Being your better self

Here's my latest piece from the Jewish Independent in Vancouver--this piece also appeared in a Winnipeg paper.  It's about rough days, and...well, donkeys, of course:

It takes work to be your better self

Other news...we've been very busy with summer here.  Summer camp, wading pools (with slides!), picking strawberries and canning strawberry jam, checking out cool bugs, rabbits, and other important long walk, digging outside, planting, gardening, digging... hot weather activities.

I've also been busy on a secret project--a new design to be released as part of the Manitoba Fibre Festival "flatlands collection" which will be available soon on Ravelry!  Stay tuned for sneak peeks...it's all about handspun flax, subtle handknit textures, and more..

High Fashion

 On Thursday night, March 16th,my design, the Spire Smock, from Knit Green will be featured in the Reel Green fashion show as part of a collaboration with the Manitoba Fibre Festival.  I think the sweater will be keeping a mannequin warm...but it's hitting a fashion runway, nevertheless!

When I handed the sweater sample over today, a knitter saw it and inquired...and the great thing is that you too can have a sweater like this one!  The pattern's available. :)  (and you don't have to do it in orange if that isn't your color, of course....)

At home, I'm featuring another fiber entirely.  I purchased this tow flax roving at the Manitoba Fibre Festival from Taproot Fibre Lab.  I've had it waiting patiently for quite a while, but just couple of weeks ago, I began to spin it.  I'm almost finished with the first 100 g bag.

I love it!  It's delicious to spin, and I cannot wait to do more.  It is a great departure from wool, and is offering me a very gentle start after a while when I wasn't managing any spinning at all.  (Note: Despite what my spinning teacher taught me 30+ years ago, you can start and stop when spinning linen.  No problem...and if this were really a serious issue, well, historically, women with small children would never have spun any linen)

Last but not least, I came upon a very nice image of the Due North Mittens over here on Instagram, knit beautifully by thewolfandtheblacksmithswife.  Lovely mitts!  I hope they are keeping someone toasty.

7.5 hours in the car--with twins

We went off grid.  Away for the August long weekend...(Canadians have a holiday August 3) and travelled to see a friend at his family cottage in Minnesota.  It was billed as a 4.5 hour trip by the directions that the Professor printed out.  Our friend said, well---maybe up to 6 hours.  It was 7.5 hours -- each way...with four year old twins.  In between multiple interruptions, I did some knitting on the Turkish Lace Camisole while the Professor drove.

What was the delay?  Road construction, a little line up at the border crossing, and about 50 billion pit stops.  We had to visit every rest area and water every tree and plant between here and Minnesota...and a second time on the way home.  No kidding.  However, I am the first to proudly say: we had no accidents in the car!

Meanwhile, while away from the Internet for the first time in eons, the CBC published my opinion piece.  Due to the holiday weekend, I'm not sure many people read it, but it's live here:

Environment Canada air quality system needs a megaphone

Although the skies here are now clear, this has been a terrible forest fire season--and Canada does not have nearly the air quality alert system (or the weather warning system) that the US has.  I was reminded of this when we were alerted by weather radio, early Sunday morning, to a big storm near the lake cottage where we visited.  This is something the US is doing very well!  Maybe Environment Canada/Provincial/local governments/health care systems can learn from it.

I wanted to share fun lake photos of boys digging, but the Professor (and possibly his camera) have now rushed off to a conference at UC-Berkeley.  Here's a brief description I wrote, in part, to a friend earlier today:

We just returned from our friend's family cottage in northern Minnnesota.  It was gorgeous in terms of location and really a fascinating old family retreat, full of family treasures dating back over 100 years.  (Including working pump organ, hymnals from 1908, and other amazing handmade woven, braided, quilted, rug hooked, wood working treasures.)  Downside is that a 320 mile trip took 7.5 hours each way because of construction, border crossing, and two boys who needed to make a ton of bathroom and food breaks.  It was a very long trip! We stopped by the road and watered the plants many times between Winnipeg and Ottertail, MN. I also saw the inside of every single rest stop.

We really enjoyed seeing our friend though and the boys spent many happy hours digging into the sand, wading in the water, taking a boat ride, and checking out the cottage and lakeside wildlife.  

There is nothing like rushing out to see a blue heron on the dock at 6:45 AM!  Well, maybe playing with minnows in a bucket (a close second) and watching all the water come alive in a temporary lake water aquarium in the cottage living room... 

That...and s'mores.  The boys had s'mores for the first time this trip, and it clearly was an enormous hit. :)
Hopefully, I can share a photo or two sometime soon.  

In the meanwhile, Happy August!

A summer camisole

It has been a super long time since I've knit this camisole.  I just checked my files, and I think I designed this as "lace camisole" for Knit Picks in 2006, when they had just started their design program.  They asked me to use a novelty yarn, which resulted in a red camisole and a neon yellow/green one.  Then, when the copyright reverted to me, I released it on Ravelry as the Turkish Lace Camisole.

I seemed to remember it as a quick, satisfying knit...and bear in mind, 4+ years without sleep means I can't remember much of anything!  So, when I happened upon some lovely linen yarn at a local yarn shop's sidewalk sale, I decided to give it ago.

I've started a knit-along in my Ravelry group in case anyone wants to join me for a relaxing knit and summer chat session...but for now, I'm finding it delightfully airy, cool, and fast.  Who knows?  I might even get to wear it a couple times at the end of the summer, if summer hangs on long enough in Winnipeg!

