There will be a candelight vigil to honor Robert Busby outside the Creole Gallery tonight (Turner Street near North Grand River in Old Town, Lansing) at dusk. Sunset is 6:26 so I will get there maybe 5:45 or 6pm. I expect it will be hard to find parking (it sounds like they will be closing off Turner Street), so plan ahead.

For those interested, there has been an update on the Lansing State Journal website to this story. More tragedy, but perhaps the hint of an answer. (There was yet another update to that same story around mid-afternoon with more answers.)

The State Journal is doing a good job of updating this story in near-real-time, check their online front page for related stories and comments. The seven photos of Robert, Meegan and the gallery on this page brought tears to my eyes. You can see his peaceful strength in every photo.

I am sorry to interrupt this usually-optimistic blog with a discouraging post. I will be back again with color and cheer but this post must be written.

Robert Busby, owner of Creole Gallery in Lansing, Michigan, was found dead in his building Tuesday. This is too sad for words.

I have known Robert for 20 years. He was one of the classiest, kindest human beings I have ever known. He would go out of his way to greet everyone, and then he would ask thoughtful questions of us all. He would absolutely listen to each reply, never letting his eyes wander.

Sometimes I would go home and realize I never asked him anything in return… he had me answering questions about my own projects. He authentically wished to understand my work, and there was no conversation lag where I might have asked him a few things.

Robert was often called “The Mayor of Old Town” although there really was no such position. Nobody denied his leadership but he never raised his voice and never pushed, never bullied: a pure gentleman. I just loved being in the same room with him, even when he was talking with someone else.

Robert was one of the first to pioneer the renaissance which has happened in that corner of my city. I knew him first (in 1987) through his involvement with Two Doors Down Gallery and after that Otherwise Gallery and currently Creole Gallery… where he arranged the art exhibits and Meegan Holland arranges the concerts. Brian and I have opened for three concerts there over the years.

It is a place where wonderful people gather, where art (visual and performance/music) blossom and thrive. It is a place for community, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

My favorite story about Robert is when a mutual friend had moved out of town. She came back to Lansing and wanted to see Robert. He was not where she expected him to be. So she walked up and down Turner Street and Grand River Ave., calling out loud “Robert, where are you?” I don’t remember if she found him that way or not… but it is as likely as anything that she did. (The photo is Turner Street, the largest red brick building houses the Creole.)

Robert, may you rest in peace.

The weather here is crummy. The sky is gray, it’s cold and wet, and there has been snow off and on for a while. It’s pretty big flakes but it would be easy to get down about it if I did not make distractions for myself.

I spent Monday morning singing Annette Hanshaw’s version of “Loveable and Sweet,” for hours. (This is a 1920’s pop/early jazz song by my favorite singer of the era.)

I just put the song on repeat and kept singing it. (I’m trying to learn the words so I can perform it. I just learn best when I repeat a zillion times… and I love the song so I don’t get tired of it at all.) The best line? “He’s candy!” I could not have a bad mood listening to Annette no matter how gray it was outside.

Then I went to my post office box. Wowie! The Kristi Comfort Wrap Diana offered to knit for me arrived. Oh. My. Incredible. Not a bit of gray in any one of these yarns, I’d say. Total intensity heaven for this ColorJoy fanatic. I like colors high on the intensity/saturation scale (in art class they called this “high chroma”). The lower the chroma, the more gray or black in the color… the higher the chroma the less gray and the more “fluorescent” it looks. This wrap is very close to fluorescent.

I got to choose the yarns, and Diana knit. I feel so loved. It is around my shoulders as I type this. It is SO warm and SO colorful and SO soft! It’s like a hug, which is just what I intended when I knit the first one of these for Kristi. I never imagined I would get hugged back by a later version of the same design.

I once more chose Nashua Creative Focus wool/alpaca worsted as my base yarn. I chose ten knit-alongs in all (alternating two of them where I didn’t have enough to finish a stole with just that yarn). There is mohair, alpaca, angora, merino wool, and sockyarn in here, and even one handspun singles which I spun myself, from merino/silk.

The colors in the stole are totally ColorJoy, in the truest sense. The range goes from the bluest of purples through hot purple, and fuschia/hot pink. On the other side of the spectrum I have turquoises from bluish to greenish, deep to light, (including the aqua I used for the background color in my intarsia knitted self-portrait last summer). And there are two sockyarns with blues, grass green, and one with hot spring green as a “pop” to wake up the rest of the colors.

I can not explain how much I love this stole. Thank you, Diana!
I had to go straight to teach computer class from the post office, pretty much. (There was much interest in my stole from my students, of course.) On the way home from the classes I stopped at a kitchen store, trying to find a certain baking pan which they did not have.

However, they had a clearance table of dinnerware. I took home four small plates, in sunny-side-up yellow. They are so cheerful!

Most of my dishes are a medium-to-light turquoise/aqua color, but I have had this set for about 15 years and more than half of the small plates are broken. It makes me very sad. However, now I have these yellow plates to make me smile and that really makes a difference. (The Fiesta bowl in the photo is the only turquoise Fiestaware I own, but it is the same color as my main set of dishes.)

Oh… the middle photo? Tuesday in a mood of total optimism, I purchased Morning Glory seeds. I’m not much of a gardener but my friend Ulyana gave me some of these one year and they were really pretty and did fairly well in my crummy soil. The seeds need to be planted one to two weeks before the final frost. I *love* that idea!

The weekend I went to the knitting guild retreat, I learned from my friend Rae how to knit a moebius strip (a tube with one half twist in it, Cat Bordhi has written two books on this). I knit all afternoon and evening finishing the moebius I started that day.

I have never been particularly interested in this sort of knitting. I find the scientific discussion of the moebius very interesting, and I love making them out of paper and showing kids about their “magical” properties. I just never wanted to knit one, it seemed sort of messy-looking.

I don’t know why a moebius seems messy yet I adore Sally Melville’s Best Friend Jacket/Vest (which has a three-part asymmetrical hemline). Since when do humans make sense, anyway? I’m thinking in this case that I have a tendency to like geometric shapes like triangles more than flowing and organic shapes, but then again there may be more to it.
But a moebius seemed a sort of perfect thing for my beloved Diana. She’s more mystical than I am, more able to take things for what they are than I. I like to think I’m airy-fairy but in fact that is true only in some areas of my life. Diana is more accepting of natural disorder than I am, I think.

For whatever reason… I determined that for most of a day (on retreat) I would knit for Diana. She knits for me, hours and hours and hours and days each week, most weeks. She will rip out and do it over if need be.

She doesn’t complain and she allows me to merely send her lovely yarns in payment. I would love to give her a paycheck but we both know this would be impossible in my current business structure… and she’s OK with this arrangement. In fact, she suggested this arrangement in the first place, and she keeps calling me, asking what else she can knit for me. I’m OK if this changes someday but I sure am getting a lot more done for my business right now with her help!!!

