What happens when you get off the internet for 36 hours

Last Wednesday, we celebrated seven years of marriage, and this weekend we went on our first ever camping trip together. We have historically been huge fans of farm stays, having stayed in a converted Airstream, in cabins, in an 1800s farmhouse in Eastern NC, going to farm-to-table restaurants, but never have we fully committed to the great outdoors until now. (And, to no one’s surprise, this campsite was, you guessed it, on a farm.)

We set up camp after a normal person’s dinner time in the miraculous still-light evening that only comes this time of year during solstice when the world is bright at 8:30 PM and ate buffalo chicken sandwiches looking out over the most incredible pasture. We woke up and made coffee on a crooked little campfire and burned bagel sandwiches. We hammocked basically all day with a short break in town for lunch and texting our cat sitter. We napped. I slept terribly. We read, I knit. Our phones didn’t work at all - the entire weekend - except for our brief stop in town. We had downloaded music, and that was pretty much it. I knit and re-knit a sock using some hand-dyed yarn from Posie Gets Cozy that unfortunately for me and you is now sold out. I would absolutely love to make a sweater in this yarn.

I think that this may legitimately have been the first time in I don’t even know how long - five years? Ten years? Where I truly have not been on the internet at all for over 36 hours. Realizing this fact was extremely depressing and anxiety-provoking, but I think it’s true. I’ve never deleted Instagram off of my phone or taken a true, intentional break there, either since I downloaded it in 2012. Even when we have extensively gone to the mountains, our cabins always have WiFi. Being off the grid for even just a weekend was kind of a wild experience (no pun intended), and I can’t say that I am glad to be back quite yet. When I had no choice but to just be present, I suddenly felt so nostalgic for my years growing up when this was just my normal, every day reality. Sure, I was on the computer all of the time for school, or texting my friends on my pre-iPhone smart device thingy, but it made me realize just how caught up in it I am now in my life. We had some big talks about our dreams, and how we spend our time, and what we value, and there was no input or comparison from anyone else in the world to consider when we had those conversations. Is that pathetic? Sometimes I think I am too impressionable and social media just makes that so much worse. It kind of made me question why I make any of the choices that I do in my life: do I actually want and value that goal, or do I just follow a lot of people who want and value that goal? Do I actually want XYZ item in my life or am I just constantly getting ads for it on every social media platform I see? Am I actually stressed about big life decisions or am I just hearing a lot of ads on podcasts for Modern Fertility and Better Help?

Honestly, I’m not sure yet. But I know for a fact that getting off the internet and just knitting or just reading or just being feels like a whole new concept that I plan on doing a lot, a LOT more this summer. I’ve also been listening to music from back in high school on actual CDs (I know) and y’all, it has me all in my feelings.

In other, less philosophical news, I will be releasing a new shawl pattern SOON and I am so excited to share it with you. It’s so meditative and lovely and perfect for taking with you anywhere that adventure may call this season. More soon!

So This is The New Year

Hi friends! Happy New Year to you. January came to us swift and sure and cold, all the while withholding the one thing that redeems the final chapter of a dark winter: snow. There is snow in the forecast tonight late late late and I don’t think I’ll be able to stay up for it, and feel as though by the time I wake up tomorrow morning, it will all be frozen goop instead of a fluffy white blanket. I still have hope though, always remembering the year that the “snowpocalypse” almost ruined my mid-February birthday. We have hot cocoa in our pantry just in case.

It’s hard for me to know how much I want to share in this space, because I always want it to be a warm hug for readers to come to, a good and bright spot where creativity is king and daydreamers are welcome. But to be totally honest, it has been a really, really challenging few months. I’ve been in some circumstances one right after the other that have made me have to really work to stand up for myself, and have to rethink future plans, and wonder what fresh garbage the next day will hold, and it has been exhausting. I have found myself longing over and over for things not to be this hard, and to wonder “why”, and all sorts of understandable but ultimately unhelpful thought patterns for which my regular schedule of therapy has been a complete godsend.

