Nails done, hair done, everything did

     I'm a late adopter for just about everything... Including the latest and greatest in social media, Pinterest. 
    Before I started pinning, my sister-in-law would e-mail me the pins she liked. Such as, the one to your left - the totally adorable headband/neckwarmer.
     "Can you make this?" she asked. 
     "Nope," I said.
     Because I couldn't. Until I learned how to do a yarn over, which for some reason seemed really hard for me. 
     After lots of practice (lots) (more than a normal person should have to do), I finally figured it out, and I was off! 
     My sister-in-law received the finished product as a gift for her birthday, which just so happened to be in the warmest winter ever. So, maybe she'll get to wear it next year. Or, this spring, which is shaping up to be a chilly one.
     The easy-to-follow pattern can be found here. 

Still Not a Player

I'm not a knitter, I just knit a lot.

        Seriously. I know how to do, like, six things with knitting needles. I know how to cast on, cast off, knit, purl, and in the past month, I've forced myself to learn how to do a yarn over - which means that you intentionally make holes in your knitting - and knitting increases, which you unintentionally do all the time when you are first learning to knit.
        So, maybe I should say, up until recently, I wasn't a knitter, I just knit a lot.
     It's a whole other world being a knitter - there's vocab to learn, abbreviations to figure out, and then you actually have to do the yo's and the kfb's.
     A few months ago, I learned how to do something different with knits and purls, which resulted in the lovely scarf you see a bit of above. Of course, I never posted about the scarf because, um, I wore it twice. Because we had the weirdest winter ever (80 degrees in March in Boston!).
     But, I loved making it with the pretty Noro self-striping yarn I bought on sale at a great shop in Boston (Stitch House in Dorchester), and I loved the truly shameless attitude of the pattern designer (her blog name is "Yarn Harlot" - how can you not love her!?) as she described what to do once you'd finished making the scarf:
     "Put it on, note how nicely it goes with your fall coat and go walk around Bloor West Village (or some neighbourhood near you if you don't live here) pretending to buy vegetables while waiting for someone to ask you where you bought your scarf. Gloat. (Nicely)"
     Happy to share it with you now, on April 1. Happy Spring!

The Club Can't Even Handle Me Right Now

A couple Fridays ago, I got one of the best e-mails I've gotten in a long time. I was getting ready to go to a conference, and the e-mail was from the conference organizers. It said: "Please feel free to bring creative projects you may be working on currently... We invite you to select and bring a project with you that helps support creative thinking during our discussions and activities."

I was so excited, but I was already away from home and my collection of creative projects. (I'm not making it up - that part of the e-mail was bold in the original). Thankfully, I was with my Mom, and she has a huge collection of her own of stuff to make creative projects.  (With love, some might call this collection a "hoard.") I was able to find a couple of small skeins of yarn that, I swear, are older than I am. Knitting needles were not a problem - Mom has quite a few extras. Mom also provided great inspiration with the simplest idea: "Why don't you make felt bowls?"

Why don't I!? Because I don't have a clue how to knit in the round.

I also didn't have a clue how to knit stripes, and as you can see, I was able to figure that out. I still haven't figured out how to knit in the round (project for March, seriously), but I found a pattern online (awesome use of free wireless in the conference hotel!) and adapted it to be able to knit it on straight needles and stitch it up. Since you can't get a sense of the dimensions from the picture (and since a picture of the bowls from farther away wouldn't let you see the fun stripes!), the bowls are 3 1/2 inches in diameter.  

The felting was a fun Saturday evening for me and the hubby. They are very lightly felted (I was using a washing machine and kind of scared of causing a lot of irreparable damage, so only ran them through, like, um, 5 times), but I've been told that better results can be achieved through hand felting. 

Where My Stitches At?

Just before Thanksgiving, I joined a new gym. I go often (so much that I don't blog anymore, apparently!). The gym has made it easy for me to go - it's a five minute walk from my apartment and they have yoga classes.

