Taking Time to Smell the Roses

Here are the pics of the Concertina Lace Socks in Lion Brand Sock-Ease that I promised to show you. (You can click these smaller pics to see a larger picture in a separate browser window.)

This is color #204 Lemon Drop. I chose the gold colorway for these Concertina Socks, as I was smitten with the beautiful bright yellow/gold Cajun accordions last fall at the Acadian Festival in Lafayette. That is why I am calling them my “Cajun Gold” socks!

Over last weekend, I played with the Lion Brand Sock-Ease in my pattern Country Girl Socks. This is color #206 Sour Ball. This color ’spoke’ to me for making these socks because I really think of lush countryside and green as going together, lol.

Sock-Ease has nice long sections of the main color interspersed with short sections of 2 accent colors. This creates larger solid areas of color when knitted than would usually be the case for most variegated yarns. I think this allows the lace stitches to stand out nicely even amongst the relatively large contrast of the other colors.

Here’s another view of the sock from the front. Note the foot-flattering instep detail as the lace transitions from leg to the wide ribbing down foot.

Next up is Concertina Lace Socks in the bright yellow colorway that Lion Brand calls Lemon Drop. Check back soon to see pics (I hope). Meantime, I am off to play a bridge tournament this weekend!

December - Woosh! Where has the month gone? For me, the clock always seems to speed up as the holidays approach and the year is ending!

My month started off with teaching a class at John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown NC for their Holiday in the Mountains week. This was a special holiday class I titled A Winter Wonderland in Beads and Knitted Lace. I had four enthusiastic and wonderfully creative students - Tricia, Ginny, Alice and Reyn. Check out Tricia’s blog where she shares her photos from the Friday afternoon showing.

John is visiting for Christmas, and my son and daughter are in town, but other than that I am not having very much time for holiday celebrations. I am up to my ears in knitting!

I have a rush project for Mountain Colors and Lorna’s Laces which I just couldn’t bring myself to turn down (I really liked the marketing premise and it has good potential), so I can blame no one else but myself for getting into this time pinch. That, along with the other new patterns I hope to release next month and various samples for yarn companies have me busy-busy-busy. But I am happy and life looks good.

As a member of Association of Knitwear Designers (AKD), I volunteered to knit some swatches for the Great Wall of Yarn (GWOY) that will be displayed at the TNNA trade show in Long Beach CA next month. Here are the yarns that I will be swatching.

As just one of the many benefits of being an AKD member, it is sort of neat to get to see and work with new yarns and colors — sometimes even before they are released! I’ll post more information about each yarn over the next few days, along with pictures of the display samples I am playing around with.

Enjoy the week of holiday celebrations! Happy Christmas Eve and blessed Christmas Day to you and yours.

Look what showed up from the post office. Pretty pathetic, heah?

The results of this post office mutilation came with the usual “We Care” message, and how sorry they are that the enclosed document was inadvertently damaged. Well, to me it looks like they maimed, beat it to death, and stomped on it some more afterwards just for good measure!

There is nothing left except a torn and crumpled, blackened front side of a security envelope. I can’t identify whose hand-writing this is. The area where a return address might have been is missing. So I am at a loss as to who had written me and what is missing from inside. Can you help me solve this mystery?

It’s not like I need another distraction, but I have been dreaming of having a cajun accordian (technically a diatonic accordian in the German melodean style) ever since I fell in love watching Andre of the Lost Bayou Ramblers playing the summer of 2005 (that is how the inspiration for the Concertina Lace Socks design came about).  

Well, my dream has come true finally. When I was over in Lafayette, Louisiana last month for Festivals Acadiens, I went by the Martin Accordians shop beforehand and ordered an accordian to be custom-built for me by Junior Martin. I got a call from him mid-week that he had completed it (yay!), and John picked it up for me on his way over here this weekend. So now I am the proud owner of this beauty in birdseye maple.

Of course, Andre makes playing his accordian look effortless and sound so good (and he is good-looking, too!). I have a LOT of practicing ahead of me to anywhere reach near to that level, lol.

Sorry to be offline for so long. First I was tied up with traveling, then life threw me a curve ball. I normally am an upbeat person, so trying to write while my mood has not been the best had been just too painful. But I need to look forward and have faith that things happen for the best, even if we can’t understand why at the time. Onward …

I haven’t yet even been able to pick up my knitting needles — I am still feeling so stressed out. Although sometimes I find knitting helps relieve stress, this particular emotional anxiety has quelched any motivation towards creativity. That’s bad! So I need to do something about that because I DO love to knit.