So at the retreat I cast on some dark purple Nashua Creative Focus worsted wool/alpaca in what I thought would be a single-wrap cowl for Diana. I bound off with an attached I-cord using Louisa Harding Impression yarn which Diana loves (it’s a knit nylon ribbon with a soft baby mohair fuzz attached to it, really lovely). The bind off was more than 750 stitches but it seemed the right ending.

And when I took it off the needles, it was half as wide and twice as long as I had expected. I was *very* disappointed at first. I blocked it anyway, and worked in the ends. And took it to Rae’s shop to pout a little.

Then Rae showed me that I could wrap it twice to make it look about the size I had expected in the first place. It would be more warm, every bit as soft and perhaps more beautiful with more of the colorful edges showing.

I sent it to Diana (not telling her I had misgivings). She called me the next day to tell me that she was wearing it wrapped around her head, soft and warm, and she loved it. Of course, I did tell her the story eventually but that was after I allowed her to love it just the way it was.

Sometimes luck goes my way. Whew!

I started to write a blog entry about the yarn I put up for sale on my shopping cart last night around 3am. It’s 11am and it just sold. Thank you guys for being such great supporters of my work. It means the world to me.

Fortunately for those who are tuning in just now, I also put up four offerings of polymer clay buttons. Two are sets of matching buttons and two are individual smaller buttons that might be good on a purse or maybe one of those one-button sweaters or capelets. Three of the four have coloring that sort of tricks the eye into thinking that they have more colors in them than they do. This means they go with a lot of colors of yarn, a very good thing. They “go” without having to match. Cool.

I expect a busy day teaching computer classes today and I am making a custom order tonight for a special friend, but for the record the next thing that I will be putting up on my shopping cart will be “oddballs.” This is mostly short skeins, mostly of my Tiptoe sockyarn, though I think there are also a few small oddballs also of my Cushy ColorSport DK washable/dryable merino.

Occasionally an oddball is an unusual yarn I rarely offer (typically an experiment of some sort) but usually they are just skeins that are shorter than my standard size. They can be good for contrasting toes and heels, or for baby items, or just to see if you like how my yarn knits up. For whatever reason, I seem to not be able to keep oddballs in stock. As soon as I process the photos I will have more on the cart.

If you want to be among the first to know when I put up new things (as clearly my customer this morning did), you can go to my shopping cart and sign up as a customer. When you do that, you can check the box for “global notification” which will let you know if I have added new merchandise. You can also sign up for shop newsletters (I haven’t sent one yet but plan to use this feature occasionally.) Or not, your choice!

Thank all of you for being so loyal and supportive. Without you I would not be able to make this humble living as an artist. I do not take this for granted.

Photos: Three of the four button offerings available as I write this, and the Lynnabelle Cushy ColorSport DK yarn that sold in merely 8 morning hours.

Aaaah… Diana did it again! I wrote the pattern (for my Watercolor Bag), picked the yarn, sent it to her, and she sent me back a knitted item. I felted it (we’re a great team), sewed in the handle, and delivered it to Threadbear, where I bought the yarn. This new bag is on display at the shop as I type this.

The yarn is Autunno from diVe’ (you can see it on the Cascade Yarns website if you click that link). This is one fabulous yarn! It’s a worsted-weight “singles” (one ply, though yarn people say there is officially no such thing as a one ply… sort of like there’s no “first annual” event, only a second annual event, maybe). Anyway, it’s a soft lovely 100% merino yarn which comes in heathered solids and slowly-changing colorways.

I have made ribbed legwarmers with this stuff (really warm). Mine of course were the gray-to-turquoise colorway. This bag has solid handles and bottom made of Cascade 220 in a sort of dark chocolate heather (almost some purple in there). There are three slowly-changing colorways in this bag, the bottom is the gray/turquoise 48162, the middle is turquoise to sunset-gold, which I think is 25741, and the top is a gold to soft mocha (and I can not tell what colorway that one is by looking at the color cards on the Cascade site).

This yarn felts beautifully, and much faster than the Noro Kureyon I used when I first designed it. The fabric is ultra-soft, like a kitten.

For those in town, I am teaching this bag at Threadbear (Lansing, MI) soon. The sessions are two weeks apart… March 18 and April 1, both Sundays from 1:30 to 3:30pm. Cost is $25 plus materials… and since it’s a pretty small project and the yarn is not doubled, it only requires a pattern, four balls of yarn and needles you may already own.

Photos: My Watercolor Bag in diVe’ Autunno, currently on display at Threadbear Fiberarts; and my first Watercolor Bag (knit from three colorways of Noro Kureyon and a solid Cascade 220), currently on display at Yarn Garden in Charlotte, Michigan.

In Michigan we are all weary of snow and cold by now. Many of us are down or grumpy or both. Diana, my sister-in-love, has posted today and yesterday in defiance of the blues.

Today she posted garden photos. She is a gardener, and the person I call when I want to know anything about herbs or food plants. Her flowers are wonderful, as well… and she takes great photos of her flowers. Today is a veritable bouquet of flower photos on Otterwise, Diana’s blog.

Yesterday was a different sort of comfort. A recipe! Forty-Clove Chicken Thighs with Lemon Rice. That is, garlic and chicken and more garlic, and some marjoram (you could probably sub oregano if you didn’t have marjoram). It sounds easy (the rice sounds simple as well)… and garlic is definitely comfort food during winter.
Thanks for the uplifting posts, Diana!

This is incredible… on YouTube.com, from the movie Stormy Weather. Jumpin Jive with Cab Calloway (music) and The Nicholas Brothers (dance). It’s musical, artful, athletic. I find it hard to believe my own eyes.

We listened (also on Youtube) to an interview with one of the brothers from just a few years ago. He said they did it (at least that final staircase sequence) in just one take. Amazing.

My Brian is playing during dinner hour at Altu’s Ethiopian Cuisine in East Lansing, MI tonight (Saturday, February 24). The show is 6:30-8:30. You can get a map to Altu’s on her website.

Brian used to do solo performances often enough that I learned about who he was, listening to him play. I loved those old songs he played, and though I was not looking for a partner I always made sure to get to his concerts whenever I saw them announced in the local papers.

Now that we’re The Fabulous Heftones as a couple, he almost never does solo performances. It’s sort of too bad, because the man is an encyclopedia of songs and I know only the tiniest percentage of the music he can play off the top of his head. I mostly know love songs, though I’m working on expanding to jazzy numbers. He does original instrumentals, dance tunes from the turn of the century, rags and marches, jug band music, old timey music (written for fiddle), bluegrass banjo, and more novelty/humor than can fit in two hours.

I am looking forward to “Java Jive” (a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!… was used for Maxwell House coffee commercials if I remember right). Do consider joining us.

