What this all nighter is missing...

is chocolate.

Which . . .

I left at my office.




Crap.

Paper? Plastic? Spastic?

That was a rough first 10 days off the meds. Also, it was PMS time. Nice timing there, spaz. Not that I believe it's over or that the peace I'm feeling today will even last. I'm still touchy, still get mad quickly, cry even more quickly, but when I'm not mad or crying in that overstressed, getting over the hump way, I feel so much more. . . real. It's as if that skin the meds give me becomes wool batting after a while. Everything is muffled and it's hard to take in how things really are. Hard to empathize, hard to take action, hard to just feel things as deeply as I do unmedicated. I'm not the first person to say all this, (indeed, it's not the first time I've learned it) so I won't take time to reiterate a common complaint. After all, I have things to make.
Here's a fun project: I have started purchasing reusable store bags. Trader Joe's has these handy insulated grocery bags, for frozen and refrigerated items and Safeway has the best cloth bags I've seen so far. They are made from recycled materials, are lighter than the canvas bags I could never get used to, and they carry twice as much.

Also, I actually remember to use them, which is a first. But, I don't like advertising for these, or any, stores. The bags are little billboards and I won't be suckered into carrying them around that way. Last Sunday, as a my sister and a friend sat in my kitchen and we BS'ed, I dug out some fabric paints and covered up the Safeway logo with black, to match the rest of the bag, then decorated with wonky flowers and vines until the girls noticed and wanted to paint, too. Sigh.


The first experimental one was fun, and I did hand over half the bags to the girls to do themselves, but now I want to do something better and have been looking through all my motif books.



Aren't Dover Books the best? I never appreciated them until I started wanting to make things beautiful and had given up on waiting until I was an artist. I think I'll google a few things I don't have, too, like oak leaf and acorn motifs, and see what says, "Pick me!" the loudest.
Anyway, I'm trying to tell that voice in my head which mocks the admittedly odd ways and places my need to create manifests to shut the fuck up. So what if I'm spending time, effort and materials on grocery bags. If it were up to that asshole, all I'd ever do is bitch on this blog. ; )

A catalog of certainties

that occur when coming off anti-depression/anxiety meds:

1. You will have no skin. No way to deflect the slightest hint of negativity. Every exasperated sigh, even from people you know love you, will cut you to the quick.

2. You will be paranoid. In absence of any or very little evidence, you will believe that strangers hate you and think you are crap at everything. You will hate them back and lash out without being able to stop yourself. The words and actions you visualize come forth, despite all efforts.

3. You will feel exposed. Walking through a store or other public area you will feel certain that you stand out, and not for any good reason. Your inability to cope/function/fit in is being broadcast in your smile, eye contact, clothing choices and hair color.

4. You will feel intensely. All emotions will be heightened and result in crying, even the good ones. Sentimental tears held back will make the muscles around your eyes ache. Your breathing will always feel like the post-crying kind. Frustrations will be epic and you will feel certain you are actually oppressed by even the most minor obstacle.

5. You will be certain that everyone in your vicinity does everything they do to either hurt you or help you. You are the center of it all.

6. You will make bad decisions. You will find your instinct/judgment to be off often enough to be frightening.

7. You will get worse when you end each episode with the litany of self-hatred. You know you have one. That's what got you here in the first place.

Knowing this does not always help, but Don't. Give. Up.

What the meds do can be accomplished at home, folks, the old fashioned way. It's what you say inside your muddled, probably dizzy head. Forgive yourself. Forgive everyone else. Give the world the benefit of the doubt. Assume your husband loves you and does not consciously take advantage of opportunities to subvert your authority or happiness. Assume your kids don't know they are ruining your life with their fighting and slovenliness. Remember they don't know you even have a life to ruin. Don't expect appealing to their (inappropriate/non-existent) concern for your happiness to work.

That is all, for now.

Back to the new hobby...

