I made yet another urchin. This time with the yarn my nephew and I dyed. I actually completed this two weeks ago, but I’ve been so busy during my short trip back home to Ireland, I didn’t get organised to put up any pictures.
SO I’m going to flood my blog with old posts.
I don’t cross-stitch, but I thought this was nice… a member of an online crafty list Stitch & Bitch Ireland mailing list is de-stashing some supplies to make some space in her home. You should drop by her blog and say hello!
The lady at “Me, Life, Cross Stitch, Vegetables and Other Stuff” is doing a give-away for the 12 days of Christmas. Each day she’ll give post about something. You leave a comment, and she’ll draw the winners on Sunday! Read: “On the first day of Christmas”
I’m getting excited about my Secret Santa swaps. I am doing a Secret Santa swap with the Irish Knitters group on Raverly- and I have probably the best swap-target. She is so easy to buy for, I love her work & her taste. OMG I am so excited about the things I have found, but I can’t post about them until after Christmas. I can’t wait to show off not only the stuff, but where I found the things.
And I’m doing a Gnome Swap with a gnome group on Ravelry. I started making the frikking thing and he’s so frikking cute, I can’t stand it. I can’t post a picture until my partner gets it!
I also finished a whopping 3 (that’s right folks, 3!!!) hats for presents. Whoah.
Knit cafe
Originally uploaded by feather.
Did I mention I had a photo published in this really cool book?
I should have mentioned it before. Martin John Brown, a co-author with Larissa Brown, approached me after seeing my photo on Flickr.
I was chuffed it made the cover! See my photo is top centre 
(link to amazon)
From the publishers: Knitalong:Celebrating the Tradition of Knitting Together - you can also see a photo gallery from the book at Melanie Falick books. Their book also got very good reviews from readers at Amazon, well done!
From the above page, about the book:
“Authors Larissa Brown and Martin John Brown present an inspiring look at centuries of people knitting together, and why knitters find the interaction so meaningful and worthwhile. Along the way, they offer 20 projects especially suited for different types of knitalongs. The Barn Raising Quilt and the Traveling Scarf, for instance, call on individual knitters to collaborate on a single project; while the Pinwheel Blanket and the Meathead Hat encourage a community of knitters to improvise on the same pattern to come up with a variety of results. Also included is essential information about finding, joining, and starting knitalongs.”
The nice bonus was I got to pick any book I wanted. I chose “Knitting for Baby” which I have lent to my boyfriend’s mom who is a new grandmother.
I don’t usually blog about non-crafty stuff, but I thought this was worth mentioning. I didn’t know what this Movember was all about- I thought it had to do with “movement” but no, it’s men growing moustaches for raising awareness about mens health. 1 in 6 men will get prostate cancer. I won’t list any more statistics, that was stunning enough. I love men, and I love moustaches. What more could you ask for a charity/awareness drive?
If you don’t know any fella growing a moustache for Movember, maybe you’d like to donate to Daniel Hunt- a very talented web developer and all-around Good Guy:
View Daniel Hunt’s Mo-Space. Money donated to the Irish version of Movember goes to Action Prostate Cancer
Spoon was a waste of time!
Originally uploaded by feather.
The day I found out Nana passed away, I was visiting my sister and her family. I was teaching one of my nephews to knit (I had shown them crocheting before) and we also dyed some yarn. Later on when we actually got The Call, this nephew, M. and I were kneading dough to make pizzas- which is something I pretty much always do when I go up there. (Remind me to show you the Manta Ray Pizza that M. made!) Anyway, Nana would have appreciated all this fun kitcheny creativity going on.
It was cool when we looked online we saw Pea Soup of the Day’s tutorial on how to dye yarn with food colouring. It was cool, she showed her son getting into the dyeing. Boys like yarn too, see!
So here we are trying to dye wool. We gave up on the spoon, that was silly. We were trying to get like stripes, but it wasn’t working, so we ended up just pouring the dye on.
I was my brilliant idea to leave some white spaces, those didn’t come out- but the cool thing is, we got purple! And we only had blue and green food colouring! Somehow if you make the blue really really strong, you’ll get purple. Looks like some blue food colouring also contains red! More scientifical food-colouring info here: Using Food Coloring as a Textile Dye for Protein Fibers
Easy peasy:
Boil:
Let cool before rinsing:
Prices for recyclables have dropped and warehouses all over the planet are just filling with recyclable materials.
Steve Eminton, of http://letsrecycle.com “said that mountains of plastic bottles, paper and steel cans were likely to build up by the end of the year and that the problem would be exacerbated by the Christmas festivities, when a surge of packaging materials and drinks containers would fill recycling bins.”
Yet another reason to make prezzies or Buy Handmade http://www.buyhandmade.org/
I saw the video below on the Shiny and Fuzzy blog, an idyllic view of recyclables sorting.
