kid is narrow in the hips, so instead, I just basted down the ribbing on the inside, and it forms a double layer band towards the bottom of the sweater.  It looks tidy enough on the inside.

Now, in this action shot, over a hand me down polar fleece, if you undo the sleeve cuffs, you can see there is still room to grow this season, and the sweater has already been in action again...worn out and about.

The kid in question is pleased as punch to have his sweater back.

I haven't done as much writing about Slow Fashion this month as I had intended.  However, maybe I have some excuses to fall back on.  Pre-twins, I did write a whole book about this back in 2009.  You know, about making ethical and green choices when it came to choosing knitting yarns and textiles in general...Knit Green.

I also realize that while I may not be snapping so many perfectly staged photos, I am indeed spending those moments trying to mend, recycle, reuse, and maximize what we've got at home when it comes to clothing.  Yesterday, I showed someone the knitting in my purse.  It's the sleeve to one twin's fall sweater (each kid gets one handknit sweater a year, if I can manage it) and one half of a handknit kid's sock.  It's all from my stash--no new yarn purchases.  I'm still trying, one stitch at a time, to make things from scratch in a responsible way.

Today, in other activities: I've made 3 loaves of challah, one loaf of banana chocolate chip bread, pureed the soup (and froze some) that I cooked yesterday, put chicken and potatoes into the slow cooker, got my freezer lamb for the year delivered, dealt with another house upkeep issue, and submitted an article on a deadline to an editor.  You know, nothing much... there's still time to fit in a little more mending and knitting, I hope! (and all before I pick up boys from kindergarten, too...)

Priorities

I planned to write lots about slow fashion in October, but we took a big family trip east to see relatives in NYC and Virginia (near DC) and we only got home yesterday. (Priorities here: family travels overruled all blog posts and computer time)

All went smoothly, and I think our twins mostly had a great time.  ...We had one 'throw up on Mommy on the airplane incident' but luckily, I had a change of clothes for everybody with me.  You know, par for the course when travelling with a couple of five year olds...

So, here are a few things to catch up:
Here's my latest piece on the CBC, which ran while we were travelling.  It is (surprise!) about priorities...educational ones.  How do we decide which students get priority?  Why do some misdeeds related to stealing intellectual property get seriously penalized while others are ignored?

International students pay more, get less at University of Manitoba

Also a matter of priorities...how do you know when to salvage something, how to mend it, and when to give up?

This is a mending job I did recently on a beloved quilt.  It belongs to one of my twins, it was handmade for him and has his name quilted right into it!  However, some of the stitching came out.  So, I made a very obvious repair.  I used matching embroidery floss and stitched it a bit like a crazy quilt, so that it was clear what I was doing.  I knew I couldn't make the repair invisibly, so instead, I fixed it like I meant it--in the tradition of meaningful mending that makes beloved textiles last a long time.

By contrast, I've developed a "two time and you're out" method when it comes to kids' pants.  I started by using cloth wipes left over from our cloth diapering days.  These are clean bits of well-used fabric, I hemmed and stitched them across knees as necessary.

Here is the backside of the pair of pants...as you can see, the stitching is not fancy.

Then, as the patches loosened, I went with iron-on patches on the back and front to keep the patch in place longer.  The patches are random; I bought a big bag of them, so I don't always choose a perfect match.  (at this point though, the priority is to keep the pants in circulation, so I don't focus on high fashion!)

After a few more wearings, this may or may not last..we may have to re-use this in the rag bag soon.  While visiting my family, my dad kindly did a third mending/repair job on two pairs of trousers that were worn hard and re-torn while playing at playgrounds.  We have a history of fixing things when they break, and having help on this was really a nice respite!  (This trip was a tour of living rooms, backyards, playgrounds, gardens, and a synagogue, for the most part; no major site-seeing despite the big city locations.)

The thing that I focus on when it comes to Slow Fashion (or how educational institutions work) is this:  What are one's priorities?  What is most important here?  Do we need to waste time or money unnecessarily?  How can we put people's needs first? Can we optimize conditions to re-use, recycle, or learn to make good use of new material to meet the needs of both people and the environment?

