To Share

I told myself I wanted to wake early this morning.  I wasn’t sure what I’d do – knit or pack or email.  I just knew I’d want some quiet time before the rush that is leaving.  I spent the time online, gloriously alone in a still house but finding treasures and kindred spirits.

Sharing: : to partake of, use, experience, occupy, or enjoy with others

Taking Time for You – A little brainstorming to remind you that being good to yourself comes in all sorts of durations, even the 30 second kind.

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Joy Rebellion – Great title.  Because joy is a primal state, beyond reason and all the rules that say, “No.”

Mission Monday: Doing it Imperfectly Fabulous thought.  Marvelous thought.  Reveling in imperfection.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I put myself in counseling to deal with my perfectionism on the theory that a perfectionist mother is not a healthy mother.  It was an eye-opening process.  I’m not more in control when things are perfect, I’m not more lovable when things are just so, I’m not safe when things are perfect.  Life is messy and so am I.  And out of that comes creativity, happiness, personality…

Excerpt that seems so appropriate as I head out to camp: “Glorious Imperfection means that doing it badly is better than not doing it at all….We live in one of those outdoors-y, rafting, climbing, “my extreme outdoor sport beat up your extreme outdoor sport” regions. We were intimidated!”  (I totally get that intimidation with outdoor people.  What’s up with that?  Why can’t we all just be happy that everyone is outside and being happy in their own way?)  But the article is so much more than just camping.  It’s about giving ourselves permission to be imperfect in all aspects of our lives.

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And speaking of joy:   “A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.”
~Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The journal page that accompanies this quote is a just-so mix of calmness and exhuberance.  Inspiring me to wish I had more time to play with scissors and glue this morning. Art Journal Collection v1.2 at Daisy Yellow.

It has been joy to share with you this morning.

Northeast

It’s time for us to head out for our main vacation of the year.  10 days of camping in the Canadian Shield in a park I’ve never been to in an area of the province I’ve never been to.  So exciting!  This will get me one step closer to checking off my goal of visiting 8 national or provincial parks for my 101 in 1001 project.  We’ve packed and cooked and frozen and organized and and and…

Before I leave I wanted to point out these wonderful Kind Over Matter garden cards.  It’s an idea I’ve been pondering for a while, but without computer design skills something like this is harder to make and much harder to share with everyone.  Luckily for me, Amanda from Kind Over Matter liked my idea and created these lovely printouts.  So take the next few weeks to prop these in gardens around your city.  I’d so love to see photos of a few of your ‘garden drops’.

A Quote and a Question

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“Once you’re gone, your mark is what you’ve done, but some of that is how you’ve done it.” Dathan Ritzenhein

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In what facets of your life do you insist on a particular method; where does form become beauty, industriousness, and purpose?

Exploring Yellows

Yellow is such a changeable colour. Is it greenish, cool, and marking a feeling of growth beginning? Deep, rich, and settled? There is a profusion of yellow in the flower world, but much less of it in the world we humans have constructed. We seem to prefer to keep yellow as a dash, punctuation. Not our family. Our house is a creamy yellow outside and the inside is a range of yellows from soft to vibrant. Yellow makes us happy. Soothing or Energizing. It is a colour we’ve chosen to wrap around ourselves as a colour shield against the winters, against feeling bland, against feeling sad.

We went to the beach in Minnedosa yesterday. A stiff cold breeze whipped off the lake and kept us out of the water and playing instead. Across the street from the marvelously old-fashioned and dangerous “Small Fry Park” there was a run-down mini golf. The colours were so vibrantly painted that I couldn’t resist wandering through it. I left the kids in the park, knowing they were Big Fry and could handle the dangers.

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A few of the yellows to be seen in our garden these two months:

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Archeology Field Trip

Last Friday we were lucky enough to join the archeology department for a morning.

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Wouldn’t you camp here? I would. Gentle curve of the river, the north bank is higher and provides shelter, good sweet land.

The day was overcast, luckily, but there were tarps covering it all as well, and flags and fencing to mark off the areas you might be likely to stumble into if you were not paying attention. Hardly a mosquito to be seen, too, which is usually the price you pay for an overcast day. An ideal day.

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Scrape with a trowel held at 45 degrees. Scoop the dirt into dustpans and then into your bucket. Call the professor when you discover something. Measure the location of the stone flake within the quadrant.

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Take your bucket to the screens and make sure you’re not overlooking small bits before you discard your soil.

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We were lucky enough to find quite a few things.  It kept the kids interested in what can be a fairly tedious way to explore soil.  Several stone flakes, mostly bones, and something they called ’shatter’ that was apparently an exciting kind of byproduct of the tool-making process.