A nice thing happened yesterday and I want to share it with you. I stumbled across an email that my friend Margaret Pittman (Heritage Yarns) sent me several years ago. I believe the original might have been posted on her Christian friends yahoo list. Yesterday I quickly read through, but today I am going to re-type every word here so that I can better reflect on each point. I think there is some really good stuff here, and I hope it might be helpful to you somehow, also. Thank you Margaret.

36 Christian Ways to Reduce Stress

1. Pray.
2. Go to bed on time.
3. Get up on time so you can start the day unrushed.
4. Say NO to projects that won’t fit into your time schedule or that will compromise your mental health.
5. Delegate tasks to capable others.
6. Simplify and unclutter your life.
7. Less is more. (Although one is often not enough, two are often too many.)
8. Allow extra time to do things and to get to places.
9. Pace yourself. Spread out big changes and difficult projects over time; don’t lump the hard things all together.
10. Take one day at a time.
11. Separate worries from concerns. If a situation is a concern, find out what God would have you to do and let go of the anxiety. If you can’t do anything about a situation, forget it.
12. Live within your budget; don’t use credit cards for ordinary purchases.
13. Have backups; an extra car key in your wallet, an extra house key buried in the garden, extra stamps, etc.,
14. K.M.S. (Keep Mouth Shut.) This single piece of advice can prevent an enormous amount of trouble.
15. Do something for the Kid in You everyday.
16. Carry a Bible with you to read while waiting in line.
17. Get enough exercise.
18. Eat right.
19. Get organized so everything has its place.
20. Listen to a tape while driving that can help improve your quality of life.
21. Write thoughts and inspirations down.
22. Every day, find time to be alone.
23. Having problems? Talk to God on the spot. Try to nip small problems in the bud. Don’t wait until its time to go to bed to try and pray.
24. Make friends with Godly people.
25. Keep a folder of favorite scriptures on hand.
26. Remember that the shortest bridge between despair and hope is often a good “Thank you Jesus!”.
27. Laugh.
28. Laugh some more!
29. Take your work seriously, but yourself not at all.
30. Develop a forgiving attitude (most people are doing the best they can).
31. Be kind to unkind people (they probably need it the most).
32. Sit on your ego.
33. Talk less; listen more.
34. Slow down.
35. Remind yourself that you are not the general manager of the universe.
36. Every night before bed, think of one thing you’re grateful for that you’ve never been grateful for before.

Almost the whole year of 2006 gone - whoosh! Before it gets away totally, and in keeping with “taking time to smell the roses”, I I treated myself, son Tommy and old friend John to champagne brunch at Hotel Intercontinental for Christmas day. Talk about a lot of good food! It’s great when someone else is doing the cooking and cleaning up. Here we are in a quick candid shot taken by one of our attentive servers.

This month slipped by and I really never got into the holiday decorating or cooking mode. I did get up to the attic though, when looking for my old Christmas cookie cutters while thinking of ideas of a family holiday cookie recipe to contribute to Tink Boord-Dill’s Holiday Bake Along. (You’ll see that I ended up submitting an easy drop meringue cookie recipe. The cookie cutters will have to wait until next year when I have more time (maybe?).

Anyway, while in the attic, I spied one of the hand-crafted holiday decorations that my Mom had made. This particular piece has always had a special place in my heart, and is especially special now that my Mom is no longer on this earth.

It is a Christmas tree in long needlepoint stitches using acrylic yarn on plastic canvas, embellished with foil baubles and plastic beads. Not something that I would do, but my Mom loved this kind of thing and was always generous in gifting me and my other two sisters with the fruits of her love and labor. I sometimes would lightly chide her about the quality of the materials she’d use, but she enjoyed what she was doing with what she had.

Now, I probably should have been more selective in which holiday decorations I store in the attic. Although the attic is walk-in off my second floor studio, vented and has an automatic fan that kicks on above a set temperature, our New Orleans heat can really build up!

You’ve probably guessed it — when I picked up the decoration, the clear plastic canvas backing started crumbling into pieces. Fortunately the opaque green canvas and all the stitching is still in place. It just goes to show us that we need to pay attention to the quality of the materials we use in our artistic creations, as well as pay attention to the care and keeping of things that we’ve invested our time in.

Otherwise time and our handcrafts may just crumble away.

Even after taking early retirement from a day job in corporate America, I still keep busier than ever. I loved what I did as a systems analyst, but I didn’t love being on someone else’s schedule. I would often become frustrated with corporate politics, and I hated driving to and from work in the dreadful traffic.

So now my work is all play … well almost … But we can talk about that another time…. The line between my so-called work and personal time is often blurred, and often leads me to getting over-involved in a single aspect of life while forgetting to take time to do some other fun things for variety. This blog is dedicated to my search, and maybe yours too, in finding balance in life and rediscovering the simple things in life.