Those needs can be basic (food, water, housing) or a little more advanced (higher education tuition, registration, etc.) but it all comes to how we prioritize.  We need to use our ethical and moral values in the mix.  Let's not throw things out unnecessarily- but people's needs (and the environment) come first in the equation to maximize long usage of things into the future.  At least, that's how I hope it works in my house.  What do you hope for?

...that other book

In the last day or two, a new book on sustainability issues and knitting has been released. It is published by a well known company that I've written articles for quite a bit, and even a design or two. The book is written with an anthology approach, with essays by well-known people in the knitting world and top-notch designer contributions.

All of this is ok--because one of my goals in writing a book about conservation, sustainability, and "greener" choices for knitters was to help more people think about their choices. In fact, when I heard about this book--maybe a year ago--I tried to be positive about it. I figured that our books wouldn't be the same...and as best I can tell (I haven't read that other book cover to cover yet) they aren't. My book has more information in it rather than personal essays. My book has a variety of designs from easy to intermediate, and likely has some projects in it that are better for the beginner knitter. So, while famous people contributed to that other book, their contents weren't the same. Things like that made the books look different, as best I could tell.

Except for the titles. You see, book titles don't have to be copyrighted, and they are essentially chosen by committee. For my books, I created a long list of titles I could live with, and in each case, the publisher chose one of those titles with a group consensus. I assume the publisher researched those titles, and I googled every single one of them to be sure I wasn't stepping on anyone's toes. That's fine...I assumed that was just good manners.

A lot of friends have recently discovered this other book because of all the publicity around its release. They immediately email me or call me to complain. Couldn't this other book have chosen a different title? Couldn't they have been a bit more careful? ...and yes, I have wondered these things myself, although I've known about this book for a while.

In fact, back in the "olden days" of publishing, there likely would have been lawyers involved, and a last minute name change, and all sorts of efforts to avoid this situation. However, in today's whirlwind publishing world, with issues of free download piracy and ever more books being released ever faster, maybe that isn't possible. To be clear about confusion, it is the kind of situation where two books are published within 8 months of one another. The only difference in their titles is an "ing." Luckily, the subtitles are different too.

I won't lie. My own personal green monster--the jealous, angry, frustrated one--has come visiting. I feel pretty annoyed, because my book came out first and yet I cannot do a thing to defend its title. I suppose this is only natural, and I'm trying hard to keep my chartreuse buddy under wraps and get her to go back into her lair.

However, I also see two positive end results. First is an unintended one. That other book? The new book? Its title is close enough to mine...Knit Green: 20 Projects and Ideas for Sustainability that it's briefly driving up sales of my book. That is, people look up those words "Knitting" and "Green" online and they find my book, too. Hopefully, they find something of value in it, and they purchase it. So, in that sense, I have to be grateful for the inadvertent free publicity...which I'm sure that other publishing company hadn't planned on. Thank you.

Second though, and most important, is the bigger issue. If more people write appealing books about environmental issues, more readers might buy them. If you own a book about sustainability, you just might read it. Then, you might think about the issues, and do a thing or two about conserving our planet's resources. Although personally I'd love to sell more books (or ebooks) and maybe even make a living, on a bigger level, it's more about learning about the earth. It's about making a difference in the world and keeping our knitting -and our lives- eco-friendly. That's important stuff... Stuff I also care about.

In honor of Earth Day, I've been invited to give a talk tomorrow, April 22nd, in Winnipeg. I'll be speaking at the Millennium Library downtown at 7 pm. The Manitoba Craft Museum and Library is hosting this gig, and artists and crafters will be selling art made from recycled materials before the lecture. The Museum will be selling my books, too, and appreciates any donations you can make to support their mission. After the lecture, I'll hang around to answer questions, sign books, and visit. There will be a trunk show, with samples from the book on display for everyone to touch and see.

If you're local, I hope you can come! I look forward to seeing you there! If not...please feel free to join me in the comments below.

If you're one of those people who contacted me about that other book and its title, I really appreciate your concern and commiseration. I have felt a bit rough round the edges. Still, I think if we can all visit with our personal monsters occasionally--letting them out from under the bed or opening up those closets...we find in the light of day that this is not the scariest thing, or at least not as scary as we'd thought it to be.

Losing glaciers, polar bears, low lying islands? Extinctions or natural disasters? Maybe more of an issue in the long run.

Please join me--wherever you are-- in celebrating and honoring Earth Day 2010.