Rethinking due to Reassessment…

Here’s my Twitterscope for today:

Ironically, I saw that after I’d had a good heart to heart with myself about my ability to finish History On Two Needles on my own. I don’t know if I can do it, given my diminished energy and my new diagnosis of Fibromyalgia.

The book WILL get done, but I have to face the fact that things are different now – at least for the short run. I’ve been beating myself up for not getting more done on the book, but when I look at the last 6 months I realize just HOW MUCH I’ve been in pain, how difficult life has been, and how I’d been avoiding seeing that.

Barrelling through IS a good strategy, but it doesn’t work forever.

So now that I’ve been sidelined, seriously, I need to reconsider how I’m going to go about publishing this book. I think I’ll contact publishers I’ve wanted to work with for a while and see if they have any interest. I’ve already done the research, and most of the patterns are written and finished garments are ready to be photographed. I just cannot see myself arranging that as I thought I could a year ago.

I can’t tell you guys how sad this makes me. But to have the book not see the light of day would make me much sadder. So, we pick the level of our sadness, I guess, and we pick our battles.

I think the Trazodone has been helping my sleeping. I don’t think I’d realized that my sleep WAS being interrupted by pain, but it had been. I have half-awake remembrances of rolling one way and finding it agonizing, then rolling the other and finding THAT agonizing, too.

I’ve also been waking up between 5 – 7 every morning. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d been going to sleep later and later. Laying in bed felt good because I was tired, but it HURT to be in one position for very long. The Trazodone is helping me go to sleep at 11 and sleep, FULLY, until I wake up at 8 or so. Very late for me.

I guess that’s what vacations are for!

ONLINE CLASSES
And – irony of ironies – how brilliant that this is all coming to a head right when my first online class is about to start. It’s a beautiful thing, to be able to teach and not have to drive, carry bags (the hardest thing for me) walk up stairs, carry bags up stairs.

It’s nice to not have to unpack all my stuff, dance around a classroom to act out Stitch Theater, move from student to student bending over and looking at work (I’d been doing more “gather ’round me, students!” moments) and then packing everything up, carrying it out to the car and driving home. It’s good to not have to do that.

What’s been hard is finding a day when I look halfway like myself to make videos. I look at myself in the mirror and I hardly recognize myself. I look very old, very wrinkled, very tired.

So I brush my hair and put on makeup and I feel better. And today I WILL make several videos and thus be finished with the pre-recorded portion of the Combination Knitting Class.

I’m blown away by the fact that the January Combination Knitting class is sold out, and February is one space away from being sold out. I’m contemplating adding a second section to February, there’s no reason why I can’t, but I want to get an idea of how much email / chat I’ll be fielding on a week to week basis before I make that commitment. I’ll decide by mid Jan.

In the mean time I’m making a few samples for a new class, the Universal Mitered Handbag, and I cannot WAIT to get going with that class! I’m thinking hard about how best to feature a project class, how much can I expect from the students when we don’t have the 3-hour time constraint. This new way of working out classes is fascinating!

CRAZY LACE
Something else that’s fascinating is a new book I was just sent! Myra Wood’s new book, Crazy Lace, is just lovely! It’s well photographed, laid out in an easy-to-read manner, and has a lot of useful images to help a knitter through the concept of creating your own lace.

I really like the “go for it!” attitude it has about lace, that you should approach it fearlessly, with a bit of a ‘go to hell’ attitude about making sure everything is perfectly symmetrical. I think this will free up a lot of folks to begin to play with their lace.

It’s through this kind of play that we become the knitters we want to be – folks who don’t lose themselves in their knitting often have a hard time finding themselves in their knitting, too.

One thing that I thought was odd was Mrya’s use of the left leaning triple decrease in all the patterns. I think it would have been helpful to introduce the concept of a centered (or vertical) double decrease, which can add such a dramatic effect. And, like many books, this one works on the assumption that every knitter is a Western knitter (all decreases are described as if all stitches were seated on the needle in a Western fashion)

It’s understandable, but I keep hoping that as wonderful books are being independently published, the concept of a universal knitting pattern style will begin to take hold (describing decreases as left and right leaning – k2togL and k2togR – instead of using the terms SSK and K2tog, which only apply to Western knitters.)

One thing I really liked was the encouragement to BLOCK. I’m often surprised when I meet an excellent knitter in a class, someone who obviously knows all the ins and outs of creating beautiful knit fabric, but is wearing a garment that COULD be really stellar if only it were blocked.

When I mention blocking in class, often this same student will shake their head and say, “I never block!” Such a waste – to be SO close to an amazing garment and falter in the last few yards.

Blocking is easy. You don’t have to wet down your garment, you can use steam to block just about anything (I use it for EVERYTHING except mostly acrylic fibers, which can stretch out) and the results of blocking are so easy to see, it feels like you’ve just performed a miracle. This is especially true in lace knitting, when the increases and decreases need to be opened up as only blocking can do.

If folks who read Crazy Lace start blocking more, it will be a wonderful thing for all knitting in general!

FAMILY TREE
I’ve discovered Ancestry.com and it’s a real work stopper. Fortunately I can’t afford the $155 for the whole year, so I’ll be out before my 14 day free trial is over. But I’m enjoying it right now!

Here’s one branch of my father’s family that I’ve been looking up. Is it true? Who knows.

This does, though, give a good amount of information so I can begin using other resources to verify what I’ve found. I know the connection to the Cunninghams is solid (we used to go to the Modesitt/Cunningham reunion when I was a kid) and the walk back from Cunninghams to Scotland seems pretty firm. Maybe this is why I felt so at home in Scotland this past Summer?