Next year for sure!

Yarn Party

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Can’t talk. My needles arrived.

Oh, and some yarn that my sister and I ordered came, too.  It’s making it hard to find my needles.  But I forgive it.

Random Acts of Colour

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Project Spectrum postcard (from a past Swap-bot swap) and some teeny books go out into the world to surprise people. Inspired by the Kind Over Matter site and their lovely card drops.

Some delivered while I was jogging. Yes, I am the mad woman you saw stopping to smell every lilac bush in the city that lay near enough to the sidewalk and carrying tiny booklets tied with green embroidery thread while I panted in the sudden heat.

If you don’t live by me, don’t worry. I’m cooking up a way to get little booklets to some of you dear readers as thanks for being so supportive and kind. In the meantime, wander over to Perfect Sentiment and download the inspiring bit of pretty words she’s cooked up for us. Be kind to yourself…for me.  And check out her other printables and those at Kind Over Matter, too. Be kind to yourself a second time.

A Quote and a Question

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“Before we can make things that are pleasant to see, we must find pleasure in seeing the things that are offered to our sight.”
Eva Zeisel

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What can you delight in seeing this very moment?

Full and Fabulous

We’ve had an impossibly full weekend, the kind that is nearly unblogable. The highlights, then.

*Hot sunny days and the year-end soccer tournament. Seeing our kids so brave and bold, such good leaders on their teams.

*Father’s Day was celebrated on Saturday. The promise of dazzling tulips ordered for him now but delivered only in the fall. Books to wait for him on the shelves when he needs another world to enter.

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I had such fun making this pop-up card! I used a photo from his very first marathon, run 7 years ago on Father’s Day. Hard to imagine it’s the same family. Kids so cute and wee, Rainer before his 50 pound weight loss, not having that certain feeling that of course he’d cross the finish line. The card reads: “Fathering may not have a finish line, but you’re setting a PR* every day.”

*PR = personal record

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*Marathon #10 in the bag.

I was filled with such pride every time I saw him; it suffused my whole chest and I felt like I was glowing. And I saw him often – driving round the empty city streets on an early Sunday morning, leap-frogging ahead of him.

*Lunch at McNally Robinson bookstore. Chickpea salad. Coconut-crusted salmon. Peanut soup. All the time we wanted for browsing the shelves. Ahhh, now that’s heaven. The kids hadn’t come along, wanting to play the rest of the tournament with their teams. It made cheering at the marathon oddly lonely, but the post-marathon recovery time indulgently patient and full of time.

*My birthday. I’m 33 now. And the best one I can remember in years. Up at 5 to see Rainer to the start line – the fact that I was born on the longest day of the year always seemed to give my birthday, and therefore me, a lovely specialness and shine – and being up with the sun was just right. I gave myself the gifts of time to browse and freedom to purchase at the bookstore. I choose some delightful little lined booklets from Semikolon and the hefty and stylish Custom Knits. We listened to Nightwatch and chuckled on the drive back. We arrived in time to see Sandra’s team come back from a 0-1 to win the final 4-1. Ate a birthday supper of filet mignon and salad on the deck of my parents’ home, overlooking their native prairie plant gardens. I got prezzies. An iPod! And my sister had crocheted a present for me. Gorgeous purple, wavy/ruffly scarf. See the goofy photos of the Gali scarf/wrap. Home again, home again, to read Voyage of the Dawn Treader aloud as a family before falling asleep.

Like I said, it was full and it was fabulous.

June’s Blue

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The lunch bag of surprise yarn turned out to be a project I was fondly remembering and hoping would emerge soon from the box of surprise to which it had been consigned.

Misti Alpaca worsted becomes Helleborus.

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The pattern includes the following: Work rows 1–2, then repeat rows 3–10 until you drop dead. This is a boring knit, and you’ve now been warned. I don’t agree that it’s boring. It’s soothing. I always have to check the pattern for the edge stitches, but beyond those first and last 3 the pattern is a rhythmic joy. Simple. And blue. So little of what I’ve knit has been blue despite that colour’s status among my favourites.

I haven’t written much about these Personal Yarn Club packages because quite a few of them have been projects meant to be gifts. I’m finding the process both fun and frustrating. Sometimes I can’t wait for a project to arrive, like this one, and sometimes I can’t remember at all what I’ve packed away and the surprise is…surprising, which is what I wanted. Other times, though, a project feels like it just adds to my workload for a month, or I feel like it’s keeping me from something else that’s caught my fancy, or I wish I could dig through and get a particular yarn back (for Project Spectrum in particular). But mostly it’s been a fun way to play with my yarn. I could really see this being fun if it were tied into something like PS or another ongoing project.