Thoughts in Random Patterns

Birthday Scarf

While I had a lovely birthday celebration of my 45th birthday last week, it was also my older sister's birthday on Monday 9/12.  We had a terrific sister day, with breakfast, facials, and lots of fun shopping together.

And I gave her a knitted gift that I really truly intended to finish in time for her birthday LAST year, but just didn't get it done.

I made a black mohair scarf blended with shiny neon accent colors, which is just right for her.  And it's finally finished!

 I used a single row reversible scarf pattern (and another blog post about it) from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee a.k.a. Yarn Harlot who is surely one of my favorite knitting bloggers.

 Progession in photographs: 

First photographed on August 10, 2010 - getting under way: 

 

 Photographed on August 28, 2010 - about halfway done - two weeks of knitting time left before the birthday deadline: 

 

and again on September 3rd in the sunshine at our Keystone house:

 

This yarn is hard to photograph because of the shiny neon accent yard mixed with the fuzzy black mohair: 

 
 

 

And a year later - finally finished! 

 

 

 The day between my sister's birthday and mine was a stormy rainy day, ending with this beautiful double rainbow over Eldorado Canyon that really looks like it ends in my yard: 

What's on my Needles?

I started knitting last summer in Keystone after a 20 year hiatus, and have thoroughly enjoyed making gifts for friends and family over the past year.

In June I finally finished a baby blanket for my cousin Josh and wife Brie's new baby boy, Benjamin Shoemaker.  I'd been working on it through the winter but didn't quite finish before his birth date in May.  These aren't exactly "baby" colors, but they're colors that I enjoy working with.  I liked the mock cable look and used a machine washable acrylic yarn for practicality.  Another of my cousins had a baby boy in August, but I haven't managed to make a blanket for him yet. 

 

In between working on Benjamin's blanket, I whipped up a scarf for my friend Maureen's birthday.  It is modeled here by her husband, Dave Jilk, demonstrating an unexpected flair for the true spirit of fashion. 

Since we were going to be in Alaska for the entire month of July, I thought I might finally make something for myself.  I ordered my favorite yarn, Misti Alpaca Chunky in Urban Autumn, online and started making a blanket for myself.  I used the same baby blanket pattern as the Rollie Cohen baby blanket from fall 2009. 

I got about 5 inches into it and realized it was going to weigh approximately 117 pounds before it was done and would smother me if I fell asleep under it while watching television.  I wasn't trying to replicate the feeling of the lead protective covering you wear during dental x-rays.

So I pulled it out.

I thought I'd go back to what I know best, and made a scarf instead. 

I used a simple moss stitch and things progressed nicely.

Here it is wet-blocked with the stitches stretched out:

Then I took a week-long daily Forrest Yoga class and gave the completed scarf to the teacher as a thank you gift.

So I still haven't made anything for myself.

I thought I might get brave and try some socks, and bought some fun yarn, but then I decided I wasn't brave enough to attempt that without being able to get human help.

I started another scarf project with an interesting loopy-looking pattern:

But I got bored with the simple 4-row repeat and pulled it out.

Then July was over and it was time to come home to Boulder.

So I'm trying again to make something for myself.  I'm using a yarn that I bought to make hats, but I haven't managed to move from two dimensions into three.  It turns out the amount of yarn wasn't really long enough to actually make a scarf, so I browsed some at my superb local yarn store,  Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins to find a complementary yarn.  I found a Donegal tweed green with a purple fleck I think will make a very nice striped scarf for myself.  I'll experiment with how wide the bands of each yarn will be and we'll see if I can actually FINISH something without pulling it out!

The Year in Review

Or, where did it go?

Or, here are some of the big things in 2009 I meant to blog about, but didn't.  Good intentions pave the road to somewhere?!?

All the way back in May I went to Tanzania and Kenya for two weeks with The Nature Conservancy, which was my second trip to Africa, but won't be my last.  I am grateful for the opportunity to be involved with such an excellent organization and provide some capacity building support to their partners there.

Also in May, my Mom moved to Colorado into a retirement community near me, her grandchildren Morgan and Drew, and my sister Martha.  Sister Wendy moved back to Anchorage, Alaska in June after 10 years in Colorado, so we're holding steady on the family headcount here.  I'm looking forward to having Mom as my date for all kinds of cultural events in the years to come.  Brad can avoid ballet, museums, and symphony henceforth.

I retreated for almost an entire summer of writing at Keystone, which was wonderfully productive and peaceful.  I did manage to blog about that.

I have continued knitting like a fiend this fall.  I made a baby blanket for the adorable Rollie Cohen in blue:

Then I worked for a long time on a scarf for my amazing personal assistant, Kelli.  This is a complicated Diamond Brocade pattern using a beautiful hand-painted 100% alpaca yarn called High Country Vineyard from Lonesome Stone Yarn in Granby, Colorado stocked at the massive and excellent Shuttles, Spindles and Skeins in Boulder. 

I was very happy with how this project turned out, and was delighted to make a gift for Kelli worthy of her generous spirit and hard work.

A person new in my life in 2009 that I'm extra grateful for is Colette from Room to Room who has been working with me to organize my life.  It has been amazing to open the last boxes of college papers and throw away anything I don't want anymore.  I'm learning that just because something is useful, that doesn't mean it's useful to me.  I look forward to removing more clutter from my physical world and implementing systems that allow me to focus my time on what I really care about. Thanks, Colette.

