Kind of Blue

  

I'm stuck. There it is.

On the last four repeats of my shawl, on the color navy, with a bum hand from a needle stick that turned my smallest finger blue and yellow. I can still feel the sting of it from the moment that it happened: late at night, too tired to move but the little rat needed his medicine, and so I crouched near the floor and made his nebulizer dose, but I was thinking of something else and my eyes flicked away for a second and the needle slipped, and I was surprised, but it felt more as though I were looking through glass at someone else's pain and only the throb in my hand betrayed the fact that it was my own. I bandaged my hand and cleaned up and pulled the little one out of his cage; I could feel every knob on his spine like a neat line of buttons, and when I put him on my chest he lay flat and nestled his face into the hollow of my neck and closed his eyes.

He's gone now, but the throb in my hand is still there. We buried him outside our bedroom window with a little clump of yellow flowers that somehow survived the frost. In the night I still listen for his scrabbly breath, and I hope in time that I'll remember him as he was before: fur the color of wheat, dark sweet eyes, and the feeling of his soft little body nestled up in my pajamas as I read myself to sleep. In time it will come, like spring, when the ground warms up and the sun moves in wider and wider circles around the earth.

For now I wait, but in time it will come. I have hope.



RIP Monsieur Garth 'Pooper'
Spring 2013 - December 18th, 2015

xo
c.

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

Ballgown Styling

  

On Tuesday evening of this week, I had a makeup test for my ballgown styling with a coworker of my friend Sooz, who kindly offered to do the makeup for my presentation. We played with some dramatic layers of eye color, but in the end, we decided that an understated smokey eye with a pop of dark green was just the ticket. To keep things simple but polished, we threw in a nude lip and some soft blush. I love it - it's the exact amount of subtle prettiness that I wanted to complement the dress.

Plus, it picks up just a little bit of the color from my delicious Chie Mihara pumps! (Clearly, matching the shoes is the most important.) Overall, styling this gown has been a bit more of a challenge for me; I usually like to pair vibrant colors together, but the aesthetic of the dress is so soft and romantic that I have to be careful of upstaging it with fancy accessories and overpowering colors.

Good thing I've got Monsieur Pooper to help me out!

Happy Friday!

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