I started practicing yoga in college, if falling asleep as soon as we lay down counts as practicing. I managed to learn something, though, as I actually taught a room of 100 people downward dog just after college. It was very cool, and I felt very good at the yoga thing.

For the past few years, I've been practicing yoga regularly, not falling asleep anymore and continuing to feel very good at it. Until I joined this new gym.

For the first couple weeks, I was convinced the instructors were teaching some sort of yoga torture ("toes pose" cannot be a real pose, right?). But, I actually started to get better at it. The instructors grew on me. Especially one, who said to me, while I was in three-legged dog (which involves being upside down with one leg in the air), "Oh, look, your toenail polish matches your pants! How cute!"

Seriously, that moment was one of the best I've had in a while.

I like matchy-matchy, and I really like my nail polish color. At Thanksgiving, my sister gave me the chance to make something that matches my nail polish.

She had bought me two little skeins of yarn. She got them at Big Lots for $1 each, which I loved. One was the same color as my nail polish, and one was another of my faves - green! Each had little specks of the other, and I spent a week trying to think of something I could make that used both of them.

Infinity scarves are way in, which, of course, I learned from my mother-in-law. Someone she works with gave her one last winter and she gave it to me, because she didn't know what to do with it, but mostly because I was quite reluctant to give it back to her once she let me borrow it.


*Photo credit to my husband, who thought this picture wouldn't make it to the web. But it's good, so here it is. Also, I totally stole this post's title from a fabulous knit and crochet site called Ravelry.

Gimme a Sister, Can't Resist Her

My sister Jodi, pictured left, braved two craft shows with me this weekend. We've been bred for this kind of action. We, daughters of a consummate crafter, spent our childhood not just strolling the aisles of every craft show in the Washington, D.C. metro area, but often enough could be found with the cash box behind the booth, too.

We've done the church Christmas craft show and the synagogue Chanukah gift extravaganza. We've done Spartanfest and Sugarloaf. And now we've done Craftboston and SoWa.

Now, as an adult with a budding craft hobby, living in a world and with a husband that would like everything to be commodified, I walk through the shows with mixed emotions. My talkative little brain is asking: "Is my stuff as good as hers?" "How much is he charging for that?" "Why don't you get your act together and open an Etsy shop?" It's as stressful as it is fun, as inspirational as it is overwhelming.

We passed one artist who was selling what I call coffee cozies. Jodi's holding the one I made her for her birthday in the picture in this post. I said, "Hey, look, coffee cozies." And, Jodi, best sister ever, said, "Oh, those are nice, but I like the one you made me much better."

Superfreak

My mom is what Debbie Stoller, in her classic knitter's guide Stitch and Bitch, calls a "get your freak on" knitter. Says Stoller: "Throwing away their knitting magazines and relieving themselves of the shackles of a pattern, these knitters, also known as artsy-fartsy knitters, like to grab some yarn, grab some needles, and just make something up. Many of them are so busy expressing themselves that they can't be bothered with knitting rules or techniques. The sweaters they make are one-of-a-kind, gorgeous concoctions, though you might not be able to get your head through the collar."

Like many women, I have a deep-seated fear of becoming my mother. I've begun to confront that fear (read the original post on this blog, for instance). I'm trying to embrace the parts of myself that are like my mom, rather than run screaming in the opposite direction.

But, we've always been different sorts of crafters. I tend to like to follow a pattern, usually just choose one color or color scheme for completing any given project, and stick to the basics, not going too far astray from what anyone might call "normal." Sometimes my crafting is like what my mom says about my clothing choices: "Elana, do you ever wear any colors? I mean, it's always black and grey, grey and black." (That exchange happened a few years ago, but sadly it pretty much still holds true.)