I've spent the last 4 days making recycled paper. It's been coming on for weeks...ever since I first read No Impact Man. There's a link in his early posts to instructions for making paper from junk mail. I tried to talk myself out of it, for fear of having another obsession. If I allowed myself to know how much money I spent when I finally fell for beads, holy shit...But, suddenly I had to make paper. Turns out it is slow, backbreaking, and really, really cool. There is such satisfaction in the work of it. The shredding, the soaking, the processing... I love making up the paper pulp. The racket of the food processor (just slightly younger than yours truly), the quiet when moving my hands through the water stirring up the slurry... its just fantastic. Waiting for the individual sheets to dry is hard, but what beauty when it's finally ready! My friend scoffs, says it's hard to write on recycled paper with a dip pen (we don't discuss my habitual use of ball points. It's beneath us), but why write on this? Just making it, looking at it's texture and the feathery edges, it's almost enough even if I never use it. And yet, I've seen wonderful art work matted with paper like this. The paper itself can be art! If I manage to get a flower press and learn to use it before summer is over this could turn out to be something really lovely. Pressed Sonoma County bounty in handmade paper? It's all been done before, but turning so much wasted paper into such tactile and visual wonder? Where's the downside? I know she's imagining getting a stack of dark grey, chunky "homemade stationary" as a gift, but another thing I learned this cycle (!!!) is not to combine learning a new craft with gifting. I wait to see how it turns out and what I feel like doing with it. No more learning how to make something so I can, at the same time, start a temporary Christmas sweatshop and make a ton of them. What a way to strip something of any fun or creativity. The pressure, fer Chrissakes!
See? It's like this year I finally grew some sense. And I'm terrified of losing it. Or worse, of finding out I've lost it many times before.

So, about papermaking. I've taken many pictures, as if to do a tutorial, but going along with a resolution not to teach things I've only started to learn myself, recommend books I'm only half way through and movies not yet seen, but sitting in my Netflix queue, I will refrain from actually posting that way.
.

However, I would like to point out 3 things I have to add to the excellent tutorials already out there, there and there (and now here!) on the web, that I came up with as I went along:


#1. I did not make my own frames with wood, saw, nails/staples. I dug out some old frames with broken glass and used a hot glue gun to attach window screen fabric to the inside of the frames. This only worked with wood frames, not metal, but it worked beautifully. Being submerged in water does not seem to affect the adhesion at all.







#2. We (Lucie helped for a while) added pencil shavings, from an electric or hand sharpener, especially colored pencils to our white pulp. You get the specks of paint from the outside of the pencils and the small wood fibers that look lovely in the finished sheets of paper. I do recommend rinsing the shavings in a fine strainer to remove most of the graphite. Lucie and I find the smell unpleasant.

#3. After the first batch of pulp and finished paper I decided to sort my raw materials a little. I started to separate newsprint from computer paper and first class junk mail. Newsprint turns a dark grey I don't love, although it has it's purposes (later idea to pursue), and I found that white computer paper that has been printed on makes nearly white recycled paper. The best discovery though was the few pieces of colored computer paper. We made a gorgeous batch of pulp with purple and pink , a vibrant blue, and, finally, a tiny batch of yellow. As we used the scant amounts of these colored pulps the slurry got pretty thin and I would add our white pulp, making the colors softer and lighter with each sheet.

All about the kni... oooooh! Beads! Whoa! I can make paper? Kids? What kids?

