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rebbiejaye
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Name: Rebecca
Location: Maryland, United States
Gender: Female
Interests: Writing almost anything, singing almost anything, musicals, books, computer games, martial arts, and (of course) knitting.
Expertise: textile design, Microsoft Publisher
Occupation: Administrative Assistant
Industry: Religious/Non Profit
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
12/4/2003
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| Well, ladies and gents.... It's finally happened. I'm leaving Xanga. Thanks to the help of my intrepid husband and the most excellent Fjord, I has a brand new wobsite. It's got my own URL and everything: http://www.osbornfiber.com.
For those of you who have been reading through xanga... sorry! :( but y'all are welcome as ever. To those who have been reading through facebook, not much will change for you methinks. And for those who have been reading through an RSS feed, then you know more about this crap than I do and probably set up a new feed before you even got to this paragraph.
That said, Xanga, it's been fun! See you on the flip side! | | |
| I'm pretty sure my mother would never knit in church.
As a kid, I was pretty free to do as I liked during mass, as long as it was quiet. When I was too little to understand what was going on, mom apparently didn't think that making me sit still in a pew for a whole sermon would be helpful in teaching me piety. But I quickly figured out that the grown up thing to do was to sit and listen, and to learn how to participate in the liturgical hoohah. I'm pretty sure there were never snacks. No little bags of cheerios, that I remember. And noisemaking was not tolerated. My mom's no liturgical extremist, but there is some amount of conformity expected for the sake of others' worship experience. And cheerios did not fit in that boundary.
For reasons no more complicated or thought-out than those above, I never thought I would knit in church. There was nothing to be discussed. Not to be done. Nope. Didn't even occur to me to think about it, and I would have looked down on anyone who did it.
One problem. I can't concentrate worth beans. If it's a new church, several months will go by before I simply cannot process what's being said. I've been reduced lately to playing with the seat cushions... you know, drawing things by smoothing all the fibers one way and then smoothing other ones the other way.
I've known for a while that knitting helps my concentration level. I knit through my junior and senior years of college, and I participated well enough that no teacher was ever really bothered. (Well, except Dr. Bush, but that's different. I was cross-stitching.) Even my note-taking gets better, becuase instead of doodling like a maniac, I much more effectively process and filter new information and synthesize it down into note form.
Still. No knitting in church. That would be bad. Disrespectful. Church is God's time, not for engaging in hobbies. Can't I focus for one half hour of the week without something in my hands?
Finally, a couple weeks ago, I broke. I realized that I couldn't repeat a word of Fr. Terry's sermons from the past month, and not because they're boring. So, very discreetly, I did a few rows during the sermon.
And it worked. I engaged. I retained information. The little part of my brain that's like a constant mental twitch gets shut up when my hands are doing something, especially something useful and meaningful (unlike doodling or playing tic-tac-toe with myself on a 1-foot square of velvet). And the next week, it was better. I knit a little bit, then stopped, just doing enough to get myself in a groove.
So what do you think? Woud you never do it? Do you hide your needles under your coat at synogogue? Have you had a ball roll down the aisle during a prayer meeting? Share your opinions. | | |
| The Christmas projects continue. I picked back up the thing that I was ignoring, finished up a fun thing, and started another thing. Things continue apace, but not at the ploughing rate you would expect from someone who gets paid to sit around and play with yarn all the time. No, I've been prepping for the Open House at which I'll be debuting... ripping out sweaters, re-spinning them, avoiding doing administration... I should really be advertising, but I haven't had time yet...
So I'll ask you to spread the word. Do you know anyone who is even vaguely interested in either yarn or excellent local food sourcing? The trip out to West Friendship should be well worth it. On Dec. 5th & 6th, from 12:00 - 4:00 p.m., Breezy Willow Farm will be hosting a Holiday Open House. This is a great opportunity to learn about Community Supported Agriculture, to get out and see a farm (they have chickens!), and check out an unusual collection of local handcrafted stuff. The facebook event says this: "We will have LOCAL handmade crafts which include; Handmade soap & body products, handmade felt items, naturally dyed, recycled yarn,fresh evergreen wreaths/swags, hand-knitted items, Delightful jewelry creations, handmade candles, handmade greeting cards and more!" Sounds like fun to me. Especially for us Howard Countyites, stuck in Columbia, this is a great chance to reconnect with the farminess that is the majority of our county. Directions are on Breezy Willow's Website. Jared & I will be there the whole time, so you're guaranteed to catch us.
