WolfWeave

Last week I had another spurt of beading. Most of us in Bead Group wanted to bead a square for Jeanette Shanigan’s 2007 Breast Cancer Donation Quilts to be auctioned off at Bead & Button’s Bead Artists Against Breast Cancer auction. All of the squares were to be a specific size and to contain a butterfly motif in some form. Here is a photo of my bead embroidered butterfly (shown larger than its real 1.5 x 1.5 inch size!):

Sue Jackson is collecting our squares to be sent in together so that hopefully we can all be grouped together in the same quilt. If you are a beader, even a beginning one, please consider doing a quilt. All the information is on Jeanette’s site.

Everybody’s doing it… Checking to see how much their blog’s worth! Hey, it took a second and…

Of course, I have no idea how Technorati gets THAT result because when I use their blog-searching function to search for the name of my blog, I get THIS result: “No results from ‘all blogs’ with ‘any authority’ in ‘any language.’ There are no posts that contain that text.”

Hmmmm—Maybe I’m not worth that $1693 after all. On the other hand, it did list 5 blogs in the past week that had links to my blog!

The Yarn Harlot‘s blog is worth $1,095,772.14, as it draws a ton of visitors, but it’s nice to know my son’s blog is worth $177,265.56—at least he has more readers than I do!

To my sons:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.  
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;  
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil   
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?  
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;            
  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 
  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil   
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 
 
And for all this, nature is never spent;    
  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;           
And though the last lights off the black West went  
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—    
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent    
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.  

I refer you to this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which has always moved me, and, on this, my 21st wedding anniversary, I would like to remind you of one important fact: There is more to romance than just technology (and lots more to life than either one). May your lives be as full of the romantic as they are of the technological (and may you appreciate the difference).

I don’t know—four guys in my life and I don’t get a single card for Valentine’s Day (let alone flowers or candy). I gave or sent them all cards…year after year I give them all cards (and candy where appropriate); you’d think they’d catch on by now! But, noooooo. Maybe it’s a guy thing and they have some form of Valentine’s Day male blindness. Maybe it’s just one of those things and I have to let it go…but I’ve let so many things go; after all, it’s not easy being the only woman in a house full of males, even if you are the wife and mother and supposedly in charge. Ha! Over 21 years, faced with that solid wall of maleness, I gave up on so many expectations that I can’t even begin to remember them all—the furniture everyone jumps on, the stacks of magazines and papers wherever you look, the gardens turned to weeds, the good dishes we never use, the games and toys and computers strewn across every available surface, the endless piles of dirty clothes, the noise and the demands and the complaints and the doors left open and the doors slammed shut and the shoes tracking mud and snow along the floors. With a family of boys, you learn to abandon all the niceties you once imagined would be part of your life…but this, THIS is where I draw the line! It’s Valentine’s Day dammit and I want to hold on to my last remaining romantic illusion! I love you all and I wouldn’t give up a moment of it (though I do wish our house looked more like a picture from a magazine) but I give each one of you a Valentine’s Day card every damn year and it’s about time I received some cards in return!! If you won’t learn from me, then learn from your grandparents, who always remember to send their daughter a Valentine’s Day card. Thanks Mom & Dad, for understanding that sometimes the smallest gestures can carry the most meaning.

Last week I had the opportunity to take two wonderful workshops in two distinctly different media. Over the weekend of February 3rd and 4th, I was able to take two knitting workshops offered by the Windy City Knitting Guild with Annie Modesitt, knitting heretic extraordinaire:

Here’s a photo of Annie graciously signing a book for me after class. The two classes I took were “Love Your Lace” in which I actually learned how to knit the i-cord cast-on and bind-off (and they’re not at all hard to do once you know how!!). So now I can finish the trim on my cherry boucle jacket, which is all done in i-cord bind-off, when I get to that point! Here is my lace from the class:

The second class was called “Cable Mania” and, this being Sunday, was a little more manic than Saturday had been! Annie is in the middle of moving from New Jersey to Minneapolis, while honoring her teaching and writing commitments, so her life is pretty hectic as it is, but Sunday was a fun class with everyone having a riotous time learning to cable without a cable needle of any sort (YES, it can be done!), spurred on by Annie’s hysterical story involving how to hold the stitches. I can’t tell you the story but I can tell you that I learned to cable for the first time (I’ve been totally afraid of cabling) and to do it without a cable needle was nothing short of miraculous!! Here’s my sample:

[I had been signed up for a third class (Combination Knitting) on Saturday morning but was unable to make it, as we were busy picking up Aaron at the airport and rushing him to the emergency room at the University of Chicago Hospital to have him checked out for a flareup of his ulcerative colitis. Luckily, his steroids had kicked in by that time and he was judged fine and discharged (with a loud "I told you so" on his part). So, I guess, after flying him in on the redeye from San Francisco, we definitely qualify as helicopter parents (or is that airplane parents?)---still hovering over their oldest son. Despite the hospital visit, it was nice to know he was all right and even better having him home for the weekend and hearing about his latest adventures in San Francisco and the exciting new projects he's involved in (which will probably keep him in SF, and not returning to Boston, for a few more months).]

