As yarn is my savior

Things haven't been particularly easy for me this year, but I've done a pretty good job of making it through. Making it through with the help of yarn and knitting as a meditative, healing, and often distracting process has been my saving grace. I have been knitting. A lot. And spinning. And buying yarn. And playing on ravelry. It keeps my hands busy, takes the fidgets away, and lets me focus on other, more important things. Then, after awhile, I have something cool that I made. It doesn't get much better than that, really.

And Ravelry, oh ravelry, with your web 2.0 and your social networking and all of your jargony goodness. I could hardly help myself - it was like an entire new world and subculture of people just.like.me. opened their doors, welcomed me in, let me play with all their yarn, showed me all their patterns and projects, and then had a big huge party with an open bar, free music, and lots of people to chat with about something you love.

It's strange, I never really took to knitting as much as I have in the last few years. My Gramma taught me when I was young and re-taught me when I was in college. Moving to Chicago got me into some nice yarn stores and off of knitting with crappy acrylic yarn. Ravelry introduced me to a bunch of new techniques, patterns, and people. And now I'm all up in it, meeting / hanging out with / becoming friends with all kinds of new folks, knitting a bunch of new stuff, going to be teaching a class in october and loving every minute of it. I feel so lucky and fortunate to find myself where I am.

And the yarn. It's beautiful - especially the sock yarn, where each individual skein is like a 200 - 450 yrd work of art. So I hung up all my sock yarn on the wall. Why not, right? Now I just sit and think of all the possibilities. Which yarn will be next? Which pattern will I use? Will they be for me or someone else?

Socks make the perfect portable little project and there really isn't anything like a handknit sock. If you're still on tube socks from the tar-jay, you're missin' out pal. For real. I even bought clear converse sneakers to show off my socks. Instant matchy outfit, or completely clashy if that's your schtick (and it is sometimes mine). I even have some yarn with sparkles in it. And I.fucking.love.sparkles.

I'm trying to get back into blogging regularly, so it only seemed fitting to me to talk about the thing that I've been spending so much time on lately. Stay tuned.

08.28.08 5:23pm(5 comments)