I wasn’t the kind of mother who knitted “Mommy and Me” matching sweaters when my daughters were little, but I seem to be making up for lost time now that my younger daughter is an adult. The way that generally happens is that I try out a new idea for myself that would work well … More My Baby and Me
My annual Swatchathon at the beginning of every new year is usually my test bed for most of the knitting I’m going to do in the course of the year. That mostly didn’t happen in 2021, not because my 2021 Swatchathon failed to provide interesting ideas– it did– but because 2021 came around and I … More January 2022 Swatchathon
Being BFF’s with the owner of a thriving yarn store has tangible perks for a dedicated knitter. Many knitters, and I’m one of them, accumulate more yarn than they can ever knit during their time on earth. We call it SABLE, an acronym for “stash acquisition beyond life expectancy”, and it sounds like a joke, … More Melissa’s Largesse
When I previously wrote about using the machine knitting method Diana Sullivan calls “sew as you go”, which joins a new piece of knitting to the edge stitch of a previously knitted piece, I had made three variations on a sweater formula I’d developed and a pair of socks with a wavy shape built into … More More Panels
I had aged out of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books by the time they were published in the 1970’s, so they were a delightful new discovery when my husband and I came across them during our daughters’ early childhood at the beginning of the 1990’s. I remember we even had a VHS tape of … More Down the Rabbit Hole with Frog and Toad
For my first couple of years of dyeing yarn using foraged local plant materials, a good true orange was the color I craved and never achieved. It took me a while to realize that the fulfillment of my desires was in the trash and the pantry. I have written about the magic transformation I get … More A Bunch of Oranges
I’m not the first to have noticed that the limitations of my skills and equipment stimulate designs that get around those limitations or turn them into design features. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. Or is it “mother is the invention of necessity”? Or “invention is the necessity of mother”? Whatever, last spring … More A Panel Discussion
Q: When you’re retired, what’s the difference between everyday life and vacation? A: Packing. I’m being facetious, but that reflects the fact of my privileged little life, in which what I do every day is what I want to do every day no matter where I am. Every summer, preferably in July to escape Baltimore’s … More Continuity of Operations
Last fall, when the pokeberries were ripe, I experimented with extracting their color by soaking them in vinegar in hopes of getting a more durable dye than I had previously gotten by fermenting the berries in water. In October I collected bags and bags of this invasive species and stuffed them into 2-quart plastic tomato … More Moldy Oldies
While I was working on my master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies during my pre-knitting 20’s, I encountered an Israeli artist who attempted to explain to me the logic of her color use in one of her works. At that stage in my life, my focus was on learning the morphology of Arabic words so … More Maybe It’s Maybelline…
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 