In other news, I'm canning.  So far?  Apricot, Nanking Cherry, and Blueberry-Plum-Vanilla jams.  I'm hoping to fit in some pickles, salsa, and chutney later on.  As the summer progresses, I'll be doing more chasing of twins, as we don't have much childcare scheduled...so all bets are off as to how much will actually happen!  We might have to go to the wading pool instead...and I might have to wear a new cover up.

crush

The Professor is lucky.  I'd have to say that I encounter few people that actually turn my head these days.  (Yup, nearly 16 years of marriage and counting...)

I cannot say the same about yarn.  I occasionally get a crush.  Sometimes, the crush is totally fulfilled and runs its course.  Icelandic yarn, while I will always love you, while I will return back to you, I'll have to say that my crush is over for now.  I spent this entire winter knitting SOMETHING out of Lopi.  I made a bathmat, two women's sweaters and two little boy sweaters.  Most, if not all of that knitting happened while the boys watched their 20-40 minutes of Sesame Street, Caillou, Thomas, Busytown, or Curious George in the evenings while drinking their bedtime milk.  (We have recently started watching Clifford, it is a thrilling alternative.)  I sit nearby and knit as fast as I can.  Any more complicated knitting happens around nap or night time, and I am usually denying myself sleep to do it.

Recently, I bumped into this pattern on Ravelry.  Then I looked over the whole ebook: Kestrel and I swooned.  A whole lot of Pam Allen designs, and I am a great fan of her work.  Then....only then, I allowed myself to wander over to her yarn company's website--Quince & Co. and looked around.  Another SWOON.  That yarn, Kestrel, is made out of Belgian organic linen.  (Quick, stop yourself before you cruise around to the other yarns.  You could go bankrupt.)

I am on a strict yarn diet.  First off, my stash just about insulates our house.  Second, I knit much less than I used to, before twins....I just don't have time.  Third...shipping anything to Canada is a drag, the postage is expensive, it takes forever, and we are erratically charged duty on weird stuff.  (The latest weirdness?  Secondhand cloth diapers from the UK.  Yes, they were spotlessly clean...but USED NAPPIES?  Really?  We owe money on that baby/kid necessity?!)

Anyway, all that has kept me from buying out Brooklyn Tweed or Harrisville's new yarn, Watershed.  I've even looked at the Irish, UK and Icelandic sites, as we seem to have less problem shipping from there than from the US...

You'll note that there is not a single photo in this post.  This way, if you do not feel the urge to fall in love, to look at yarn p*rn, to covet, you don't have to.  Now you know what I do when I am faced with hours of mindless child-related clean up, or when I am up AGAIN in the middle of the night.  I dream of yarn, of course.

(I'm knitting with this Canadian yarn right now, and it's just about taking the edge off.  The strong woolly odor of spinning oil and fleece does it.  Ahhh.  For now.)

PS:  Trust me, no one is paying me a dime to promote or link to their yarns.  Not even a skein.  I'm just, well, crushing too much to hold it in.

whip up cool summer

A few days ago, a friend emailed me and said, "Have you seen this?" Whipup.net reviewed Knit Green! Lucky me, having friends to tell me this, since I obviously missed this and had my head stuck in the ground like an ostrich or something. How exciting!

I'm not sorry I've missed the heat waves that have tormented my family in Virginia and the Professor's family in NYC. Winnipeg is having a warm day today. It's 30C (86F). Granted, we don't have air conditioning, but I'm not complaining...in fact, when I have a moment, I'm enjoying the warm (but not very warm) summer weather here!

Free moments are hard to come by. I'm participating in an outdoor exhibit this summer called Craft on the Loose. In theory, this is a really fabulous concept. In practice, I had to come up with something to hang out of doors in rain or sun and create it fast. I managed to get my loom warped just a little more than a week ago. I whipped up this rug to be hung up or laced up wherever the exhibit curators prefer. Here's what the tag that goes with it will say:
Please feel free to touch this rug, made from a torn old bedspread and an old white sheet! This “new” woven rug will give many more years of life to these worn-out textiles.

Joanne Seiff is a fiber artist who works with locally sourced, recycled or naturally produced materials whenever possible. She spins, weaves, knits, and dyes her pieces. Seiff feels it’s important to make and delight in using beautiful handmade things in our daily lives. This rug, created entirely out of recycled or mill end materials, will sit on a floor in Winnipeg one day soon for many bare feet to enjoy.

The Professor summarized it as: "You sure do know how to make something out of nothing!"
It still needs to be washed and finished but that was one quick project. Note: I know the stripes are uneven in width. That is ok with me. I'm a bit uneven in places myself!

At the same time, I am about to finish teaching the first section of my "Technical Writing for Graduate Students" class. I am scheduled to start teaching another section (4 days a week) in August. I suggested the students bring homemade awards to thank each other, as we've done a lot of hard collaborative editing work and I wanted them to acknowledge their classmates' work. It was a whimsical idea for some very serious students. It turned out I got awards too! Here's a handmade crown, from one of my students and her young son.

My favorite part of the crown is this sentence:
"Thank you...for helping me to like to write!"
(A miracle, actually, because this section mainly consisted of Engineering graduate students... and very few of them liked to write at the beginning of this class, I suspect.)


As part of my recent celebration of "cool" textures and ideas, I went wild and took two linen pillow cases out of their wrapping. I've had these brand new pillow cases since I went to Ireland with the Professor. I think we went in 2005. I bought linen textiles for everyone in the family then, but never actually used my own! The pillow cases have careful white on white embroidery on them and their crisp texture really appealed to me when I made the bed. I imagined laying down my head to sleep on this on warm nights.

It's hard to catch a catch a photo of what linen feels like. It will soften and age over the years, and now that I've finally decided to use these things, I can't wait to see how soft they will become.

Do you have linen in use at home? Do you save purchases for way too long before deciding to go ahead and enjoy them? Say hi. Leave a note. :)