Unraveled Wednesday | 1.4.23

Unraveled Wednesday | 1.4.23

Greetings dearest Unravelers!

New Year, New Project? Or New Year, New Technique?

For me, the answer right now… on the first Wednesday of 2023 is neither! (Although, I’d really like to overcome my Brioche Fear in 2023, but I don’t think January is the month for that!)

My last project of 2022 was Gniclaus, the brother of Gnoelle. He is the present carrier for Gnoelle, who just tells him what to pack! A third sibling is in process as you can see above!

I also want to share what I did with those snowflakes. I had hoped for a “glamor shot” of them, but days and days of rain have made pictures… challenging. But gosh, I learned so much from the tips that Dropcloth Samplers shared. If you want to do some embroidery this year… and you don’t have a clue where to start… I highly recommend them! The Trio of Snowflakes will grace our Happy Hour Table during the winter. So.Much.Fun. And I have some ideas knocking about my brain for a spring cloth as well!

I have done no other knitting, but I have been busting through my Base 12 Spin from Hipstrings. I am more than halfway done… I am spinning them in order, Number 6 is in process currently so I just have 7, 8, 9, A, B, and 10 to go.

I also did some plying in the “Dead Week” and will finish the single spinning as soon as I am done with the Base 12 spin. I have made excellent notes on singles speed, plying speed, and this yarn will be my next sweater project. What sweater? I have an idea, but until I knit up some gauge swatches, I won’t know what might work.

I am reading GREAT books currently! My Daytime Listen is Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. It is curious, and engaging. I am enjoying it tremendously!

My read with my eyes book is Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons. Gah! I am loving it… and the books dedication blew me away, and drew me instantly in:

“For Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony triggered this narrative.”

YES! Oh hell yes! I am hoping this book will release my inner dragon. LOL Anyway, I am eager to see where this book goes and a huge thanks to KMKat for putting this book on my radar!

I’d also like to thank Kym and Bonny for their reviews of two books I had on hold… thanks to them, I removed the holds. Speaking of book reviews… if you are Goodreads, please leave reviews. What you liked, what worked, what you didn’t like, what didn’t work, etc. They are so helpful for other readers…me especially! Ha!

Anyways, that is all I have to share today. A new painting class drops tomorrow! I am excited!

So… back to my opening questions: Are you casting on a new project this week, or are you going to learn a new technique? Or are you combining the two!?

As always, if you wrote a post to share please lave your link below and thank you!


Welcome to My Word | 1.2.23

Welcome to My Word | 1.2.23

Hello 2023 and Hello Authenticity!

It has been a bit of a journey to get here, but the time for dancing around the elephant in the room is done.

I am going to bring some baggage with me though, which I am hoping will make this journey a bit easier…yay for all I learned from my previous words!

I started a journey with a word back in 2017… I picked joy and had no idea what I was doing. At all. It was a true bust of a word and so I did not pick a word at all in 2018. But I spent time in 2018 researching One Little Word… specifically the why of choosing a word. And so with several pages of notes in my journal, I decided to try again in 2019.

And so I began my year of Focus. I did not understand the power of that a quote could have over the course of the year, but I started off with Eckhart Tolle, Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. It was a good year, and I began to “get” the value that a word could bring to your life.

I moved into 2020 expanding focus a bit more and: the Year of Intentional Living was born. This time I focused entirely on a single quote by the wise Mary Anne Radmacher, Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen Hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is. And over the course of the year, I contemplated all the delicious bits of her quote. I kept my focus, and yes, I absolutely began the process of Intentional Living. And from there, I wanted my journey to go where I will this year… but it did not feel right. I had a good amount of unfinished business to sort out.

I knew that I could not have one scintilla of authenticity until I could release so much. Hello, 2021… the Dreaded Year of Release. It was a year of hard work… and I was so happy to be done. Although, I am far from done… I made a very good start!

2022 was a much better year… and after letting so much stuff go, I spent the year learning about being Full… with the delightful help of Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day. It was such a good word… and it was a wonderful year. I learned so much. And still… Focus, Intentional Living, and Release were very much still a part of my journey. You see, I realized early on that words could be building blocks, each word providing a base for the next word to grow from.

And as 2022 began to draw to a close, authenticity began to reappear on my radar… regularly. And so, with great trepidation… I will embrace authenticity in 2023. I have a good foundation, I think I am ready for this exciting word!

Welcome to my Year of Authenticity! And January is always so much fun as I dig in and see what authenticity has to reveal!

I will be back on Wednesday with some Unraveling… a New Year of Making Intentions post!

P.S. That photo above is my bright, shining, sans makeup, freshly 63 err…62-year-old face! (I do know how old I am…most days! LOL) Grey hair? Yep! A wrinkle to two? Absolutely!! Yes, my first step into authenticity will be getting comfortable with images of myself!