When I get grumpy the best thing I can do is write a list of things I am grateful for… so here it goes:

• My dishwasher! (Also my clothes washer/dryer.)
• The February thaw we have had for a few days.
• My beloved who somehow loves me even when I’m grumpy.
• Sweet potatoes (see photo).
• Great friends, some of whom are also the owners of yarn shops where I teach.
• My “job” which is really a few dozen jobs rolled into one (I never get bored).
• All of you who have read this blog, purchased any pattern from me, any yarn, any class, any anything… creating income that helps me continue to make a living as an artist/instructor.
• My car (see photo).
• My Heftone Bass, a gift from my father in law who invented and built it himself.
• Two ukuleles I bought for myself… one pistachio green “Flea” and one turquoise “Fluke” (I don’t play them well but I am delighted with them, and never really wanted one before ukes came in colors other than brown). (see photo)
• My singing career with Brian, another part of making a living as an artist.
• Foods which I love and which nurture me and make me happy (especially Teff muffins (see photo), baked sweet potatoes and oven-roasted rutabaga fries… really).
• Yarn, good needles, knitting.
• My gizmos: laptop, two cameras, cell phone, MP3 player, stereos in car and office and dyeing studio.
• My fiber tools: spinning wheel, swift, ballwinder, skeinwinder, and its new yardage counter.
• A house big enough to (almost) hold a one-woman art business, including a basement in which to dye yarn… small for Lansing but it would be luxurious if we lived in NYC and I know it.
• Color. Lots and lots of color, the brighter the better. This ncludes my clothing, my dishes, anything I can embellish with more color including our house.
• The sunshine we have seen in this town in the last week.

Thursday I wrote a really long post, published it to the web for a short while, then took it down. I decided not to pass my less than cheery thoughts to you.

I had two difficult days in a row with young people (Wednesday and Thursday). Mind you, in my classroom all was in order.

It was busier and noisier than usual because I had at one point a dozen knitters (8 boys and 4 girls) and two computer kids. They still honored my rules and observed the usual level of politeness (pretty good with a few lessons in boundary-setting thrown in at times).

However, in the building (outside my room, in fact just exactly outside my door) several times I had to deal with difficult situations. They could have impacted the serenity inside my room. I handled it well, in my estimation. My group of knitters grew because of my actions, in an odd turn of events.

Name-calling and teasing are not allowed, you know. There are reasons we have rules of this sort! I had to enforce these things more often (and more forcefully) than usual and it made me sad.

March is a grumpy month. It feels like we all (including myself) got there too soon this year.

My Shopping Cart is now updated with all of my new full-sized skeins of Tiptoe Sock Yarn. I made 7 colorways this time, with anywhere from 1 to 8 skeins in each colorway.

Sometime here in the next week I will be posting some short “oddball” skeins in solid colors (I imagine these for contrasting heels/toes or baby booties, or maybe just as a way for you to see if you like the feel of my yarn). I also hope to post a few polymer clay buttons.

The colors in the photo above are not as true as the photos on the shopping cart. Well, the almost-solids (flammegarns) are fairly close, it is the multicolors that are a challenge. As a colorist, I find the limitations of the web somewhat limiting. No photos (web or print) can show the billions of colors our eyes can see in good light. I work very hard on correcting the web colors as closely as possible. I get excellent feedback from folks when they do receive their yarn.

As always, I totally guarantee you will love the color when it arrives. For the record, I’ve never had to take a return on anything. Folks usually like the colors more when they get the package… but I still stand behind that promise.

I have had a small run on my yarn in the last 24 hours, which delights me. (I am thinking that the folks buying in the last 24 hours had signed up for “global notification” if I changed/added anything to my cart. I don’t know why else they would have known that things were happening since I had not announced it anywhere.)

The shopping cart will tell you how many of each colorway are in stock, and it will stop displaying a yarn if I sell out of that color. So no more worries about whether I have run out of something, the shopping cart is our friend.

As always, thank you all for your support. An extra thank you to Debra Chinn of California, who often knits with my Tiptoe yarn and sent this photo. We think these were from my Lilac Flammegarn that I dyed late last year (mostly lilac with tiny spots of white). She used the waffle stitch (sometimes called Blueberry Waffles) for the leg pattern on these. Notice how far she was able to knit with one skein. Debra writes: “I always have yarn left even with size 10 feet!”

Debra, you always do a wonderful job. Thank you for sharing this recently-completed pair with us.

You perhaps “heard” me say recently that I had experimented with a Teff brownie recipe and it was not fully successful. I have to say that the brownies were too crisp the next morning. However, they did taste better at room temperature than they did straight out of the oven.

I then was reading favorite blogs and lo and behold, the February 16 post for “Something in Season” is a discussion of how to experiment with recipes. Worth a read for those who cook and/or bake, particularly for those who have limitations as far as ingredients for whatever reason.

The writer of the blog I’m discussing cooks gluten-free. He also tries to cook with local, seasonal fresh ingredients from his farmer’s market. I like his writing style, his attitude about food and family and life, and his blog.

I find it amusing, though… he does type out his recipes on his computer, then prints them out, then makes notes in handwriting of things he plans to change. He says his wife chuckles at how it looks.

I’m glad that Brian has nothing to say about my recipe pages. The recent success I had with Teff muffins (yum, had them again today) was the result of much experimentation.

I first made the recipe on the bag of teff flour from Bob’s Red Mill. However, it called for rice flour and eggs which I wanted to eliminate. I did a few tries with notes on the label of flour, then I typed out what I’d liked best on paper. That paper now has 10 different variations on it, because every time I made the muffins I changed something and every variation was documented down to how long I baked them.

The Teff Muffin success is one of the few recipes I feel I will never need to change again. Having said that, today I made them with a new type of starch just to see what characteristics that starch has compared to something I know well.

I have done this experimentation with my Buckwheat pancakes (trying to use fewer flours at once, trying to eliminate eggs, etc… and that page has even more variations noted than the Teff muffins. I *LOST* the sheet I used for pumpkin bread, the one that was so good even people with no limitations would request it. It’s somewhere in the piles and piles of papers in my office, I hope. I’d taken it out of the kitchen intending to post the recipe here for you folks and we all lost it at that point.

Anyway, I’m providing you with three photos of my recipe sheets (the third is granola bars, I’m still not at 100% satisfaction with those, either) for your entertainment.

Chuckle if you want… it’s an odd science but this is how I do it. Baking is truly science… you need the right balance of ingredients, heat and time to make things work. It is too easy to have something not rise, not hold together, not brown/carmelize as it should. Cooking soup is much less precise, which makes it easier but maybe less satisfying when it works, it just was not enough of a struggle to be impressed!

No recipes today. I do highly recommend the “Something in Season” blog, just for good writing even if you have no food restrictions.

The Museum of Arts & Design in New York City is having an exhibit called Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting until June 17, 2007. I am going to be in New York for the NYUkefest at the end of April! I get to go to the exhibit!!!

Happy, happy Lynn.

OK, I dyed yarn. I dried it. I re-wound it into skeins. I need to label it but took photos while the sun was out (the porch is a good place for photos on days like this, since it is above freezing and I’m shielded from the wind while getting nice reflected light).

So I took the photos inside. And I got really frustrated. You see, I dyed some yarn in the most wonderful colorway I’ve ever dyed… at least for me (I do have favorite colors, as you know). It is a wonderful intense turquoise with a new deep pink dye and my favorite intense purple with blue tones.

So I took photos. I could *NOT* get it to display the turquoise/green aspect of the yarn at all using the new, slick Sony Cybershot camera I bought not long ago. It was so frustrating.