One of the areas that I'm spending more energy on and really enjoying is the philanthropic work I do through the Anchor Point Fund, particularly the Anchor Point Internships in Global Leadership at Wellesley College.  I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Joanne Murray, the director of both the Center for Work and Service and the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs which has its inaugural program in January 2010.  I look forward to continuing to shape the vision of what global leadership means in the 21st century with Joanne.

We funded four internships in Africa during the summer and will do so again in 2010, and many years to come, with the interns presenting their experiential learning results at the Tanner Conference in the fall.

Here is a photo of 3 of the 4 Anchor Point Interns and me in the spring of 2009:

And a different set of 3 of the 4 interns and me in November 2009, along with Salwa Muhammad ('06), Assistant Director of  Internships & Service Learning at the Center for Work and Service: 

 

We each ordered the gorgeous lobster at our celebratory dinner at Blue Ginger Restaurant:

I am deeply honored to have been elected to the board of trustees at Wellesley College and look forward to learning how to be an effective trustee and serving the College during my tenure.

In 2010 I'm thinking of reviving some other dormant skills since the knitting has been so satisfying.  My viola gathers dust in its case and I think I'm going to try to find a way to bring viola back into my life.

We'll be going to Alaska for the month of July, and we love company.  If you're considering a trip to Alaska, come stay with us in Homer.

I'm not making any specific New Year's Resolutions, but I will continue to try to do more blogging.  I have enjoyed tweeting on Twitter, but I think I do have some thoughts that take more than 140 characters to express.  I'll post them here.

Best wishes to all for a healthy and happy 2010!

Knitting

The Year of Living Alphabetically hasn't turned out the way I planned -- but then again, very few things seem to.  I'm accepting defeat or reality or failure or whatever and giving up on this project so I can get back to just blogging and reconnect to my community of readers. 

I still think it's an interesting idea to structure time around words or concepts rather than around a Calendar and a Task List, and I have a fun list of alphabetical topics that I had all kinds of good intentions of writing about:

• Innovation / Introversion / Inspiration
• Journey vs. destination / Julie & Julia / Joy / Justice (vs. Peace, South Africa Truth & Reconciliation)
• Kindness
• Language / Learning / Lists / Love
• Meditation / Middle Path
• Nature / Nature Conservancy
• Organized (Zero Sum possessions) / Observer vs. participant / Optimist
• Privacy (celebrity culture, right to privacy, thesis "Right to be let alone" Brandeis 1905)  / Patience / Persistence / Potential / Peace
• and Quiet / Question authority / Quality (Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
• Rest and Relaxation (renew / retreat / restore)
• Safari (Africa in May)
• Travel / Trust

I'm still working on learning to fail faster.  The goal of having a blog is not to set myself up with another set of expectations that I'm not meeting and to feel bad about not writing; it's to have an open venue to share my writing.

My summer of writing in Keystone worked very well for me.  I immersed myself in my apparently never-ending novel and made good progress on The North Side of Trees.  I hiked some, read some, and deeply enjoyed the freedom of entire weeks without a single appointment on my calendar.  It was entertaining to let my introvert self have free rein.  My theory was that I'd come back to Boulder this fall and switch into extrovert mode, but that hasn't turned out the way I planned either.  I've loved reconnecting with friends and family, but my introvert self really loves solitude and contemplative time.  I remember a teacher, Wes Nisker, at a meditation retreat at Spirit Rock being asked when he had developed a committed daily meditation practice, which he had been doing for over 30 years.  He answered, "When I needed to."  I cherish my alone time.  I still haven't needed to develop a daily meditation practice, but I find that my self, and therefore my days, are calmer if I take / make time for silence and solitude.

An old dormant skill that I revived this summer in which I'm finding a nice mix of creative productivity and meditative quiet time is knitting.  My father taught me to knit when I was a young girl, but I hadn't made anything craft-y since I crocheted a couple of afghans during college, which makes it more than 20 years ago.  My mother-in-law, Cecelia, is a beautiful knitter and raved about the yarn store in Frisco during an extended stay in Keystone during the summer of 2008.  I decided that I would have / make / take time this summer to sit and enjoy making gifts with my very own hands. 

The first thing I made was a simple repeat pattern scarf for my Mom's birthday in August:

  

Then I made a more complicated basketweave pattern scarf with a ribbed edge for my sister Martha's birthday in September.  The photographs don't do justice to the vibrancy of the alpaca yarn since they're against the background of my gray desktop.

 

Then I used the same pattern and yarn but in a different color for a scarf for Cecelia's birthday, also in September.  I was extra careful to go back and tear out any mistakes and knit again since I really wanted her scarf to be as close to perfect as I could get it.  I loved this blue color for her.

And the back or "wrong" side is very square and regular, too:

 
And then I used the same basketweave pattern with a chunky alpaca yarn called Urban Autumn on big fat needles for my friend Ilana's birthday scarf in October.  It's great how variegated yarns make their own color pattern within a stitch pattern. 

 

 
  

I'm working on a two different projects now, one of which isn't even a scarf!  Part of the fun of knitting is that you can increase the difficulty as you achieve mastery so that you're often working in a flow state -- and it's a nice meditation to think lovingkindness thoughts of the recipient of the gift as you knit along.