 

 

An Unraveled Review | 12.28.22

An Unraveled Review | 12.28.22

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I have been stumbling around trying to figure out how to share the books that I have read this year. And then, yesterday, dear Bonny lit the path with her brilliant post of her reading! Thank you so very much, Bonny!

This year, I set my “reading goal” at 60 books and while I have read many more than 60 books… the number is not a thing for me at all. Rather, I am looking to spend a year with books that “knock me out” as it were… thank you Mr. Salinger for that. And yes, books that make me wish the author was a friend… oh gosh, I wish this so often. I had a year of those kinds of books… knock out books that left me wishing that the authors were all my friends!

The other “big thing” for me this year was the fact that there were so few 5-star books. I tried to set myself on a better path for book ratings… and this year most of the books I deeply loved, the “knock outs” were 4-star books. I think this is a very good thing… because it elevated those 5-star books a bit higher… which a 5-star book should be!

And so let’s begin with some of the best of the best, shall we?

Knock Out’s, most certainly (and I absolutely do wish I was friends with every.single.author listed!!)
Books to warm your heart for days on end
Books that Changed My Life, Opened My Mind, and Educated Me in all The Very Best Ways

I am currently reading an ARC of Maggie Smith’s memoir that will be out early next year. It is incredible and, if I finish it this week… it will be the best book memoir I read all year. It is so insanely good… I don’t want it to end, so I am rationing the reading to make it last! Do yourself a favor… pre-order it ASAP!

There you have my 2022 reading… it was such a very good year!


Now, a tiny post script for the Year of Gnomes. Gnoelle has made it very clear that she is but one of three siblings. Yes, triplets. And I need to get knitting PRONTO to bring her siblings to life. I am on it, Gnoelle! I am not sure I can get them done before the New Year…it would be something to Knit Three Gnomes in December! All I can do is try, hahaha!


As always, if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below and thank you!

I think I will be back on Friday…but if I am not, it simply means that the knitting has overtaken the blogging! Haha!


Full, Filling, Empty | December 2022

Full, Filling, Empty | December 2022

Filling what’s empty and emptying what’s full.
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

I have spent a year contemplating full and it has been a wise use of my time! I used Mary Oliver’s Summer Day as my starting point, and particularly these lines:

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And so I began… thinking about how to fill my days and, more specifically, what to fill them with!

It soon became apparent to me that being full was a thing in flux…full, filling, empty. Full is not a “one and done” concept and that in order to appreciate full – I needed emptiness as well.

And, likewise, I quickly learned that there was little to appreciate in being “overly full.” Leaving space for more enhanced full…tremendously.

And so the sweet spot of filling became a thing I thought about every day… not just the filling, but the things I filled my day with!

But this does not end my journey with full… I will continue on and I am so excited about how full will fit with my new word for 2023!

I want to thank Carolyn for her continued inspiration in the power that a word can do for your days, weeks, months, and yes… years!

See you back here on Wednesday as I unravel my year of reading!

 

 

A Final pre-Holiday RIFF | 12.23.22

A Final pre-Holiday RIFF | 12.23.22

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime. ― Laura Ingalls Wilder

Today, I hope to do a bit of what Halfpint so nobly encourages us to do… but perhaps a bit less reverently, ha! So let’s get RIFFing!

Read (poetry) —

I heard this poem this week and have not stopped thinking about it. A good poem will do that… linger, niggle, inch into your thoughts. Kay Ryan is one of those poets… her work lingers…wonderfully.

Crib

by Kay Ryan

From the Greek for
woven or plaited,
which quickly translated
to basket. Whence the verb
crib, which meant “to filch”
under cover of wicker
anything–some liquor,
a cutlet.
For we want to make off
with things that are not
our own. There is a pleasure
theft brings, a vitality
to the home.
Cribbed objects or answers
keep their guilty shimmer
forever, have you noticed?
Yet religions downplay this.
Note, for instance, in our
annual rehearsals of innocence,
the substitution of manger for crib
as if we ever deserved that baby,
or thought we did.

Kay Ryan, The Best of It © Grove Press, April 2011. 

In (unity) —

Michelle Obama knit us all together with the image that she posted on IG this week of a sweater she knit for a baby. This wondrous thing we do, that causes us to oooh and aaah over the things other makers knit. We understand… knitting is not quick and so we lift each other up. It is one of the best parts of this community.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Michelle Obama (@michelleobama)

Fun, fun, fun! —

For those of you who enjoyed Knives Out (I did for a variety of reasons!) there is a new mystery dropping today on Netflix… Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. More Daniel Craig over the holiday weekend? Yes, please! Hahaha

Festivus —

That’s right… today is Festivus! What is that you might ask? Perhaps this can explain it all better…

And with that… Happy Festivus for the Rest of Us! I will see you back here on Monday!

I hope your holidays, however you celebrate them, are overflowing with every good thing!

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