*Then* I remembered that I had another digital camera in the house. I bought that camera in November, 2004 and took all my photos in Africa using it. I thought I’d left it at the Temple Club but found it in the pocket of my rarely-worn dress coat, months later. I tried a few shots with the old camera, a plain-vanilla Kodak Easy-Share. (Of course, there are features in each camera that either I adore or strongly dislike, it’s impossible to pick a favorite one at this point. For today, color was everything.)

I’m delighted. The old camera handles this colorway better than the new one. Here are the photos, side by side (new camera, old camera):

Whew. To be honest, I do color-correction in PhotoShop on every photo I take, but this was the best I could get given the photos I had.

Turquoise, Hot Pink and Purple. The perfect LynnH colorway. The turquoise is more intense in real life, but you can at least see it and that’s a relief. I’m back on the road…

(Late addition to post: Photo of me in the mezzanine of Wharton Center before the concert. I’m wearing my dress from the Congo and my Party Stole. Thanks to Brian for taking the photo.)

Busy!

Sunday was a full day. I woke up at 8:30am (incredibly unusual for me) and was already daydreaming of finishing the dye work I started Saturday, before I got out of bed.

Dyeing Tasks

When I dye yarns, I steam them to set the dye, then I leave them covered in towels to stay hot as long as possible (so they don’t run in the wash later). So after a long dyeing day, I wake up the next morning and first thing rinse out the yarns that have come to room temperature.

The rinse is not about color. Acid dyes (they require a mild acid such as vinegar to create a proper pH for color-bonding to happen) do something called “exhausting the dye.” This means that if you put a reasonable amount of dye and a reasonable amount of fiber together in a solution with the right acid pH balance, and you give it enough heat and time, the water will turn entirely clear. The dye is totally bonded to the fiber permanently and no color is left in the water at all. Very cool! Kids call it “magic.”

I instead rinse my yarns to take out any residual detergent and/or citric acid (I use this instead of vinegar, but it still has an unusual aroma I try to minimize… Kool-Aid also has citric acid in it). Since I have been letting my yarns “heat sink” overnight I have not had any trouble with dye bleeding in the morning rinse. It’s really worth the wait.

Once the yarn is rinsed (in a utility sink), I spin out the water using my clothes washer’s spin cycle, then put the yarns out on sweater-drying racks to dry. In this cold weather (with the heater blowing) they dry in less than a day; in humid spring weather I have to point a box fan at them and it takes however long it takes.

Gauge Woes

While waiting for yarns to cool and later dry, I am knitting. I am struggling (no surprise) to get the gauge I need with a yarn I’ve never used before. I can get its stated gauge but I’m making socks and the gauge needs to be tighter. On the second try I got it much tighter, now I need to work in the in-between needle sizes and cross fingers I can make this work.

If I can get 5.5st/inch with size 3.0mm needles and 7.25st/inch with size 2.25mm, then I need to find my 2.5mm and 2.75mm needles and hope one of them will work out to 6.25st/inch. (At these sizes, US needles are labeled differently depending on the brand, for example 3mm are size 2-1/2 in Brittany needles but size 3 in other brands.)

Photos and Patterns

I am also working on the text/images for my current batch of patterns under development. I went out in the snow wearing a silk sweater, silk skirt and the Party Stole which will soon live at Threadbear, so that Brian could take a final photograph for me (brrr!). He took 14 shots and one is working out fine. Have I mentioned lately what a great sport Brian truly is? The best.

Of course, my primary expertise with PhotoShop is with web graphics… I’m very comfortable with that angle, but it took me hours to figure out how to get this photo to print well on paper in my pattern. It looked great on screen, of course!

Miscellaneous Knitting

I finished a pair of heavy slipper-footies a few days ago, all except for closing up one heel. I finished one legwarmer which will be a sample. I cast on for a sock for me in Bingo. I don’t remember where I got this yarn, it’s a sort of hot pink/magenta, and I know Threadbear carries many colors of this yarn but not this pink.

I’m happy to have the yarn, at any rate. Bingo makes great socks, I’m wearing some green ones from 2005 (same color as my brother Eric’s pair from 2006) right now.

The Concert

I knit the pink Bingo when we were at Wharton Center tonight, before the show and during intermission. Ladysmith Black Mambazo is just plain amazing. Seven voices and the rhythms which can be made by humans standing on stage, nothing else. I cried plenty, as predicted. That was a pretty great substitute for a Florida vacation since we just couldn’t make one fit in this year.

I sort of like having a pair of socks as a reminder of a good concert. I remember a pair I knit during a James Taylor concert a few years back… they have been darned a few times but are still wearable.

Work is Waiting

The yarn is dry now, but it is almost bedtime. I have 35 skeins to wind and label, and photograph for you/my online shop.

I guess I will be winding yarn all day Monday, since it is a holiday here. I do not teach computers tomorrow, though I will be helping a friend install her new printer. Other than that, it’s another long day in ColorJoy Studio Heaven. I am not complaining. I LOVE my long days alone at home! I get so much done!

Finally. I had a full day at home alone, and I was able to get a lot of work, many tasks done during that time.

Samples

I blocked the charcoal Kristi Comfort Wrap this morning (and worked in some ends while I was at it). I shrunk a Watercolor Bag that Diana knit from diVe’ Autunno yarn, it turned out well. I had to spend some time prodding it into shape but it dried nicely. Now I just need to sew some D-Rings into the inner edges for the handles, and it can go to Threadbear for display.

This new bag is really lovely though very different than my normal colors. It’s sort of southwestern sunset colors, pleasing to so many of us. The fabric is dense and soft, too, very nice.

Plugging Along on Patterns

I did some photo editing and a little proofreading on the patterns I’m developing right now. I also touched base with Diana who keeps knitting like there is no tomorrow. She told me she’s a good bit into the Kristi Wrap she’s knitting for me! Oooooh, the suspense!

Dye Up to My Elbows

Then I spent hours in the basement studio making yarn into pretty colors. It is lovely, very nice. My new yellow-green dye is particularly satisfying at this cold time of year. I love spring greens in February!

I finished dyeing at 10:21pm, and stopped to shed the water-soaked clothes and put on the turquoise loungewear/jammies my friend Altu gave me for my birthday. Then I had a nice cup of tea and I’m back doing more.

Carefree Knitting

I’ve knit a bit more on a legwarmer that is intended to become a pattern in the next wave of patterns, mostly because it truly is knitting I need not think about while I am doing it. I can do that sort of knitting while touching base with Diana. So much knitting requires concentration but not a legwarmer! I love that sort of worry-bead knitting, it really makes me happy. I never get bored knitting tubes, though I know many folks do.

Challenging Knitting

Now I am going to get out the new yarn I got to make an adult ladies’ large size Chippy sock. I am curious to see how this works out, because the colors are much lower contrast than I would normally use in a colorwork design. They are nice together, though, and it’s mostly about doublechecking the yarn requirements of the pattern rather than a photography session this time. I hope I can get the right gauge. That may be the hardest part of the project.