It occurs to me that everything occurs to me repeatedly. I have this one loop of ideas and realizations that I go through over the course of each year. One of those is that I keep no memories, really. I don't journal, I lose pictures, I fail to even take pictures, I forget everything. I have a cycle of good times, followed by stress, followed by no sleep, followed by lost days or even weeks in which all I do is survive and keep the kids alive, finalized by a reboot, i.e. getting some sleep and starting over. I don't mean starting over from where I left off after a nice rest. I don't mean 'it's never too late to start the day over,' a la ye olde 12 steps, I mean starting over as in forgetting much that went before and starting. the fuck. OVER. Starting over discovering how to do my job, and why. How to parent, and why. How to homeschool. How to relate to my family and friends. My poor kids, how will I ever see to their education when only about 20% of my days are actually functional? At this stage, inevitably, I start a new hobby. And when I start a new hobby I do little else. There's no cleaning, no cooking, or just one without the other. Much impatience with pesky family members... I learn it all. I get all the tools and all the skills and make a few nifty things and then... I start that hideous cycle again. Eventually, I rediscover knitting, but only by starting new projects, the UFO's receding into a basket or bag I may not re-visit for a year or more. When I rediscover those projects they take me back to where I was when I started them and I get the awful insight that I've learned all this before, grown through all this before and I just keep doing it over and over with no wisdom. It's a pathetic, real life Memento. Luckily, and thank the Universe for this, there's my best friend with whom I speak almost every day. She keeps my memory, my mind really, and tries to give it back to me in bites I can chew after one of those devastating set backs. It must get so boring for her...
There is some foundation forming, I guess. I think it's been a few years since I last complained that, growing up, she actually had culture and an education, and I had... an awful fucking lot of television. Each time I told her that it felt like a really original thought. Or, at least, that it was the first time I had the guts to say it aloud. The last time though, she asked me, "Are we doing the culture thing again?" And then I remembered. We first had this conversation when we were fifteen. Jesus!
So, no surprise, here I am again, in a big start over that includes ceasing to take meds for depression and realizing that if I kept a journal, or actually posted to this as yet private blog, I may save myself some remedial living and get outside the spiral I'm making through life. Maybe I'll get to move up a level, get into some three dimensional existing.
Something is a little different this time already and I'm writing it down before its too late. Right before this latest reboot I learned to cook. And to clean. And to think. I mean, all the disassociated skills of my 37 years finally started to gel and I could come up with original ideas on how to organize, put things together, vague shit like that. Essentially, I could work with what I had. I could see beyond the tiny little detail right in front of me and draw on everything in my life, my experience and my home and put something together. For a few weeks there, I was good & happy. I managed my household. I had time for my kids and a little for myself and even Tarzan (read: spouse). I had a clean home and I learned that I need it to be clean. I understood that squalor is a huge part of my lifelong, abusive marriage to depression. I learned that stress doesn't come from not having time to clean, it comes from not taking time to clean and I was stuck in that trap because I didn't know how much time a clean house gives me. How much peace. Remember that silly poster from the 70's with the supine kitten that was captioned, "Whenever I feel like doing homework I lie down until the feeling goes away."? Am I the only one who remembers that? That is exactly what I did with homework and housework or any thing I needed to do. The stress I was feeling came not from the crap on the floor in the hallway but from not letting myself pick up the crap on the floor in the hallway! From not letting myself work on my paper until the night before it was due! When I wanted to! I wanted to do what I needed to do. Now I know what that feeling is. What did I think it was before? Cultural oppression? Gas? I don't fucking know... And yet, learning this, I still don't do my job the way I should. Maybe that will come with time. Please! Let it be so.

These may look like successful projects...

But don't be fooled. They hate them. Please kill me before I knit for these devil children again.

Not so lame cross stitch

I dislike cross stitch. I mean, what a lame ass, fake brand of textile art. There are exceptions, as always. Really tiny cross stitch done on a large scale scenic textile can be beautiful. But the ordinary, every day variety is, to me, one step above plastic canvas. And, wow, do I loathe that shit. I keep and cherish the cross stitch birth samplers and blankets-you -must-never-use from my grandmothers for my kids, and I use the tea towels from my step-dad's old battle ax of a mother and am glad to have them. But don't tell me it's an art or even much of a craft.
However. Subversive Cross Stitch is something I can get behind. Bring it on.

