This month’s post is a show-and-tell minus the tell, because I’m up to my ears in not-ready-for-primetime projects. I try to manage my crafted production so that I have something finished and ready to blog about in detail every month, but this month threatens to go by without a post. Not because I have been … More Progress Report
Every now and then, one sees articles about mathematicians and physicists who take up knitting and then begin analyzing their new craft from the standpoint of their academic specialty. The knitting itself is ordinary beginner work, but the scientist-knitters get very excited about the physical characteristics of how a one-dimensional material can create a three-dimensional … More More on Optimization
A couple of weeks ago I posted a selfie of myself wearing my newly completed pullover paired with a scarf I had needle-felted a couple of years ago, and I got some nice comments from a couple of people who have known me for a very long time. The first comment, from Lynda, complimented me … More My Colorful Past
The weather has gotten colder in places north of the 45th Parallel, where I know people whose temperature control is important to me. Stocking them with knitted winter survival gear gave me the opportunity to play with an idea that is so ubiquitous that we don’t even notice it in daily life. That is, the … More When Vertical Lines Meet Horizontal Lines
Yarn talks to me. Its colors tell me stories about time, place, and memory, and sometimes it tells me about the Big Issues in Life. It doesn’t happen because the colors are pretty. It happens because the colors have a message. In fact it’s more likely to happen when the colors are strange, even unappealing … More Love and Death
I have self-imposed rules for obtaining the plants I use for plant dyeing, which boil down to being a scavenger and using only plants that I find or am given or rescue from the garbage bin. I don’t pay for my dye materials or use materials that could be eaten. And then I broke my … More The Hunt for Red September
Over the past nine months I have been experimenting with the basics of plant dyeing using scavenged materials. The thrill of uncovering beautiful colors hidden inside ordinary plants that I never noticed before, or food waste that I would have thrown away without a thought, could almost have distracted me from the fact that I … More What Happens After You Dye?
I have a collection of Wollmeise lace yarn that is several times beyond SABLE, a useful acronym in knitting jargon that breaks out to “Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy.” I use this yarn exclusively by choice and necessity, since I have so much that I can’t consider buying other kinds of yarn. I love Wollmeise because of the … More Don’t Just Live– Dye!
When I was about 6 years old, my 13-year-old sister told me that white goes with everything. Of course I believed her. She was a teenager and she knew everything. White is known to be pure, basic, modern, minimalistic. White is a blank slate, an empty page. But my work with color has brought me … More White: Color’s Secret Frenemy
My first job out of college was a position as a library assistant in a chichi Harvard Square architecture company that was responsible for some of the ugliest buildings to blight the Middle East. This job taught me several valuable lessons, listed in ascending order of importance: I didn’t want to be an architect. Aside from the … More Deconstructing the Shell Game
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 