I hope these will be able to be retrofitted for Brian after I make them to spec from the pattern. Or that is the plan right now, because his foot is closest of anyone in my family to that size. if that does not work or if he doesn’t like how they look, perhaps we’ll see if they work for Altu.

Resting the Muscles

OK… now I get to work on the couch for a while. The reward of a physical-labor day is to rest the body when it is done. Dyeing is tiring, physically. My back does not hurt but it gets tired from carrying bins of water and yarn. I am very glad I am well again and can do it once more! Count me as one grateful woman.

Good night.

It is 37 degrees F (3.7C) outside right now! Oh, My! What luck.

I cooked Buckwheat pancakes for breakfast and the house was full of the related cooking smoke (we do not have a vent fan in our old house). Since I still have a lingering cough from the flu I had last month, the smoke was a real irritant. I wanted to open doors and/or windows. Honestly, I’m big on open windows any time of year and it has been a long time since this house had a chance to breathe.

One glance at the thermometer and I took action. I turned off the furnace, and opened front and back doors. Thank goodness for a really warm alpaca sweater, longjohns, legwarmers and two pairs of wool socks (yes, this is what I often wear indoors in the winter, and we keep the heat at 72F/22C which I realize is relatively warm for many folks). Remember that I’m not truly happy until it is 84F/29C. I like it warm!

That said, the doors did not stay open long. I’ll take what I can get in February.

I have started a dyeing day. The space heater is making the basement studio liveable right now (I can not wear my good alpaca sweater down there when dyeing, so I need to heat it a bit before I go down there). I got a couple of new green dyes just before I got sick, and I am very eager to play with greens and turquoises as I always do in February.

I’ve already started my workday by blocking the Kristi Comfort Wrap that Diana sent me (charcoal Lamb’s Pride worsted with greens and blues, for Linda at Little Red Schoolhouse). This one is not as soft as the Nashua Creative Focus wool/alpaca (like the purple wrap that is at Rae’s shop) or the Malabrigo merino worsted, but it is every bit as warm and beautiful.

(I can not get the photo to display properly… it is charcoal gray with bits of green and blue peeking out, and this photo looks like the base yarn is green, sigh. The blue one is approximately that color but the depth of the knit-alongs is missing.)

The indigo/purple-blue Malabrigo Kristi Comfort Wrap that Diana knit as a sample for Threadbear was already blocked last Monday. It is ready to take to their shop as soon as I can get enough new patterns ready to print/sell for them to place an order. (Their Party Stole sample in greens/turquoises, just like the one I wear, is also ready to go.)

I hope Brian will be able to take some photos of me in the Party Stole tomorrow when we are both home, because that is the only thing missing in that pattern. Just a full-view photo is the delay.

The Chippy Socks (pattern #3) will wait until I can do one last sock as a test, since all the samples so far were done in tiny sizes. I’m doing a Large sized sock to be as sure as I can that all sizes are on target (especially for amounts of yarn required, since the pattern is a three-color project).

OK, off to exchange an alpaca sweater for two black (un-stainable) cotton sweatshirts and my full-length white cotton lab coat. I’ll pull on my rainbow-striped rubber boots (which are warm, thank goodness). Then I will get down there (just me and the spiders in our humble basement with good lighting) to see what beautiful colors I can pull together.

Photos added later: Two Kristi Comfort Wraps (fringe not showing). Left is Brown Sheep worsted in charcoal with nine knit-alongs from fingering to DK weight in hot yellow-green to turquoise to sapphire blue. Right is Malabrigo merino worsted with nine knit-alongs in mostly greens and blues but with a few sockyarns, a Colinette mohair and some Koigu PPPM adding colorful “pops” of interest. You can see the Koigu cherry red peeking out even in this small photo.

A Breath of Fresh Air

I had a day off today. The schools are off for 4 days because of Presidents’ Day. No elementary kids Friday, no adult computer students this coming Monday. No Florida vation this weekend as planned, but as I mentioned before we have a Ladysmith Black Mambazo concert Sunday.

(Brian plays with Scarlet Runner Stringband at a Contra Dance on Saturday. I am not sure what I will do Saturday, I have too many choices and my favorite thing to do is stay home on Saturday nights when Brian’s out. I love long quiet times at home, especially when it is dark outside.)

Friday was pretty darned good! I had been so tired the night before that I fell asleep on the couch before 11pm. I woke up around 1:30am and went upstairs and slept till I think 10 or so. I needed the sleep and had no reason to cut it short.

A Slow Morning/Good Breakfast

I woke up as slowly as I could, with some good black tea (packaged in an orange box with Arabic writing on it, something very special in my book after my trip to Egypt and the tea there). I then made my wonderful, fabulous, as-perfect-as-possible Teff muffins for breakfast.

I made 6 muffins, gave one to Brian and proceeded to eat the five that were left. For someone like me who is actually losing weight slowly because of food restrictions, if I can eat that much breakfast it is a good thing to proceed. (Odd for someone who once had an overeating problem but then we are so clearly not in charge of our destiny I should not be surprised.)

The Business of the Day

I made a plan to work in my jammies as long as possible today. I did some email work, some publicity for Altu’s restaurant, and a little knitting while I was trying to become truly awake. I had some packages to get into the mail so when my friend April called, inviting me across the street to her house for tea, I asked if she might come here instead and chat while I packaged. She was without her toddler for part of a day so came right over (me still in my jammies with a sweater on top). It was great.

While April and I chatted, Brian made dinner in the crockpot (he even went out to get ingredients, what a guy)… turkey and parsnips and carrots and bok choy. I really like this combination, and I like it even better when I do not have to do the preparation.

After April left I took a long hot bath and then ran my errands. I had to pick up some more yarn for testing my Chippy Sock pattern one last time (people keep asking when it will come out… as soon as I am confident all the numbers are right… it will be in eight sizes so I need to really doublecheck the numbers). I am going to try the Rowan DK Rae got in… not my colors but colors that go well with one another… it feels good so I’m trying it.

I also had to go to the health food store (finally I feel well enough to stand in line and wait at the checkout, after a month of feeling weak in the knees). I got the three things I’d planned to get, plus some really healthy and wonderful organic kohlrabi. I could not resist. And I ran into some friends. I always see someone I know there. I never see anyone I know when I go to “Texas Roadhouse” but always at the health food store. I’m not quite an “earth muffin” but I guess creative folks hang out there for some reason.

Finally, I went to the Post Office. Diana had sent me two projects she finished knitting for me. Oh, Joy! The Watercolor Bag in Autunno yarn promises to be incredible (it’s like a sunset in SouthWestern colors… turquoise and gray and gold). I still need to felt it, but it holds much promise and the sample felted swatch is wonderful so I’m hopeful.

The package also held a Kristi Comfort Wrap for Little Red Schoolhouse in charcoal Lamb’s Pride. It is spectacular with its knit-alongs in blues and greens. I so want to keep this one, it goes with my Harris Tweed man’s coat but I need to let it sell patterns for me for a while first.