Cursed knitting

It's a wonder I ever complete any damn project at all. Almost everything I start goes unfinished because of some fatal error in planning, swatching, yarn choice, whatever. Usually, I'm philosophical about it. Each experience, I tell myself, means I'll be wiser the next time. And I guess it's true. I now understand fully that doing a real swatch saves ripping out hours of good knitting. I swatch, I wash, I measure, I measure again, I count and double count. Stitch and row gauge. I have learned the hard way that flat stockinette and knitting in the round give me completely different stitch counts despite using the same yarn and needle size. I knitted an entire sock only to find it was too small for the intended wearer and she's the smallest person in the house, so no carrying on and making the next sock for someone else. I have several single socks, not because I never get round to the next, but because the first one was so fucked up there was no point. They sit on my desk and mock me. I've started using them as gift bags, just so I don't have to look at them.
So, trust me when I tell you that when I planned my own first sweater I was careful. It's a big deal that I've given up on waiting until I'm a smaller size. It's a big deal that I've learned no one appreciates what I make as much as I do (and other knitters, of course). I bought patterns, I cruised the web for free ones, I kept looking for the perfect pattern for me. I made false starts with patterns that I finally had to admit were not going to suit me. Recently, I realized I had to design my own pattern and make all that effort to do the math and risk having to restart a few times, maybe at every step. I mean, just getting the width to cover my ass is only the beginning. What about when I get to the armholes? I have very little experience with those... but I decided to go for it anyway and I swatched, washed, measured, multiplied and divided. I changed the ribbing on the bottom to a rolled edge followed by some reverse stockinette. I added side slits, which I double knit for stability and a hemmed look. I cast on 113 stitches and counted them twice. I got used to purling across that wide expanse every other row (oh how I love the no-purling of circular knitting). I enjoyed the mindless stockinette and thought I might make this thing up in time for next winter, past history not-withstanding. I couldn't find my measuring tape and kept thinking I really should, so I don't knit past the 7.5 inch mark, when I'm supposed to start decreasing for the waist. This morning I finally remembered we have that big-ass tape measure in my office (yeah, I knit when I should work. Don't you?) and I found I was only at 6 inches, not a problem, so I sat down to do a couple more rows before, you know, finding some work to do, and then I thought, "Oh yeah, I wanted to measure the width. "

32 fucking inches. WHAT?? But I checked my gauge! I am a master of gauge! I am all about GAUGE! So, I checked my damn gauge, I redid the math. My gauge is right on, so WTF? Finally, I counted my stitches. 123. 10 more than I was supposed to cast on. No, 9, because I remember in a fit of superstition I went for 114, rather than 113. Or, at least I thought I had. Apparently I had a seizure that lasted while I cast on and the two times I counted to be sure.

Motherfucker.

Needle Gauge Necklace

Found at Schoolhouse Press:

" Handmade, by artist Erica Schlueter, from Sterling Silver and textured with varying knit fabrics, these necklaces are both functional (for measuring needles size 0-11) and decorative."
No more digging around and searching for the migrating needle gauges. This one stays right where you need it.

Rip, tink, throw up hands and knit a damn hat

Refering back to the post with the three projects I was working on, this is the one that I finished. All three had issues. The shawl? Don't ask. All I can say is now I have too much Elesbeth Lavold Silky Wool for a scarf, but not enough for a sweater. The washcloth? Ripped back and put back on needle with the working yarn at the wrong end. This hat, well, I just kept going round and round, because I didn't know how to do the decreases for 2x2 rib. The Knitlist helped, I finished, and Aaron loved the hat. Now there's another problem and that is the 140 stitches around. I think I had Paul Bunyan in mind when I did that math. Anyway, we've discussed strategies for controlled shrinkage and I'm hoping things work out. I mean, he wears it in the house. I knew he needed to cover that bald head of his, he just needed someone to give him something nice to use for the purpose.

Duh... can't think of anything to call this. It's about socks.