I saw an image on IG the other day that reflected on how growth looks different for everyone: a picture of two plants, one which was blooming, and one with an extensive system of deep roots, but only a few leaves to the naked eye. It resonated with me deeply, and I know I am growing strong roots in this season. They will be hard-fought and (I hope) solidifying moving forward.

AND YET. In the midst of all of this. Joy. I received no fewer than three bouquets from the people in my life who love me the most this week. B and I have perfected a new couch snuggle that guarantees I fall asleep completely warm and perfectly happy in five minutes flat. I have started a new mug collection and it is bringing an actual, full smile to my face every time I see it. My grocery store hyacinth has the most heavenly scent you can imagine! We have a new president! And of course, there is knitting. My mental energy has been real low by the time I have space in my day to work on new designs, but I am still working on a new mitten design that I am excited to share with you hopefully soon.

I hope that whatever this new year has already brought, you are digging deep, staying cozy, and that you are lucky enough to experience the perfect stillness of a snowy morning.

July, as it were

How are we doing today? Today it is July, next week it will be August. This time of year is hardest for me typically: I’ve experienced all the best that summer has to offer (cool water on a hot day, fresh tomatoes, fireflies, a getaway, a celebration or two) and my heart starts to wonder when the heat will subside and the cool relief of the fall will arrive. The days where the hottest it will get is 85 degrees are over and we are in heat indexes nearing 100 which makes it hard to feel good about doing anything out of doors.

And yet! There is gratitude in each day. I’m home after a week with family, the first week I’ve spent with them all since November, and it filled my heart so full. It was a lot of travel and way more levels of stress than any of us were thinking with the virus still rearing its ugly head in the areas where I was destined, but it was also 100% worth it. For a long time I think I expected to get into more of a rhythm with living far from home but honestly, each year is still a bit of a heartache. My nieces and nephew are the most special little people I know and photos are not the same as being with them. (How far away are the holidays now?)

The highlights of my week this week are the ten pounds of heirloom tomatoes that Nash insists on munching whenever he gets the chance that will turn into the best tomato sauce and my weekly bouquet from Bluebird Meadows Farm. I’ll get a photo soon, because everyone needs to know how amazing these flowers are. Having a pitcher of happiness in my dining room never meant so much to me as it does this year. I’d take celosia and zinnias and black-eyed susan over most things.

The Paeonia Shawl testing is also complete and will be launching this week! Check out my Instagram for more information and photos today. I’m so so excited to share this with you all. Wishing you joy (and air-conditioning) in the meantime.

Resetting & Restarting

I feel as though I blinked, and it’s June 23.

We have been longing to get out of the house, and we did, and now time seems to be flying by in a new, wild pace. B graduated from his residency program, we celebrated at the beach, we made a day-trip to my in-laws for Father’s Day, we worked a lot, we mowed the lawn, we worked some more, and we celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary with a little staycation in town. We stayed at a tiny, historic house just a few minutes up the road and ate takeout and read books together. We had the most FANTASTIC Japanese food I’ve ever had in my life and reconnected sharing a meal.

Perhaps the shifts feel so much more dramatic because there’s still just so little sense of what to anticipate for the future, and it still feels very not normal to live this way. In our state the number of hospitalizations hit a new all-time high today, and this week we experienced a new wave of cancellations for events and special celebrations in the end of summer and beginning of fall. The little griefs get all bottled up and then come out in waves, sometimes, and unexpectedly. We are unable to make plans, and I need plans as a part of my DNA. It’s so hard not to have them.

And yet, I am so attuned right now to the changing seasons and the natural world in a way that I think I never have before. I feel the heat without judgement, just feeling it and not dreading it and being present today. Seeing dragonflies resting on the bricks outside of my house, going on a walk and seeing the flora literally change from week to week as the month unfolds. Lightning bugs every night. Seeing the persistent piles of leftover leaves and sticks on my driveway and feeling a sense of clean, declutter, reset, renew in this space we are in, this new day that we have found. Get rid of everything that didn’t work before that’s taking up physical and emotional space. A new dining table, and this room just works now. There will be sungold tomatoes in our produce box this week. Tomatoes! It’s tomato season. What a blessing to be here. Hostas and lilies and fresh basil and fruit in every drink.