After Errands

Home again, we ate lovely food thanks to my beloved. I knit a little more. Then Brian set up the computer to do some recording. I did another set of vocal takes for “Button Up Your Overcoat” and a harmony vocal on one of Brian’s pieces.

I never enjoy recording but I am getting better at it, which means it does not take as long as it once did to get a set of good takes. It would help if I picked easy-to-sing pieces, but it seems I keep picking vocally challienging songs. That’s easier to pull off if you are singing your little heart out on a live stage… but on a CD you just can hear every small waver.

Brian humors me until I feel I have recorded enough times that I have a good take or two or three. He’s a genius at fixing problems (cutting and pasting phrases when needed) and I really appreciate that. He is so easy to get along with… I sometimes wonder how I got to live with this man. I am sure I don’t deserve that luck, though I try.

Winding Down

So now here I sit… the socks I thought I’d finish by noon are still sitting with about six rounds left until completion. And instead I’m knitting on a legwarmer that finally is allowing me to knit consistently at the gauge I need. The legwarmers I ripped out maybe four times when I was sick, because I could not knit to gauge no matter how I tried.

And I’m eating what was supposed to be brownies. Teff brownies. One of my allergy cookbooks says that Teff makes good brownies but does not supply a recipe. I tried to adapt another egg/milk-free brownie recipe I’ve used before, but it emphatically had problems. The texture is too much like sawdust to be enjoyable, though cocoa and brown sugar make it edible in small doses.

Maybe I will dig out those socks one more time. Six more rows!

It is really cold here. We are eating a lot of root vegetables and cabbage-family foods right now. They are satisfying in this sort of weather, for some reason.

Some of you have read me talk about my love for the vegetable called kohlrabi. It tastes like a very mild cabbage, with a texture like a crisp apple. It’s actually a stem that is enlarged to the point of looking like a bulb or a root. My mother once had a summer in the garden which resulted in a bumper crop of these. I like them peeled and sliced in stir fry, I like them as a fresh salad in summer, or as something like “carrot sticks” as a quick snack. I put chunks in soup sometimes, too (which does not require peeling).

What is nice is that now I can find them most of the year at the large local Meijer grocery  chain. Also quite often I find slightly-smaller organic ones (just as tasty) at the health food store.

Today when searching for information on rutabagas, I found myself reading a recipe for Spicy Kohlrabi (which contains some spices used in Indian cooking). It sounds good to me on this chilly day. I expect that if you leave out a few of the spices because you do not have them in the house, it still will taste good. Disclaimer: I have not tried this recipe, it just sounds good.

This photo (from January) is the oldest of my knitters at Foster Center. She is in High School right now, and she usually comes to knitting with her Mother (who also knits with us). Here she is showing off a handwarmer she made in the round (on double-pointed needles… she made socks last year), complete with thumb. This yarn was donated to my program (it is Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride, very warm and perfect for a handwarmer).

The kids in all of my programs have been asking me to thank all of you who have donated needles, canvas bags, yarn, needles, scissors… I make sure they know that nearly everything we use was given to them as a gift. That it is *theirs* to keep and use. And that they can keep receiving yarn as long as I see that they are knitting it at home… there is a supply as long as they are using it responsibly.

For those who will ask, I do have enough of some things (acrylic yarn in solid colors) but always can use a few special items… We are not in dire straits here because my local knit guild has been very supportive as have been my adult computer students.

However, since I now have more kids to supply, inventory is a little lower than usual. I will try to be specific.

We are always short on straight knitting needles in sizes 5 to 11 (single needles are more than welcome, I have lots of singles they might match), circulars in the same sizes for hats and small bags (I think that’s about a 16″ cable). I can not keep multicolored worsted-weight yarns in stock (they adore redheart rainbow, as we all did at that age if we had the choice). I also need darning needles (those plastic ones are just great), canvas bags (advertising is fine) in which they can carry their projects, and yarns that can be either felted and/or dyed (that is, animal fiber especially in pale colors).

For the most part they knit worsted or bulky weight yarns, in smooth textures. I have some capable of knitting thin yarns but they typically do not have the patience to knit that many stitches in one project. Even my kids who knit socks use washable yarns with at least a small wool content, but in worsted or bulky weights.

What I do not need: I have plenty of novelty yarn right now. I can use a little acrylic in really bright colors, purple or variegated/multicolors but I am full-up with solid colors that are “adult” colors such as cream, burgundy or navy. I can’t use thin yarns. I can’t use anything that was in a basement long enough to smell mildewy. I can’t use adult instruction books. I have enough double-pointed needles (DPNs) unless you want to send wood or bamboo. Some kids drop needles (especially DPNs) if they are not wood or bamboo, or plastic… (I do not have the kids enough hours for me to teach them to make their own needles, as cool as that might be. They need to spend their rare time with me actually knitting, as there are many of my kids I literally see one hour a week.)

As I said, right now I’m OK, I’m not desperately begging, but especially canvas bags, darning needles and straight knitting needles in any length are an ongoing need. And kids are so fascinated with felting that any shrinkable wool gets used up pretty quickly, though it is by no means a necessity.

If you are sending something, I’d appreciate a note to let me know to watch for a package. The address would be:

Lynn Hershberger
c/o Foster Community Center
200 N Foster Avenue
Lansing, MI 48912 USA

As always, thanks for your emotional support… no donation necessary. Your emotional support is most surely enough. For those who do send a package, I can get you a tax letter detailing what you donated if you include a piece of paper inside the package with your name and email address and/or snailmail address on it. (The paper goes to the secretary, the rest of the package goes to the computer/knitting room.) A business card would work, if you have one.

Oh, the last photo… CityKidz Knit! at Foster Center just a few weeks ago. Every day is a different group, though many return often. The child at far right made socks last year and a glove this year, and moved to Oregon this month. I love them all, and that means I already miss her. The good news is that I know she will knit without me no matter where she goes. That feels really good.

Charlotte wrote that there was an article about African cooking in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. There are recipes from both Somalia and Ethiopia. I printed out several and I’m eager to try them.

My friend Altu is an Ethiopian cook of the highest caliber… but she finds it hard to talk in “recipes.” She cooks by feel, sort of the same way that I knit… I make up the socks on the needles as I go. (Actually Altu was once a prolific knitter and she knit the same way… no patterns but general guidelines.)

Therefore, the recipes in today’s article are precious. Twice precious, in this winter weather. We did not get as much snow as was predicted, but the drifting is bad. When I got home could not see the first step to my back door.

It is a perfect day to make spicy and warm food. I will be singing at Altu’s restaurant and she will fill me with her own cooking… I will not cook today. If I did not have that luxury, I would have a stack of excellent recipes ready!

For those looking for a pleasant evening on Wednesday, Brian and I are playing as The Fabulous Heftones, at Altus.

The reason for a mid-week performance is Valentines Day. We will croon to you alone, with a sweetie, or with a table of friends. (For the single folks in the crowd, Brian will surely do a rendition of “I Love Me” in your honor.)

The food is as good as it gets in Lansing. The menu ranges from vegetarian to meat, spicy to mild, beef stew on a bed of rice to spicy lamb to mild garlic lentils, on either rice or traditional spongy sourdough Ethiopian flatbread. Yum.