Now that that bout of self-aggrandizement is over, I can show you something I've been working on - On Saturday, Jolene finished plying some lovely stuff from Three Irish Girls that she's had on the wheel for a while, and it's perfectly gorgeous stuff. So I had an unreasonably large amount of joy when she chucked a little ball at me and said "have some singles!" I dropped everything and spent the next two days making this:
What is this tiny bit of adoreableness, you ask? From whence came it stripy glory?
It's a camera sock! Knit on wee size 0 needles (a new record of smallness for me), as a suitable container for the new camera Jolene got for the shop (so we now have no excuse not to blog for the shop. like I need another distraction from my own blog). Anyway, the camera is pink, and I decided it was cute enough to merit a custom-fit sock. Notice how the stitches are all a little skewed? That's because the singles were still energized, all curling up on each other, so it has a rather impressive bias. I still love the thing, though. I couldn't put it down, as every few minutes a new color would show up and I would want to see how it all went together.
Well, now it's back to the grindstone... I have my first-ever commission to compete, and I'd like to do it in a timely manner. ciaobye.
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| I can't get to FarmVille. I'm sitting here at work and I can't get to my farm. All I get is the sad-looking cow. I'm sitting here, knowing full well that my coffee and pepper plants are withering as I type, and there's nothing I can do about it. It's driving me batty. What will my neighbors think? They'll stop by to help me with that gopher problem that keeps popping up (pun intended), or to fertilize my crops, and find everything a distasteful shade of brown. What will they think? Will they think that I got to level 22 just to skip off to FishVille or YoVille? Next time I see that sad brown cow I am going to harvest it for steak.
Before you decide to stage a FarmVille intervention, I will distract you with a sampling of Rebecca + Jared humor.
Words that end in "an" + "anxiety":
"beanxiety" - worry that smells like methane.
"toucanxiety" - fear of fruitloops.
"panxiety" - fear of everything, or fear of cooking.
"talibanxiety" - fear of terrorism.
"danxiety" - what Bethany had before she started dating Dan.
I don't remember the rest of them. Feel free to add your own.
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| Last night, I was ready to end my knitting career. Last night, I was ready to impale myself on my needles. Last night was one of those nights that all of us knitters have, when we forget all the reasons that we try to change the world with string and sticks and seriously consider garrotting ourselves with a longish set of circulars.
I won't tell you what the project was, as (oh dear God) I might be redoing it, but I can give you a general idea of what happened. I was really enjoying this project. It had clever little mitered corners that kept me entertained, while consisting mainly of a very simple stitch. The yarn was slubby and variegated and (most loveably) discontinued, and I enjoyed it mightily. It was nice to finally be working on a Christmas present that I was getting a kick out of, rather than kicking myself for choosing it. After a couple weeks of this, I had smugly taught myself a new bind off and was halfway through it when I noticed that something wasn't quite right.
You know how, at the beginning of projects knit in the round, after you've cast on the requisite number of stitches, they ALL say, without exception: "Join, being careful not to twist"? I knew that. I was careful. But there were a lot of stitches. a LOT of stitches. It was hard to tell whether it was twisted or not, but I did my best. Did I think to check once I had gone far enough to tell a little easier? No. I just assumed that, since I was enjoying the project so much, that I would be fine. So wrong. So, so wrong. Instead, I had knit a freak of geometry that would serve no imagineable purpose. (Though now that I think about it, the finished product might make an excellent noose.)
It was with my confidence in my abilities thus shattered that I headed off for work this morning, to *choke gasp die* lead a knit-along on a beaded scarf, having never done any beaded knitting in all my born days. It didn't go too badly, as I had practiced a little, and everyone was willing to help each other. We did have some "uhhh... no, do it like this" moments, but everyone left with at least some ability to do what was described in the pattern. As an upside, I'm finally working on a piece of knitting I can show you:
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