The orange socks, finished just hours before they left for Arctic Nebraska. I think she wore them everyday. They've rounded out and look much better now. Resisting the urge to rip them out and put in heels...
That's right, no heels. I was thinking tube socks, you know, so they'd fit longer. Trouble is, they don't really fit, ever, without heels. Another lesson learned.
Since then I've made my first grown up sock and have started the second. Ripped out and reknit the heel twice. Each time because the foot was too short (toe-up, btw), then with the last one I overcompensated and made the foot too long! I finished anyway, thinking I'd gift them to someone with larger feet (like my sister) but then couldn't take it. I wanted these socks for myself! So, I picked out the toe, ripped back to where I wanted to start the decreases and did a custom, right footed toe. That's right, now I have to make the left sock (!!!) with mirrored toe decreases. I've cast on to a provisional crochet chain, since I couldn't cast on toe-up this time and match the graft on the first sock. Christ! Is this a lot of work for a sock? Why, yes, yes it is. Did I try to go on without being such a perfectionist? I always try, but I never get away with it. I can say, though, that this sock fits better (did I mention the increases and switch to one size larger needle right before the heel?) than any I've ever worn. Can't wait for the mate!

Jayne hat, revised

Why do all the patterns for the Jayne hat that folks on the 'net are doing and sharing have pointed earflaps? They aren't pointed on the original hat, not at all. I reknit and reknit the flaps until it was passable and here's the result. Much better, I think. Of course, I should mention, while I'm being so picky, that these colors are all wrong, too. There was no red, just yellow and orange. Feh.

Works in progress, besides the socks

A washcloth









Beginner's triangle, A Gathering of Lace, Meg Swansen



I wish I could figure out how to get these pictures where I want them. Time to find a tutorial, I guess. These are the other projects taking up space on my desk, in my purse, and on the kitchen table. The yellow washcloth is for me. I guess I do knit for me sometimes, but it's not for the washcloth itself, but for mindless knitting while I'm stuck on something else. I also really love to look at yellow without trying to wear it. Who can wear yellow, anyway?

The oatmeal colored thing is my practice shawl while I wait for the good yarn to arrive. Turns out I have lots to learn about lace knitting, which is seriously cutting down on my private knitting hubris. I really thought this would be a piece of cake. Jerk.

Finally, the 2x2 ribbed tube. It's supposed to be a hat, but I just keep knitting round and round because, well, I have no idea how to figure the decreases myself. There are 140 stitches, way more than most hats, and damned if I can find a plain 2x2 rib hat pattern to copy the decreases from anywhere. I don't want to go for trial and error as this yarn is not forgiving of frogging, so I just keep going. Rather embarrassing.

Socked

Obsessed with making Lucie a pair of wool socks for her trip to Arctic Nebraska later this month, I am on my third attempt. The first was too small, and became a thumbless mitten for the toddler. Hopefully there will be a mate one day.

Next I thought I'd try a sport weight wool, rather than fingering, so it would go quicker. It might have, but Clover dpns suck and have no glide at all. Also, this sock is too big for her feet. I thought it could be for me, but it's too small and this partial ball isn't enough for a pair. Oh, and then she didn't like the maroon color anyway. Kill me.

A smart person would have given up by now. That's not me however, and I cast on another sock, in just orange this time (what she wanted all along) and I checked my gauge (10st/inch!) and measured her foot, too (6 inches around the biggest part). I am a knitting pro, fear me! So, what the hell is this pointy thing that still appears to be too big? I'm not just screwed, but socked. Socked in the head.

Edit: This morning I figured out why, despite my measuring and gauge-checking, I'm still making a sock too big for Lucie's fey little feet. I forgot to subtract 10% from her foot measurement before mulitplying by my gauge. Too late to start over, the socks will be big this winter, but hopefully fit just right next winter.

Cattywompus cloche

This is Caterina's cloche. She's standing right here as I post this and she said, "That's my hat! Thank you for making it for me, Aunt Jamie. I love it so much." Huh.
What cracks me up is the way she wears it with the flower right smack in the middle of her forehead.