The restaurant is as far west as you can go on Michigan Avenue and still be in East Lansing, Michigan. It’s right next door to the Silver Dollar Saloon. Visit Altu’s website for maps and menu and more..

The show is 6:30-8:30pm. We would love to have you join us.

For a while I have taken on an extra couple of kids’ knitting programs. I’m at Dwight Rich Middle School (Lansing Public Schools, in a joint project with Lansing Parks & Recreation) for the after-school program on Tuesdays (until June 1, which delights me… real time to develop these young folks into knitters).

Wednesdays and Thursdays I am still working with CityKidz Knit! at Foster Community Center (City of Lansing Parks and Recreation). Fridays for 4 out of 5 weeks in a row, I’m at an elementary school, also in the Lansing Public Schools.

I still do not know how I ended up the kids’ knitting specialist, but we are not really in charge of our destiny, are we? It is working out just great. One of the girls at Dwight Rich today asked me to thank Mr. Johnson for teaching me to knit (in 1969). How sweet is that?

I will never catch up with all the photos I missed posting during the month I felt crummy, but I’m going to overload this post, with the first effort in catch-up.

These three photos are projects by the same young lady. I believe she is in 5th grade, age 11, and she has been knitting since late summer. She is sharp as a tack and loves to knit even when I am not around. Kids who knit at home develop into knitters… practice and dedication make for good projects, no matter what other abilities are brought into the equation.

The kids I work with learn about fibers and where they come from. We talk about how acrylic is essentially a plastic, and how wool is essentially hair. We talk about how we can dye wool with powdered drink mix but not acrylic… we talk about how some wool will shrink/felt making a stronger but less stretchy fabric. The first project here is a set of handwarmers. Notice their size… this made sure they would be completed before the “boring” factor set in. Also notice that they are not matching in color. They are both wool/acrylic blends, washable without shrinking. A good choice, I’d say.

The other two of her projects were knit with feltable/shrinkable wool yarn, and then shrunk. This young lady has adults in her life who value her knitting and who bought her some good yarn at Rae’s shop (very close to their home and to my classroom as well) for Christmas. She has really enjoyed the Noro Kureyon you see here… the colors change so it is harder to be bored while knitting a project using it. She made up both of the pouch and pencil-holder projects herself. She is proud of herself… and I allow myself to be proud of her as well.

Brian and I had planned to get away to Florida this coming weekend. Well, then his band switched months to play the local contra dance, on Saturday, right in the middle of our getaway weekend.

Our getaway had to be this week because that is when there is a Monday holiday (Presidents’ Day). Because of the holiday I will not be teaching next Monday. I’d cleaned off my calendar from Thursday night through Wednesday afternoon. I have to plan months ahead to make things like this work. Of course, it all filled up in record time the minute I knew I was not going south.

We then considered going to Chicago or Toronto for an overnight, Sunday/Monday and maybe Tuesday. But then I saw that Ladysmith Black Mambazo (the tour dates on their site are from 2003 but the information page is excellent) was scheduled to sing at Wharton Center/MSU on Sunday. Well, if I had missed that I would have been almost more sad than missing Florida. These guys are really important to my inner self, though it’s hard to explain. Later for Chicago!

I remember the first time I heard this group sing. I was in the sad part of my adult life, but I was alone at home one Sunday and listening to WKAR, our local PBS affiliate. They had a series of folk-related shows that would play on Sundays. I remember how we had the furniture arranged, exactly how things were set up in that room at the time. I believe it was Bob Blackman’s Folk Tradition show (Bob is now a friend), that I had playing. This was right at the time Paul Simon’s Graceland album came out, in 1986.

I was doing housework or something… and the song “Homeless” came on. I was awestruck. I stopped everything, sat right there in the middle of the living room floor and drank in every note. I did not want it to end. I had never heard vocals anything like that before… and voice is my favorite instrument. It changed me forever.

Now I listen to other African musicians as well, but they were the first I heard and I still typically listen to them at least once a week. I even keep one of their CDs in my classroom at Foster Center. There is nothing that can “ground” me more than listening to these men sing.

Brian bought tickets online last night. We are going. I am full of emotion. It’s OK to stay in Michigan this year, though I’ll miss seeing my Mom. Wharton, here we come!

I feel as though I have nothing to say today. (How can that be? I’m LynnH, after all…)

OK, I’ll give it a shot.

1. I still feel well, yeah! Thirty-two days of feeling crummy was definitely enough for me.
2. I slept 9 hours though I did crash early… and am feeling tired enough to sleep before midnight again.
3. I spent the morning working on the final text edits for my Party Stole pattern. I still do not have photographs. If I can get photos, I will be able to release that pattern this week.
4. I stopped at Rae’s for literally 3 minutes today, to give her back a circular knitting needle she had loaned me. I was a brat and whined because the moebius I knit looked like it would be a cowl (as planned) on the needles… and I did even block a bit on the needles to be sure… but turned out skinny as a scarf. I don’t wear scarves, I don’t like them (they are not warm enough for someone like me). I believe Rae deserves a better friend than I was today, so I’ll try again tomorrow when I have time to actually talk, and listen.
5. I taught my computer classes today. That work is very satisfying, but it really exhausts me emotionally sometimes. The people are wonderful, they learn and come back to me reporting on how they can tell they have progressed. I have this drive to teach them as much as I possibly can. Yet I can not teach too much at once or they will not absorb anything. It’s a juggling act I do well. But after that shift (two classes in 4.5 hours) I went home and finished my shadow-knit swatch and now I’m done for the night. Whew!
6. In the weather report department, it was warmer than it has been in a while. My car had not been started since Friday and I worried it would not want to start today, but it was a champ. I’m grateful for the warmer weather, especially because of that fact.
7. We had wonderful dinner (homemade red lentil soup for me) out of the freezer so we would not have to cook (and so the freezer will hopefully soon be tamed). I had a cup or two of organic green tea that Altu gave me. And now I’m SO ready for sleep.

I am sure I am a better writer than this on most days. Today I’m a reporter of facts. Please forgive. Tomorrow I don’t teach much and I’m guessing I will even probably have some photographs! Or that is the plan, anyway…

I am glad I went on the MMKG (knitting guild) retreat. I got a change of pace and more time with some of my knitting friends than I usually get. They are good people. I’m so happy I felt well enough to go on this event.

Official thanks here to those who did the work of making the retreat possible. From the phone call people, the finders-of-locations, the idea people, the planners, the money takers, thank you all. Also a more personal thanks to Rae/Extravayarnza who drove me to the retreat and Kristi/Red Dog Knits who gave me a ride home so Rae could leave a little early (and I could stay a little bit longer to socialize… particularly good since I went to bed early on Saturday, losing out on some socializing then).

We all ate more than usual… the food there (I’m told) was very good and as for me, I packed a LOT of (pre-cooked) food from my freezer, good stuff, so I could zap it in the microwave in the dining room. (We all had refrigerators in our rooms, a wonderful luxury.) I ate three meals for 2 days in a row, something relatively rare for me (because of my odd schedule I usually get breakfast, a snack, and dinner… maybe also a snack after dinner).

