Subway Knitter is a blog devoted to knitting in public. Mystery Knitter of the Week is my favorite part; a feature in which she shows covert photos of strangers knitting on the subway, in airports, and even walking down the street.

Highly entertaining, although in future I may be torn between focusing on my commuting project and scanning for sneaky photographers.

Meabh Warburton’s post, Disappointing Day, sends my thinking in several directions:

To delightful collections of useless objects similar to her son’s bowl of broken pencil leads. I have a small jar filled with the little zig zag ends I cut off zippers at a time when I was sewing dozens of zipper bags.

In the same drawer I keep a box of cat whiskers, picked up off the floor with a “thank you!” to the cat who gifted it.

My thinking also goes to how difficult yet necessary it is to fail in the studio. It’s good to hear Andy Goldsworthy saying he makes a lot of crap when I admire his work so much. I’ve also heard that the Modernist painter Rawlston Crawford said “I reserve the right to make bad art”; a good reminder not to get too precious about results.

But when time in the studio is limited, and desperately needed, I need the encouragement that comes from success. Or at least from being satisfied with the general direction. To finally be working, and then look at the piece and see it’s limitations; that’s hard. So it’s good to know that I’m not alone, and to hear about the bad days.

One of my favorite recipes is the savory Russian Carrot Pie from Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest. (If you make it, try the nut crust with almonds and pecans.)

I like to make two and freeze one for later. If I can keep the tigers at bay…

Friday night. That feeling of being rich with two full days ahead and no plans. Time is passing so fast, weeks blinking by; I feel that I’m in a rushing river when I’d like to be on the bridge, looking down and playing Pooh Sticks. Reminds me of a Laurie Anderson lyric:

Days go by. And they just keep going by… endlessly.
Endlessly pulling you… into the future.

Yet there is also grace in this relentlessness. I am in my life; full of it. Finding balance, losing step, and finding balance again.

It may be November before I have a picture of my newly completed beret on my head. In the meantime I can tell you that it’s cute and comfy, and give you a picture of sunlight shining through the knitting, exposing the incidental nifty little flower at the center.

I read a lovely post by Soule Mama yesterday about the quiet you can find in cities.

This morning I left home a little early, and as I rounded the corner onto Myrtle Avenue, the main shopping strip in my neighborhood, I saw a large V of geese flying overhead. Then I realized that I could hear them. Over my iPod.

I took my earphones out and stood staring, head back, watching the lead bird fall back and another goose take it’s place.

Deep joy.

(photo c/o the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA is redoing their website, so for now the link has disappeared. Hopefully it’ll be back soon.)

Noodling around the internet today; I landed at Magpie & Cake where I saw this photograph of artist Chris Cobb’s installation, There is Nothing Wrong in this Whole Wide World, at Adobe Books in San Francisco.

Reading the quote from an interview with Cox I found this:

In some Native American cultures, if you make something, you have to then sleep with it next to you overnight, so that the object is transformed through your dreaming.

A little synchronistic encouragement from the universe after my last post.

I love objects organized by color beyond any reasonable explanation. I feel a deep sense of satisfaction and pleasure similar to when I color matched my mother’s sewing supplies as a child.

Something I still do with my own.

I’ve found my way back to making jewelry after several weeks of no focused design time. The absence was bugging me, and once I broke through the itchy aggravating wall of studio reentry, I felt better.

These are early morning pictures. I like to leave out new work and see how I feel about it when I’ve had some time away. It’s like a new friend; are you really as cool as I thought last night? Or new back-to-school clothes, which I liked to leave right by my bed so that I could feel them as I fell asleep, and see them as soon as I opened my eyes.

Sunday night and I’m still tired. A month into adjusting to a new schedule, new outside work, and increased commuting, I figure it’ll take another month or two to recover my stride.

I’m spending daily chunks on public transportation. A week ago I watched the man in front of me on the bus crochet a hat at high velocity as we bumped along. Just when I was wondering if he was following a pattern, he carefully took off the wonderful hat he was wearing (and had obviously made) and placed the little hat-to-be, yarmulke-style, on his head, checking that the shaping was correct. By the time I got off he had it down to his ears.

Inspired by this sighting as well as by Jude over at Spirit Cloth who quilts while commuting, and having run out of reading material, I have started knitting while traveling. I thought I’d feel self-conscious but I’m far too absorbed for that. And when standing on the subway, I’m far too busy keeping my balance. (I’ve found that bracing against the door frame and keeping my knees bent works well.)

It’s amazing how much I can get done in these in-between times. I finished a beret in a few days, a bigger version of the Purl Bee pattern, which is being blocked as I write, stretched over a dinner plate.