Design Notebook: Academy Collar

  

Lately I've been working through a major backlog of projects, and whenever that happens I get the impulse to make and finish something really quickly. I've had the materials for this collar for over a year, but I kept on putting it off because it's a silly personal project, rather than one for work. I finally started it last weekend on a whim, and now that I've taken the time to knit it up, I'm so happy with it!

I've made a few of these collars before, but this one is particularly special. I knit the body in a mohair/wool/nylon blend bouclé held double, with an additional strand of Trendsetter Luna in a shimmery rainbow-silver color. Once that was finished, Lumberjack had the brilliant idea to work an edging on just three sides of the collar, just to spiff it up a little.

I decided to use just one strand of the Luna, which is a novelty yarn with teeny sequins attached to it. It was a pain to knit the i-cord, since the yarn is basically polyester thread - but the final effect is delicate and shimmering, a fine detail next to the richly textured collar fabric.

Since the gauge of the collar and the i-cord are so different, I worked the cord separately and sewed it on using a strand of laceweight alpaca/wool, which blends in perfectly. Overall, it was super fiddly and a bit time-consuming, but I'm so pleased with the end result that I don't even mind. I'm sure I'll be making more soon enough!

More details are on Ravelry here.

Happy Thursday, friends!

<3

Cory

The Dog Is Onto Something

  

At night, the dog begs her way up onto the couch and sets her mouth on a little fleece pillow covered with cartoon Yodas. At times, her needs are straightforward: feed the dog at nine and six, let the dog out every four hours or so, make sure the dog has water before putting her to bed. Other times, her needs are more complex, almost human in their ambiguity: the time she takes to sniff around the yard, snapping dandelions off their stalks with winking teeth; the nights when she paces the floor and stops to press her nose into the crook of my thumb, only to turn away a moment later, unsatisfied. All of the unassailable, wordless needs of her tiny doggie heart.

At these moments, I wonder if her adolescent bewilderment is somewhat like my own.

Lately I've been struggling with the twin hydras of art and worth. When you make the one, does the other follow? Does the first contain the second, nested in its core like a matryoshka, or do you find yourself twisting the final doll open to find nothing inside but empty air? And at the end of it all, why does it feel like the measured worth of a job well done is as mysterious and changeable as currency?

I hope the answer is kinder than I believe it is, on my darker days. I hope that worth is something like the smack of air in your lungs on a cool spring day when you're walking across the freeway overpass and the wind starts to blow. I hope that it's something like the the feeling of dancing with your puppy on the kitchen floor while your husband is out of town, when she is looking at you with her mouth pulled up in a pointy little smile and her tongue is flapping like a ribbon and suddenly you feel so joyful you could shout.

I can only hope that much is true. I think the dog does.

<3

c.

On Loss

These last few weeks, my heart has been full. Death as a matter of course makes us examine our own lives, to draw warm things and people nearer to our hearts. In realizing the fragility of others, we hew to patterns of comfort; we take time to stop and count each moment as a blessing. We tell ourselves that this has changed everything, though we will forget this lesson soon enough. Unthinkingly, we will return to our daily procrastinations, even while those closest to the loss cannot.

The familiar heft of that feeling sticks in my chest, though my copy of it is old and worn.

 As I stand at the outskirts of that pain, it seems unfair to feel grief when the full magnitude has only hit me in the smallest of ripples. But still, there it is: a flood of memory, and gratitude, and sadness; of anger, that the world should be upended upon two people so dearly, wonderfully kind. Of that overwhelming feeling of wanting to do, when there is nothing to be done.

And so I turn to the things that I can. To my husband, who makes tea and holds my hand without my asking. To my ratlings, who are jolly and round, and who cheer me up just by existing. To wool and words, as in my incapacity to do I can still retreat into the methodical and the generative, in the perhaps vain hope that by makeshift cloth and love, I might protect all of our hearts.