In addition to the extra food portions (which are good for me right now, I don’t have the overweight problem I had in the late 1970s… after which I lost 50+ pounds which pretty much have stayed lost), I walked a lot. After almost no walking or other exercise for about a month or more. Talk about a combination set to make a girl want to curl up and hibernate!

I came home, unpacked, and had dinner with Brian. After that I bound off/finished the moebius knitting I’d started this morning (it stretched a lot… into a relatively skinny scarf rather than the cowl I’d planned, I’m not sure yet how I feel about that), finished some ends on some socks that have been waiting for attention, and talked to my brother on the phone for 40 minutes.

It is just barely past 10pm and I am totally wiped out, enough that I may go to bed. This from the past-midnight grrl.

Some nights I go to bed at 4am even after not having any caffeine since 9:30 or so, and I just lie there in the dark resting but not sleeping for a while longer. Saturday night I turned off the lights at 11:30 (after pretty much lounging on my bed in the resort for a few hours first) and slept 9 hours. I know this will not last, I’ve been a wee-morning-hours person since I was at least in High School, and years of working a “day job” did not knock it out of me.

But today I’m wiped out from walking and too much food and excitement. I’m wiped out from being out in the cold several times a day. I’m wiped out from so much social stimulation and brain stimulation. And I’m all about turning into a lump many hours earlier than is normal for me. Just for today.

Today Rae and I got to retreat and have been hanging out, eating, knitting, eating, knitting, laughing, and more…

I can’t think of a better way to get away. The site is beautiful, snowcovered and wild but peaceful. The good news is that my strength is coming back. Our sleeping rooms are far from the meeting room which is not yet as far as the dining room.

The great news is that I am able to walk all this distance even though just a few days ago I could barely walk to the car without feeling woozy. This is a wonderful development.

Our class this morning was shadow knitting. I didn’t expect it would be such fun but it really was. I finished a sample with a heart and a half a sample with stripes. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Actually this is reminding me of the shadow/illusion knitting shawl I planned a long time ago… I purchased the yarn at Threadbear and it has been a long time sitting on my shelves.

Right now I’m trying to type this as the group is watching a movie and I’m a bit distracted so I’ll stop typing. I’ll catch you later!!!

I’m going on the Mid-Michigan Knitters Guild retreat this weekend. Rae and I are car-pooling and that means good chat time, It is 1.25 hours in the car one way. I’m more excited about time with Rae than anything else, but the whole thing will be great. My friend Kristi will be there for Sunday, it will be great to have time with her as well. Poor Sharon P is too ill to go but she wisely will stay home to heal. I’ll miss her.

Saturday we mostly knit and chat and eat, but we have a workshop on shadow knitting. Sunday we have a workshop at 9:30am (yawn) on moebius knitting (Rae’s teaching that one). We may leave after lunch to come home, Rae needs to be home early afternoon. It will be wonderful no matter when we leave.

Previous retreats have been shopping trips with a hotel. This is in a retreat center. We realized that in Lansing we have such good yarn shops (five of them within 20 minutes of my house, three more if you go to 30 minutes) we don’t need to shop somewhere else… we are spoiled.

It’s too early for this grrrl to be fully happy. I’m going to make my famous Teff Muffins to make getting up a treat, make some good tea and try to wake up. It will be a good day.

I have been thinking about relationships of all sorts… neighbors, friends, co-workers, colleagues, life partners. Sometimes I believe that the words “thank you” make more difference than anything else.

If we say thank you enough, when someone does something for us (even if it is really their “job” to do it or if it was easy to do), that creates the right atmosphere. For continuing kindnesses, for feeling appreciated, for many things relationships need. Some rough times can be made more bearable when we know the extra work we are doing is truly noticed and appreciated, you know?

I might even go out on a limb and say that some relationships might turn around and heal if treated with a large portion of “thank you” moments. I could be wrong but I don’t think I am.

Of course, it takes two people to really make a relationship… but I’m watching a friend suffer deeply right now for a deficiency of thanks and appreciation. It makes me very sad.

Whether it is the doorman whose job it is to open the door for me, the waitress who brings me my “to go” dinner, my husband doing what he would do whether I was there or not… I make a point to say thank you.

No, it is not cliche’ and it is not out of proportion. I don’t really deserve to have anyone do anything for me. I’m perfectly capable of doing most everything alone, at least when I am not sick. But life is better with other people, and when someone makes my life even a little nicer I let them know that I have noticed and that I am appreciative.

It seems to me thank you is a much more important thing to say than even “I love you.” It expresses an awareness of the sometimes small actions folks take on my behalf. It lets people I appreciate, know even more surely that I do appreciate them. Even if I will never meet them again.

Remember to thank someone today. It makes life better for all of us.

Thursday the sun shone and I felt better than I have in a month, at least for several hours in the early part of the day. I really loved the rainbows on the walls of my office (thanks to cut crystals, gifts, hanging in my south-facing window).

I’ve had wobbly knees, so to speak, for several weeks since my fever left. I cought this bug on January 7, and here it is February 8 before I felt better. I still need more sleep than usual but I am making sure to allow myself that extra time.

I am cranking as hard as I can on these patterns. I had really planned to have three new patterns ready (including the Kristi Comfort Wrap which is done) Friday/tomorrow. However, after losing three nights of quiet work time (because I fell asleep about 3 hours earlier than usual) I am not sure I will catch up with that deadline. It will be a push to the finish but realistically I think this is not within reach.

I am trying a new computer program to chart my stranded colorwork for the new “Chippy” socks (you can’t stop knitting them, like potato chips). The program is called Knit Visualizer.

I am using a demo version right now, both because I want to test it first, and also because it does not support colors in charts yet. I can not export from the demo version. I have to do a screengrab, take it into Photoshop, crop and clean up the edges, and fill in colors where appropriate.

At least for the ten charts I needed for the Chippy socks, I like this better than Stitch Painter Gold or Excel, the other two programs I have used for charting colorwork in my patterns. Even after I had to colorize the charts in PhotoShop, I saved significant time in the actual chart-building time using this program.

When I created patterns for Dawn Brocco’s Heels and Toes Gazette, she liked Stitch Painter Gold. She found it easy to figure out… as for me, I was bewildered. I did complete the work she requested, but it took hours longer than it should have taken, I do not know why.

Maybe my confusion is because of my six years as a software trainer, mostly teaching Microsoft Office (and before that DOS programs). I perhaps expect programs to all “think” like Microsoft products, as awful as that admission might be. I also use one Adobe program, PhotoShop, though that one required a few seminars to learn, it’s so deep.

I am usually a whiz at learning new programs, but SP Gold did not work in any way I could expect it to work. I know Excel very well, but it is not intended to be a charting program and I had fits with the border lines when cutting and pasting.

Whatever the case, this new program is quite promising and I may go ahead and buy it after the next release. They promise color in the charts at that point, and it would be nice to be able to export the chart without fussing in PhotoShop as well.