We are less than a month away from completing the 100 Day Challenge, and to no one’s shock I haven’t completed this in the way that I certainly imagined I would, but that is 100% ok and I’m still really happy to be here, to be writing, to be knitting, and sewing, and making a life. Thanks for being here with me and I am happy to be back at my desk at the end of June.

Friday, Friday: 6.12.2020

I am entering this weekend with much clearer eyes and a heart that is filling up. I have heard stories of people who are learning, I’ve seen myself learn, and I know that we will continue to call others into the work of anti-racism and equity in this country. I’m also really overwhelmed with the positive response to the Paeonia shawl - if you were interested in testing you should have received an email from me this week, please let me know if you haven’t or if you have other questions about this design!

This week:

• I really believed the saying for the first time, “The more creativity you use, the more creativity you have.” I have two other design ideas in my brain I’m excited to work on this weekend.
• B graduates from his residency program! Parts of this spring have felt very “normal” with his pending graduation because he is continuing on in a fellowship at the same hospital where he did his residency, but we have a virtual ceremony tonight and I’m sure it will all start to feel very real.
• We scheduled out our lunches and dinners ahead of time and it took so much pressure off our daily schedule. Will be doing this more in the future.
• We ate homemade pizza bagels (a revelation).
• I found joy in going outside to check on my newly planted rosemary plant every day.
• I got back into playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is just truly a gorgeous game.
• I read up more on how to think intersectionally about gender, farming, environmentalism, and the work I do every day.
• We said a hard goodbye and a new hello.
• We went to Costco and didn’t lose our minds.

We will be at a house at the beach for the weekend celebrating B’s graduation and enjoying the sunshine (and hoping to be semi-solitary as we do so). I wish you a weekend of book-reading, learning, knitting, and joy.

Friday, Friday 5.29.2020

It’s the last Friday in May, and what a journey it has been. My heart is breaking this week and is simultaneously so angry for the injustice in our country against people of color. I know I have so much work to do as a white woman in the South and moving in white spaces I am seeing just how far so many of my peers have to go also in understanding and combating racism today. It can feel overwhelming at times but it is our burden to carry. Love for our neighbor means action.

This week, I fought a mostly winning battle with the vegetables in my fridge that I’ve been accumulating from weekly pick ups from a local farm and it has spurred me on towards several new-to-me recipes that I have loved: honey-glazed spicy turnips, zucchini fritters, and blistered snap peas, kale and a soft-boiled egg over rice vinegar noodles. I feel as though I am just now understanding how much I love turnips just as turnip season is coming, and balancing this by trying out zucchini recipes just as its season is beginning. We have been consistently keeping a jar of herb-y yogurt sauce in our fridge to spoon on top of fritters, for crudités, and to dollop on top of proteins throughout the week and WOW I am going to deeply lament the end of fresh dill season. I’m also contemplating the acquisition of a dehydrator to extend the life of these glorious herbs and wonder if anyone out there has experience they would like to lend to this effort?

The making this week has been slow and meditative. I am making great progress on my V-Neck boxy sweater and hardly any progress on the new design I am working on, thanks to some brain-scraping work loads induced by squeezing a five-day work week into only four which left only room for rounds and rounds of stockinette. My printed patterns from PDF Plotting arrived this week but aside from being unrolled, have as yet remained untouched. (But admired, longingly, from my desk with much anticipation.) I am also loving briefly, before bed, wandering into Avonlea with Anne of Green Gables now that I have it in paperback rather than attempting to make progress with my iPad. Her adventures and misadventures have consistently brought a smile to my face and have given me dreams of tea time and simplicity and endless blossoms.

Wherever you are in the world, I hope you get the rest that you need this weekend, so that you can show up and advocate and act the way that we need right now. But please, take care of yourself first.

Homestead Dreams

One of my favorite paintings, “The Neighborhood” by Phoebe Wahl

For many years, my IG bio has read something like this:

“Wild, woolly, and wonderful. Knitter, sewist, crafter, and homestead wannabe.”

