Goodbye, My Heart Rat

Early this morning, curled up with me in a nest of blankets on the couch, my buddy Squish passed away. For over two years, he's been my guy - my reluctant cuddlebug, my delightful misanthrope - and it felt right that I should be with him at the very end.

I'll miss him terribly.

  

RIP Monsieur Wayne 'Squishy'

Spring 2013 - April 5th, 2016

Little Ones, Loved Ones

  

In the last six months, as the rats have gotten older, the house has slowly been taken over by the machinery of animal care: little twists of plastic and bits of tape, hollow-tipped needles, a smudged yellow machine that compresses air. And the care has become ever more complex: at first, a spoonful of yogurt with antibiotics in it; later, a nebulizer, 60 mL syringes of sterile saline and what feels like dozens of little bottles of medication.

Before, a snuggle before bed would be all the special attention they needed, but now, it's three am and a sound like the click of a windshield wiper wakes you: the little rat, gasping for breath, frantic. You pick him up to comfort him and he feels like a baby bird - all sinew and fluff - and you hold him against your bare skin in the dark until he quiets down, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion and pain.

It is heartbreaking and yet somehow easy to care for an animal like this, when their life is so short, and the ferocity of your love is returned in such equal measure. But this time is also a mirror of loss; a compact echo of the hardships faced in our human lives. A little seedling of that fear and grief that we all face, in illness and dying and the finality of loss.

So you take what you can. The little paw holding steady on your knuckle when the big rat needs help standing up to wash his face, a nudge and a sandy little lick as thanks. The sigh and wiggle into the crook of your elbow when the little rat finishes his medicine, a bead of yogurt perched at the end of his whiskers. These small gestures of trust that carry you, that may come back to you in a dark moment in the future when the loss is not a small creature but a person, with a constellation of feelings and memories reflected in their eyes. Because we are not so different, the animals and us, in dying and in love: the size may be different, but our hearts are much the same.

<3

Cory

WIP: Magic Lupine

 

In between my secret projects, I've been knitting on a third Lupine shawl, this time in a coveted skein of Tosh Merino Light in the colorway Magic. Lately, I've been exploring more of the sparkly, Lisa-Frank-tastic style of my '90s youth, which means splatter-dyes and neon and everything funky - which has been fun, and also sort of complicated in weird ways.

I was a pretty serious kid, and even though I did have a sticker book to rival the best of them - I had sparkly, fuzzy, and scratch-n-sniff stickers, organized by type and motif in a Lisa Frank dolphin sticker book, thankyouverymuch - I didn't ever feel like I was cool enough to really participate in trends or fashion in general, so in a small way, I'm attempting to reclaim that experience a bit. (Okay, the current '90s throwback nostalgia is helping too!) It wasn't until I started going to fashion school that I admitted that I even cared about fashion, since my experience of it had been so fraught with feelings of exclusion and inadequacy - some of which was handed to me through media portrayals of beauty and worthiness, and some of which came from an internal sense of perfectionism and self-criticism. Either way, fashion was a very negative thing to me for much of my life, and I'm still sorting through a lot of my beliefs about and experiences of it.

So in my daily making & fashion life lately, I've been trying to explore and challenge those things that we all hear and internalize in childhood, which are reinforced over and over again throughout our lives: you have to be pretty to pull off short hair; being skinnier is always better; women can't have body hair, because it's gross; your hips look big in that dress, and nobody wants that, right? And what I'm finding is that I'm not just enjoying the opportunity to play with fashion and beauty that has felt off-limits to me in the past, I'm also finding that a lot of it feels authentic in ways I didn't expect, which is pretty fucking cool.

 

 In other news, Monsieur Squishy is still on a twice-daily dose of rattie antibiotics, but remains more or less his cranky self. He has become somewhat more personable during his convalescence, but I think his true opinion of us has changed only slightly: Lumberjack and I are still his annoying humans, but now we are his annoying humans who also give him tasty yogurt twice a day.

Good boy, I guess?

Happy Wednesday, friends!

<3

Cory

FO: Pip!

   

Although I finished Pip well before my Oregon Flock & Fiber trip - and actually wore it all that weekend! - I didn't have a chance to get proper photos taken until a week or so ago. I was super drawn to the Braeburn colorway for this design, but I was a little concerned about how it would fit into my wardrobe, since usually, I am all about blacks & cool greys, saturated tones, and specific shades of pink.

I shouldn't have worried - this color is perfect. It's a lovely shade of not-quite-orange, not-quite-red, not-quite-yellowy-green that coordinates perfectly with lots of earthy shades, and even contrasts beautifully with the color of my glasses. Which is a major factor when it comes to wearability for me, because

a) I am way too lazy to put contacts in on a daily basis

and

b) I like my glasses the most.

So I've been wearing this hat a lot. And working steadily away on writing up the pattern! (Stay tuned.)

(Monsieur Squishy has a lot to say about the subject, obvs.)

Details on Ravelry here.

Happy Monday!
<3
Cory

WIP Basket Evaluation, June 2014

About a week ago, I took a look at my overfull WIP basket and decided that it was time to knock some  more of these suckers out. It's gotten a lot better in the last few months - I've finished quite a few longer term project, actually! - but I would really love to be down to 4-8 works in progress at any given time and have my progress time be a little faster. Maybe shoot for finishing one thing every 2-3 weeks instead of finishing 5 things at a time, 2-3 times a year.

And, since it's fun to see before & after photos, here's a big pile of WIPs, many of them long term:

      

That turned into a big pile of finished objects (even if it took months/years to get there). Hooray, hooray!

      

So what's next? Well, these old friends, for one thing:

         

And when I say old... I mean, these projects are embarrassingly old. Most of them range from 6 months to 3 years old, which not only takes up space - both mental and actual - but also makes it harder to figure out where to pick things up. Going forward, I'd really like to limit the number of pointlessly long-term projects like this. 

For me, it can be psychologically more difficult to rip something out that isn't working, but in the end, it's a great problem-solving exercise and learning experience. It's easy to let things stagnate because I'm afraid of failing or screwing it up, but I gotta learn to let that stuff go. It inevitably feels better to finish something and let it exist, imperfectly, than to let it sit around with the possibility of perfection that never comes to pass.

(Clearly, knitting is teaching me life lessons all up in here.)

So in the future, I want my WIP basket to look more like this:

   

   

I already know that I'm a non-monogamous knitter: the worst moment in my knitting life was when I finished all of my WIPs and I suddenly had nothing to work on! To avoid that, I do want to have a small but good variety of projects to work on. Cowls and socks are great walking-around projects; shawls are engaging longer-term projects; and sweaters are a more challenging endeavor in terms of fit - I'm forever a nitpicker - but one that is very rewarding. It would be great to have a few of each, so that I always have something that I'm excited about making.

Overall, I'm trying to make it a priority to clear old things out of my life to make room for new ones - or just fewer, more valued old ones. Perfectionism is so often the unhelpful boss of my creative work, so I'm making a conscious effort to give it the finger ignore it so that I can move on to bigger, better, more fulfilling projects.

Like cuddling Mr. Squishy while eating Ben & Jerry's. BRBBBBBB