Just in case you ever wondered… this is NOT how recycling is sorted in Ireland. A friend of mine who lectures at IT Sligo on Environmental Science saw first hand that much of the recyclable material we “sort” actually gets all bunged together anyway! He also explained how it was hand-sorted, which was laborious and costly, and much of it simply gets shipped off & they pay to be processed elsewhere. Up in Donegal, my sister explained that the Bring Centre she used to go to in Carndonagh is closed… there’s simply not the infrastructure to manage all this recycled material in Ireland.
Basically, one answer is simply not to buy as much this Christmas, refuse to purchase heavily packaged goods, and tell the supermarket, toystore, whatever to stuff it.
Round Tuits
Originally uploaded by feather.
This past spring I took a pottery class. I never really wanted to leave the “pinch pot” stage, and found ever more inventive ways of pinching pots- one hole, two holes, even 7 holes. I added eyes and teeth and made characters. Coiling? Slab? No thanks.
I did however make these little “Round Tuits”, but never finished them. They are only bisque-fired, not glazed. I mean to paint them or stain them, then seal them with wax or something, not sure the best way to finish them. Then tie a ribbon in them for hanging.
My Nana had a wooden Round Tuit on her mantle in the kitchen. It was always a joke in her house, about not being able to say you didn’t get a Round Tuit. My sister got the original, but I thought it would be nice to make one for everyone in the family.
I guess the fact is, I never got a round to preparing these and giving them to everyone- and I suppose now is really the time for these.
I will be going back to the US at the end of this month for a visit. I hope these little medallions are a cheerful reminder of Nana’s good sense of humour and her love of spoonerisms and word-play.
Here’s some more pics of the pinch pots I made in pottery class:
The Big Knit
Originally uploaded by feather.
I was in Derry at the weekend, at Sainsbury’s. I saw these Big Knit hatted smoothie drinks, and cooed. I grabbed one and ran back to the cash register. I explained to my sister about the campaign, about using up little scraps of yarn, and that the company would donate X amt per hat/drink purchased.
She had a very dim view of the effort. She pointed out it made me buy a very expensive drink that I would never normally buy. And all the money they spent coordinating and putting the project together would have been better spent donated.
It amounts to a marketing ploy, she basically put it to me like that.
*sigh*
Oh well, it represents the effort of someone who was trying to be thoughtful and helpful.
Dmaxi is offering a prize to the knitter of the hats she bought:
http://undermeoxter.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/the-big-knits-little-rewards/
nana’s afghan
Originally uploaded by feather.
Today, my Nana passed away, at 95 years old. I am visiting my sister this weekend, and I think I knew it was going to happen soon, Nana has been so ill lately. None of us are surprised. But it is amazing she is really not here anymore.
Ireland is probably the only place in the world that I am from a “mixed” background. I remember my mother, who is Catholic, was having a discussion with Nana- my dad’s mom, about the possibility of ‘after life’. Nana was raised Unitarian, and while she went to church every week, it would be hard to pin down exactly what her beliefs were- unless you spoke with her.
My mom was so disturbed, maybe annoyed(?) that Nana didn’t believe in an afterlife of any sort. It was a heated discussion. “People live on in the words and deeds of the people who’s lives they touched”, Nana said. My mom insisted that people lived on, were watching over us, that we were surrounded by angels. My mom needed to believe that- since her own parents had died probably only a few years before. It comforted her.
But I felt I understood Nana’s way of thinking about it more. I knew that the poems and rhymes taught to me were taught to her by her mother. I knew that the stories passed down were as much an expression of living ancestry as any afterlife. It has always made sense to me.
Nana always encouraged an open mind- not by preaching to me, but by her own actions. Every Christmas, we’d have a visitor from another country through her church- who she’d have stay with her. We met people from as far away places as Japan, South Africa and Morocco, and others. She was always very open, curious, interested. She was on the board to elect a new minister, and I remember they took on a lesbian, and I think that was the first time I ever heard someone in my family say the word.
She was a caterer, and loved cooking. She could make cream puffs in the shape of swans, she had pots as big as small baths, and she loved trying new food. She loved cooking for people, whether it was flaming pudding at Christmas, or the hundreds of pies we made at Thanksgiving at church… or the way she laid out & set the table for *every meal* - including the breakfast. She was a very active citizen, in the League of Women voters- she’d have been so chuffed to see a black man as president in her life time. Sadly, over the last few years with severe dementia she barely had any memory or thoughts at all.
She was an avid knitter. In this photo is a picture of an afghan she knit and gave to my sister. I was examining it this evening, all the stitches- each one she made by her hand. It was very moving, and amazing to touch it and imagine all the days she worked on it, the things she was doing, the smell of her house, the cozy warmth…
This weekend I was knitting with my nephews and we even dyed some wool. Nana would have gotten a kick out of that.
She’d also be pleased to know I was teaching them knitting, the same way she taught me to knit.
And of course, she’d know that in our thoughts and actions, she lives on.
We love you Nana, thank you for being such an amazing person.
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