My family is going through some very difficult things. To keep my sanity, when all the noise is pounding against the inside of my brain, I crochet. I pick up the hook, and I work the design in whatever way I choose. Before there was crocheted mandalas, crochet was a mandala. Your soul comes out in all the knots and…
When I think of her today, this is how I pray for her–that she will find joy and see the light where I believe she often sees only boredom and struggle. She often complained about things I hadn’t even noticed or ever thought of. Perhaps, she’s simply a deeper thinker than I. There’s something hidden away about her, or was. She smiled a lot, but she could turn furious on a dime and go cold at the strangest things.
If I have a long project I’m working on, I knit or crochet in front of the TV or listening to an audiobook. Two years ago, I did a Friday film review series. I want to reprise that, adding a quick pattern with each review. What do you watch when you have a lot of crocheting or knitting to do?
Just hit up Google and you’ll find a million articles insisting that suffering and creativity go hand in hand. I know a lot of people disagree with this notion, but really, there are many examples of when someone under great duress created their masterpiece. Immediately, I think of the Russians, as they seem always to be most filled with good…
…many knitters and crocheters make items for a size of women that, mostly, don’t exist–excruciatingly tiny girl-women. These patterns look great on models, but they look like potato sacks on the rest of us.
I know the trend is all skinny jeans and 80’s crop tops these days, but I’ll never lose my childhood love for 1970’s sweater jackets and knee high boots in autumn. The one I’m creating now will probably look something like these ones, but even thicker, as I want to be able to walk around Sleepy Hollow in this one.…
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know…Umberto Eco I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those knitter/crocheters (and writer/readers, for that matter) who begins a project and gets so freaking inspired by the work of it that I come up with another project. I get…
(Jean Borgos Burnett in far left corner kneeling among her husband’s-James Faye Burnett’s-Oklahoma kin. 1947) The world has lost two great influences in the last few weeks, my grandmother and David Bowie. At first sight, you’d be hard-pressed to find a decent connection between the two. One was born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York to one Jewish parent and…
I visited my grandmother, Virginia-Lee Beaird-Fitzgerald, last week, and like always our conversation drifted back to where she came from and what her mother and grandmothers were like. You might be wondering why I’d mention her entire name up there. If you knit or crochet, it should be obvious–that’s the most Celtic name a human being could have, aside from…