For a few weeks, several of us in my office have had a knitting circle, preparing squares for the Pine Street Inn Knit-a-Thon (see more in this post). Our bunch has shown that knitting is a timeless activity - women have been doing it for years, probably because knitting together opens us up to share parts of our lives that we might not otherwise share. We now knit at lunch time, knit during monthly birthday parties, and some of us knit during conference calls (not me, of course!). So when I started working on my square to contribute to the project, I thought it would be a perfect project for me, an old-school knitter. A 9 inch by 9 inch square. What could be harder?

I had forgotten about genetics. I started knitting (see lovely sea of turquoise above) and got 80% of the way through my "square" before I realized it was a rectangle. An 11 inch by 8 inch rectangle. I knit one final inch, did the binding off, shed a tear/gave a huge sigh of relief, and threw it in the pile of squares created by my co-workers.

And the funniest thing happened. Everyone liked my "square." Even though it was freaky-big and didn't meet the Knit-a-Thon's "requirements." It's the same way I really like the square being created by my co-worker who's knitting for the first time. She's totally charmed me by saying "Elana brought her own sticks." I love that she calls needles sticks - I'm really not making fun. I also love that her knitting is super-tight, full of holes, and that she might drop a stitch, oh, for every five stitches she completes.

So, on this day before Thanksgiving, I'm giving thanks for imperfection, for beginnings, for freaks, and for breaking the rules. Get your freak on, knitters.

Gettin' Knitty Wit It

It's been over 6 weeks since I last posted. I really hadn’t intended for that to happen. In that time, I’ve made some really cute hair accessories and another bag, which you’ll get to see soon. But, also in that time, my good friend Sherri took pictures of her little boy Pelé wearing - see!? - his Elanamade hat!

Also in the knitting realm, I’m going to submit a square to Pine Street Inn’s Knit-a-Thon. (Warning: Website may be seizure-inducing.) Though I’m 100% sure that handmade blankets will not wipe out homelessness (sort of like how I’m sure that greater “awareness” about any number of social, economic, or political conditions won’t fix the years of inequality, underfunding, and absolute disregard for humanity that got us into these messes), I do like knitting, and I think the idea of a formerly homeless person getting welcomed to their new home with a handmade blanket is lovely.

Baby Got Hat

Sometimes I think people who have babies are delusional. Yes, I’m aware of the gross generalization I’ve just made, and how I’ve now lost, hm, um, yes, every single friend I had. But, give me just a second. Maybe a couple seconds.

I have to imagine that having a baby by choice is an incredible experience - the anticipation of the little person who will be, the excitement of building a family, the welcoming into the world of someone that, often enough, you were a part of creating. But, I also have to imagine that, during the time one gestates said baby, meets with doctors in preparation for the delivery of the baby, and considers the miracle of life in general (and perhaps also the miracle of lycra), one has considered that this incredible little creature might not be born knowing how to sleep for 6-8 hours straight. It takes time, people, so much time that there are some of us who are still working on it!

I’m pretty much surrounded by people bearing or raising little ones, so I hear a lot of stories about the sleep they’re not getting. The one friend I have who has said that she loves being up, even in the middle of the night, with her baby has only been home with the baby for 3 days. I think she has another thing coming.

It might just be a baby hat.

I found a simple pattern for knitting a hat a few years ago, and recently, as, hm, um, yes, every single friend I have has had a baby, I quickly tired of the baby aisle in Target (sorry, Target you know I love you, but enough is enough) at about the same time that I came into a phenomenal bag of yarn that included several bright, variegated skeins perfect for knitting tiny hats. I decided, after I’d just about lost it in Target (which would totally have been a lot more embarrassing than blogging about how you think your friends are delusional!) that giving something handmade was far superior to continuing to go the store-bought route. Also, a lot more fun for me.

And, since this blog is all about me...

Some babies have already received their hats, and joyously ripped them off their heads immediately. (That was really just one baby, but she’s my favorite, so I forgive her.) I’m hoping some of the parents of the babies, while they’re up in the middle of the night, might send me a picture of the baby in the hat, nudge nudge. If your baby wants one, because baby hats are approximately 100,000 times easier to make than bags, just let me know.