Wednesday, July 20, 2011

New Yarn & Thoughts for the Day

About 2 ½ years ago, I bought a friend a gift certificate to one of my favorite yarn stores, Knitorious, shortly after teaching her to knit. She ended up giving up the craft and forgot about the certificate, which she uncovered a couple months ago. No longer a knitter herself, she contacted the shop and asked if it would still be honored (which is was) and then re-gifted it back to me. Sandy, the owner of Knitorious, was great about honoring the gift certificate and last weekend I went up there and picked out two gorgeous yarns, as shown on the right.

I haven't had much else going on craft-wise lately. I am still working on my yarn bombing project for Strange Folk Festival. I'm almost to 3 feet! Completely non-craft related, I thought I would share some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head this week.

Recently, someone close to me made a comment that really got me thinking. They criticized something, judged. I think we all judge others to some extent, and sometimes I think we scrutinize the people who are closest to us more than we do anyone else, including even ourselves. We have built-in expectations that the people we love will live a certain way, feel a certain way, act a certain way, and when they don’t live up to those expectations, we end up feeling disappointed in them.

But what if we got rid of our expectations? What if we instead accept people for who they are. Love them as they are, not as they might someday be. Help them when they ask for it and offer it even when they don’t. What if we don’t tell them how they should feel, how they should act, and how they should change? Most of the time we spend judging others would be much better spent if we instead focused on ourselves, the things we want to accomplish, and the person we want to be.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Finished Object Friday: Head Wrap

Left to my own devices last night, I decided to finally pick out some buttons for the head wrap piece I finished a few months back. It originally started out as a shawl, but my cat destroyed the last skein of yarn I had and since the yarn is from the 70s, I was unable to find a match for it.



Ironically, when I went to visit my grandma over Memorial Day weekend (a month or so after I'd already bound off this project) we found more of the red mohair I'd used for this. Go figure. That might explain why I've taken so long to do something as simple as sew buttons on to the project to finish it. Since it didn't work as a shawl (I was about 2/3rds of the way finish), I decided it would make a good head wrap for winter.

In the below photo on the right I back lit the piece; I think it makes the pattern really pop.



I can button it all up under my chin, or button it under my chin and behind my neck under my hair if I want. Mohair is a little scratchy for me, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the outcome.

The more projects I knit, the more I learn to be happy with mistakes/mishaps and the unexpected. Something can start as one project and end up a totally different item by the time you're done with it.