OMG!  IT’S HER!

Yesterday was the long awaited Stephanie Pearl-McPhee aka Yarn Harlot visit and talk at Mt. Magazine Lodge here in Arkansas and it was crazy good!  The subject was “This Is Your Brain On Knitting” and covered the how and why knitters/fiber artists are (usually) so calm, cool and collected.  Hint:  Theta waves.  Knitters and other fiber artists have known about the benefits of playing with fiber for probably centuries, but it was really neat and affirming to have actual scientific studies proving what we’ve known all along.  Besides being the consummate knitter and knitterly author, she’s a very engaging and likable speaker – someone you’d LOVE to be sitting next to at the next knit night.  Thanks, Stephanie, for visiting and sharing with us your humor and wisdom.  It was a blast!!!   By the way, she’s from Toronto, Canada and arrived with the first ever May snowfall in Arkansas; she joked that she was the first person to visit Arkansas in May and wish she were back home in Toronto warming up!  It was COLD – snowing and sleeting hard when we left the Lodge for the drive home to Little Rock.  More about the knitting fun in the next post – so onward and upward.

NEW SKILL

I’ve lately been sort of obsessed with crochet, more specifically, granny squares.  I know the basics of crochet, it’s just not been my craft of choice.  I can do it well enough to finish a knitting project, like joining pieces together or making a neat, sort of lacy edge, but that’s about it.  It’s not that I don’t like to crochet, it’s OK, I’d probably like it a whole lot better if I practiced and got better, I just haven’t – up until now.  I saw the prettiest crocheted scarf at my LYS last week, very light, very airy and very soft and, well, that lit my fire.  I don’t know about you, but crochet always brings to mind stiff, scratchy, thick and heavy (think out-dated and ugly acrylic).  Light, soft and airy were words I just didn’t associate with crochet but I’ll admit it, I was wrong.  So, I found a book that had nothing but granny squares, grabbed some leftover sock yarn and a hook that I didn’t know I had and gave it a try.  It will probably never replace knitting as my #1 obsession, but, there’s still something nice, rhythmic and satisfying about watching string reinvent itself into something more interesting,  all the time getting more comfortable with the whole hook thing and the way it all comes together to make a square.  Here’s a look at my first efforts:

I know the colors are funky – it’s leftover sock yarn!

SPEAKING OF REINVENTION

In The Knitter’s Life List, a book I’m currently hooked on, one of the things listed is to unravel and recycle yarn from another, not so cherished, project.  That idea has been hanging out at the back of my mind for a week or so, especially when I found a sweater I knitted lord knows how long ago that was so poorly knitted and put together that it immediately was relegated to a shelf at the back of my closet, never to see the light of day.  So, a sweater so ugly I never let a camera even share its space has been reinvented and has become this:

I call it The Yarn Formerly Known as Sweater

All I can remember about it is that it’s 100% cotton.  I’ve got my eye on a nice, simple top down sweater for its reincarnation.  Something with just a little shaping and minimal seaming that will be as happily worn as it was knitted.  Do sweaters have karma?

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.  Mahatma Gandhi

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