During the week, I fortuitously found the courage to sign up for a workshop offered by The North Suburban Needlearts Guild on “Playing with Peyote Polygons” with well-known and published beader Diane Fitzgerald.

Why did I need to find my courage you ask? After all, I am a member of the original “Bead Group,” meeting every Thursday and profiled in that early issue (#10) of Bead & Button magazine! Well, sad to admit, but I haven’t actually beaded since my last time at The Bead & Button Show in 2002—and that was 4 1/2 years ago! (I still have unfinished projects from those classes!) Okay, maybe I have beaded one or two small pieces at Sue Jackson’s instigation since then, but basically I had lain down my beading needles in favor of knitting needles! And I’m not the only one…some of us have been knitting or crocheting or doing wirework (or even scrapbooking) at our weekly Bead Group meetings!

Anyway, back to the point…I did sign up to take Diane Fitzgerald’s “Playing with Peyote Polygons” class and I’m very glad I did. It was a small class, only 20 students and two very full days. The room we were in was large and well lit and we were nicely spread out, only one or two to a table, so we had plenty of space. I was lucky enough to sit with JoAnn Baumann, who helped me out a lot. Diane’s handout was excellent but she didn’t let that stand alone, demonstrating each technique for us and helping each of us until we “got it.” I was so excited by these designs—before I had stopped beading, I had been trying to execute 3-dimensional beaded geometric shapes for sculptures but had been pretty much unsuccessful. I just didn’t have the mathematical background or was unable to make the visual/spatial leap necessary to visualize and execute the forms. Diane accomplished this and figured out how to create them in beadwork. Now, thanks to this class, I too can make the shapes I’ve been waiting to bead. I was so excited and I know already that I am going to jump back into beading on a regular basis. Here are the bits that I made in class:

Eventually I plan to make them larger and to form some of them into a necklace.

I had already signed up for a few classes at The Bead & Button Show and one of them is with Huib Petersen. (I’m taking his class “My Father’s Watchband”). Well, after Diane Fitzgerald’s class, I happened to need some more needles so I stopped off at NanC Meinhardt’s Studio the next day and who should be there teaching a class on his rose but Huib! He was so gracious, allowing me to look at all his samples, chatting with me and laughing over my mentioning that I had recently seen him on an episode of “Crafters Coast to Coast” on the DIY Network, that had been filmed in 2004. He related the crazy story about them trying to film him beading for a day. He also showed me the beautiful crochet lace work that he is doing now, and I gave him Prudence’s website information to visit. Maybe we’ll have him doing freeform crochet and beadwork before long! Anyway, that was a very pleasant ending to the week.

And then, for a weekend surprise, my middle son, Noah, stopped in to spend Saturday night. He is in his first year at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland but had driven to South Bend to play in a Magic the Gathering card tournament, so drove on to Chicago to sleep over in his own bed. On Sunday, he attempted to put a larger hard drive in his computer (or something):

before he and Ben (our youngest, still in high school, who refuses to let me take his photo) drove off to Pastimes to play in yet another tournament (which Noah won, before heading back to school). It was nice having him home, feeding him dinner and hearing all about his classes. We hadn’t seen him since winter break. It’s a funny feeling—I like being home with just Ben and not the other two; I enjoy the quiet; don’t miss the craziness of having 3 sons at home…and yet, when they do come home again, I love having them here and realize all over again just how much I miss them when they are gone. I guess that’s what parenting is all about at this stage. Another year and a half and Ben will be off to college too and life will really be weird!

The alien cat warps in from outer space in his time-travelling space sack:

His eye color begins to change as he attempts to blend in with earth cats before exiting his space vehicle:

The trusting house cat comes over to investigate this strange visitor from outer space:

Immediately the house cat is immobilized by the paralyzing white rays emanating from the space cat’s eyes:

The poor house cat is stricken with the alien virus:

Within minutes, you can see that the eyes of both cats have turned bright pink as brain waves are exchanged from one to the other:

No longer just a house cat, a bit of its true alien nature peeks out from one eye: