I love this quote from Marion Woodman:

If you travel far enough,
one day you will recognize yourself
coming down the road to meet you.
And you will say
YES.

Yes.

Another excavated photo; I had completely forgotten knitting this elbow patch for my college roommate’s sweater. This could be a good solution for both my moth-damaged woolens and my unused box of knitted swatches.

Last weekend there was a pretty bad leak in my bathroom, and the water traveled, causing some speedy dragging of belongings out of closets. I still haven’t restored order, but the upside is that I’m finally sorting through those boxes that remained unpacked after moving, and the piles of papers that get hurriedly shoved into hiding whenever I have guests.

One uncovered treat is the stack of photographs I took in my final semester of art school. And this one seemed right for today, when snow is predicted, and the heater keeps revving up, and the landscape is monochromatic. This is the path to Tyningham beach, not too far from Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s one of my favorite places. The shadows and lush green promise peace as you transition from the fields to the sea, through the forest.

I’ve had a considerable amount of dental work done over the past year. I go to a university dental school where the students are required to seek the approval of faculty before they do any thing, which makes for a lot of waiting. I usually bring a book, but yesterday I had my knitting.

There was a classic rock station playing, and here’s what I have to report: You’re The One That I Want from Grease makes for some serious speed-knitting. Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly With His Song, not so much.

I am ridiculously pleased with my fingerless mittens. This whole blocking the knitting properly was magical; they’re soft and smooth, and they fit well at my wrists, a bonus just when I had resigned myself to their slight saggyness.

This little bird is whispering, “Put on all your brightest clothes and dance around the room.”

I love it when I find cash in the pocket of some long-unworn item of clothing. Today I was sorting through a pile of papers. Near the bottom I found an envelope with “home studio” written on it, and inside $20.

I have a big bright studio now. And it’s also my home. There’s a lot to be said for putting money in an envelope labeled with your dream.

I recently unearthed this wood lino block print I made ten years ago. Saved it for today.

When I was little and stayed home sick, there were some very specific things I liked to do. I liked to get out all my mother’s issues of 100 Idées (my all-time favorite magazine) and I would leaf through them, dreaming of building tree houses, embroidering blouses, hosting tea parties, and mailing letters with envelopes painted to match the stamps. After reading the magazines, I would organize them; stacking them first by month, then chronologically. Neatly.

I would move on to her sewing box, which was a brown Tupperware container with a removable divided tray. She had a pincushion with a band of elastic so she could wear in on her wrist while sewing. It became threadbare from use and she replaced the fabric on top with a scrap from a skirt she made for herself, and passed on to me a couple of years ago:

I liked to take her glass-headed pins and stick them into the cushion, placing them where the pinheads matched the colors in the fabric as closely as possible. A mosaic on the surface. Then I categorized her buttons: by size, by color, by number of holes… those that were loners, and those that came in multiples.

We have a home movie of me, age 6, sewing beads onto fabric. Thirty years later my whole life is built around making things from beads, yarn and cloth, which makes me wonder why I ever bothered questioning my life path at all? Maybe it just takes a while to accept the six-year-old’s passions.

I think it’s time I reread Daybook by Anne Truitt. I think I remember her quoting the sculptor David Smith saying that it takes fifteen years to make an artist. It seems to me that it’s taken that long to get over my schooling, and to give in to who I am. A long beginning.

I finished the first of my fingerless mittens last night. My cursory reading of the pattern led to the increases being in the wrong place, and offset instead of symmetrical, but I’m surprisingly un-bothered by this imperfection. Besides, there’s the second mitten in which to get it right.

Here’s the close-to-finished mitt:

and a close up of the flower pattern:

Stash is almost as good a word as swatch. It conjures squirrels, eccentrics, and tubs filled with yarn – all good things.

Liza sent me this article which argues that we should change the way we think about our stashes of craft supplies and consider them instead a collection. There must be something in the air because the Yarn Harlot had just posted about “pet skeins” of yarn, and The Next Stop Will Be was coming out about his accumulation of watches.

I love collections, like with like. As a young teenager I told my grandmother that I wanted to collect something, and soon afterwards she gave me three small boxes.

The silver one in the middle is from her time in India and still contains red pigment used for bindis.

Over the years those three boxes were joined by more, like this one from a friend who traveled to China:

and these four in my bathroom.

Good thing she didn’t get me started on something large!