It took me a long time before I even could put it out there that I wanted to create a homestead for my family. (You know the feeling?) The idea felt so distant and out of reach at the time when my husband and I were renting a tiny house that we knew we would move from in a year, in a shaded yard unsuitable for growing any sort of food, and with full-time jobs and school commitments. But the desire was so very real and over the years, I’ve had to figure out what it means to homestead in each season of where we live.

Of course, my own journey has been guided and inspired by folks who I have watched on their own paths towards sustainability and building a vibrant home. From our friend whose small suburban house backs up to big woods and who grows tons of food to preserve in a tenth of an acre, to folks learning homestead skills in their tiny apartments in Oakland, and stories of families who just started where they were and didn’t wait for permission or a big parcel of land or a lot of free time. I’m so glad that a spirit of industriousness and do-it-yourself and a love of sustainability and local community manifest themselves in many ways around the world.

Currently, B and I own our home and have lived here for the past 2.5 years. The house is on a really great sized lot, but is sandwiched between a highway to our back, and a thoroughfare on our front. It’s in a spot not too far from downtown but apart from the road noise, walking to the backmost part of our space you wouldn’t quite believe it. We still don’t think that this space is our “forever” home but we are making our home here for the foreseeable future and that has led to a lot of different dreams on my part to learn as much as I can and grow as much as I can while we are here. We’ve done all of the good homeowner things of settling in, painting walls, decluttering closets, and making each space work for us, and have also had the opportunity to do some more involved “homestead” things:

• We built our first raised bed. Unfortunately, even the sunniest part of our backyard gets only partial sunlight thanks to some 15 foot shrubs that we will need to hire someone to cut down significantly, and our neighbors have a few trees that shade the best parts of our yard from sunlight during the day. I am doing more research in the meantime on low-light vegetables and herbs to grow this fall.
• I just finished a trio of “mushroom beds” on the shadiest part of our yard behind our home. I purchased sawdust mushroom spawn and used the lasagna method of alternating sawdust, wood bark, and spawn to cultivate shiitake, wine cap, and morel mushrooms. Now all we have to do is wait!
• We started shopping more locally, visiting the farmer’s market, and canning seasonal fruits and veggies. It’s taught me so much about our food, the changing seasons, and our community.
• I started dyeing more and more with natural, foraged dyes and kitchen scraps. This has long been a love of mine, but it has been fun to explore it more in our kitchen.
• We cleared significant brush and started dreaming about what each small space can be. Our side yard? Future home to blueberries, if we’re lucky. The giant shed that needs to be demolished? Perfect spot for a future chicken coop.
• Learning about sustainable and human animal processing. This hasn’t been done in our home, but B has learned so much about sustainable hunting, fishing, and animal processing in the past few years.

I also consider knitting, mending, sewing, and stitching to absolutely be homestead skills, and also look forward to diving more deeply into soap and candle making and natural housekeeping. While I still dream often of a quiet few acres and the space to spread out and grow, I am learning every day and building my own kind of wannabe homestead all the time, which is more than enough for now.

Friday, Friday: 5.15.2020

Happy Friday!

This week felt SO LONG to me. The beginning seemed slow, at least, and then yesterday and today sped up with meetings, activities, and mask-making for work in advance of some community food distribution tomorrow. In the middle of it all was some really good stuff.

This week:

We polished off the last of the BEST strawberries that a wonderful friend had dropped off.

B and I had some great conversations and are making exciting progress towards achieving some goals we’ve had for a while.

I started a new personal finance book that has made me laugh out loud multiple times (in a good way).

I made great progress on my Things of Spring cross stitch and finally feel like I’m getting in the groove with those tiny stitches.

I got two more succulents in the mail!

I ventured way outside of my neighborhood to pick up some decent sushi for the first time in two months.

I made a bunch of recipes from the Nom Nom Paleo cookbook. (Yum)

One of my elephant bush plants that had started to wither started making a comeback with a little more sunlight. There’s likely a lesson there.

I have plans for a pretty productive weekend, but we’ll see how that goes! I am really stoked for our local farmer’s market to re-open with socially distant vendors and to pick up some pre-orders I put in this week. I miss our local market so much.

Happy weekend everyone!