Donna Druchunas's Blog

I know most designers (at least the vociferous ones) disagree with me on copyright law issues, but a lot of writers actually agree with me. And, it turns out, so do designers who have found a voice outside the walls of Vogue Knitting, Interweave and Knitters in the new(ish) magazine, Craft. I just can't shut up about this because I really feel that all the people who say things like "You can't make a copy of my pattern for your mother" are basically full of crap. I also hate that so many new designers are scared shitless about accidently using some design element in their new garment and being threatened with a lawsuit.

Here are a couple of brief excerpts from Craft and Copyright by Wendy Seltzer in the current issue:

Artisans have always learned their trade by copying their predecessors, picking up a pen, a brush, or chisel first to imitate, then to reinvent. Too strict an application of copyright may stifle the very creativity it is meant to promote.

So when fashion designers petition Congress to make their patterns copyrightable, they not only push aside creative reinvention, they open a new door for copyright-based threats. Yet the field has seen great creativity without copyright's incentives -- the drive to stay ahead of copyists may even be good for the fashion cycle, while adding more copyright would put a thicket of licensing in the way of creative re-styling. As both creators and remixers, crafters should insist on balance in copyright law.

Part 2 will be in the next issue, so don't miss it.

And, here's a bit by author Cory Doctorow from the Guardian:

This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it’s not’s really culture if you’re not sharing it, is it?).

It’s also a dumb idea. People aren’t going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy’s comic book. They’re also not going to stop doing culture.

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

For those interested in the subject, I highly recommend reading both of these articles in full. And don't just believe everything you read about copyright on Yahoo! Groups or in Vogue Knitting. There are other perspectives that are, in my opinion, much more enlightened and intelligent. And, yes, that's how I really feel.

Again, I don't have time to comment, but if you're a writer, you really must read this post, Writing my life -- and leading with my heart, by Susan J. Tweit.

I can't believe I said that, because mostly I hate NY. But check this out (swiped from craftzine.com because I'm too busy to do an original writeup today):

If you are in the NY area this Saturday, take some time to check out this amazing line up of artists and crafters in the "Crafting Protest" panel at The New School.

(Photo above from Cat Mazza's site, MicroRevolt.)

From the site:
Many contemporary artists are using craft to make diverse and timely political statements. Because creating crafts is so often social and communal, they can play a vital role in the public sphere. The speakers examine the role of craft in forming national identities, especially in times of political turmoil or war; notions of patriotism; feminism and the domestic sphere; and unconventional economic models. Five artists will present projects and discuss their work. By linking the act of production and handmaking in the public realm to ideological issues of agency, participants ask how art makes political subjects. Panelists include Liz Collins, artist/designer; Sabrina Gschwandtner, artist/curator; Cat Mazza, artist/activist; and Allison Smith, visual artist. Moderator: Julia Bryan-Wilson, art historian and critic, University of California at Irvine.

The New School Theresa Lang Community and Student Center Arnhold Hall 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor NYC

Admission: $8; free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID

To find out more information on the lecture, please visit The New School site here.

Just read this:

Since I decided to try to [work on writing], I have:

Put a chicken in to roast
Made tea
Eaten breakfast
Started a loaf of corn bread with sweet corn and chilis in it
Realized that the loaf was too big and sticky for the bread machine, so taken it out and hand-kneaded more flour in, subdivided it, frozen half, and stuck the other half back in the machine
Started chicken stock
Fed the cat
Cleaned a pen
Found my notebook
Washed a sink full of dishes (I typed "sing full of juices," first time. Ladies and gentlemen, my brain.)
Made orange juice
Taken my vitamins and parted out the next three days' doses of same into the thing on the counter
Thought about what to eat with the chicken, later, besides corn bread

Yup.

Only thing left is scrubbing the tub and hitting "refresh" on livejournal and the Shadow Unit BBS a couple more times....

I think my brain votes for more vacation.
Silly brain.

For better or worse, I have suddenly stumbled upon some serious deadlines so I won't be doing much procrastinating or blogging for the next few weeks. Won't be farting around reading other people's blogs either!

I can't say too much about what's going on right now, but several exciting things about my current and future books are now brewing. I can cay this: A few years ago, I wrote "To build a long term writing career focused on my personal values and passions" as the mission statement at the top of my annual writing plan, and now it is all coming true!

More later... Don't forget about the Ethnic Knitting Discovery Knitalong if you need a blog fix! There are some very interesting posts and beautiful swatches shown there!

Here's an excellent article by Sahara Briscoe at Sistah Craft about the whiteness of the crafting world. Not that I can do anything about the paleness of my own skin, but I first took notice of this about ten years ago when I read Knitting in America by Melanie Falick. There are virtually no people of color featured in it, and the one Native American-inspired project that is featured was designed by a white woman. Sure, a lot of the magazines and books throw some gorgeous dark-skinned models into the mix, but if you check the designers out, they are mostly white. Things haven't changed much in the last decade. KnitKnit, a newer book featuring knit-artists from North America and Europe still features white designers almost exclusively (I saw two Asian designers as I just flipped through the pages, and the Knitta designers are anonymous). Why is this? I certainly don't believe that only white people can design knitwear.

Here are a few books, websites, and magazines that buck the trend:

Black Purl magazine.

Ebony Elite, "Elite women of color, knitting together."

Stitches of Heratige, "My love of cross stitch with an ethnic flavor - adding a bit of knitting & crocheting to spice it up!!! My soul is fed by Needle & Thread...."

Beyond Stitch And Bitch: Reflections On Knitting And Life by Afi-Odelia Scruggs.

Double Stitch, an upcoming crochet book from Interweave by Erika and Monika Simmons.



Someone should do a book with a collection of patterns by non-white designers. And I can't do that book because my skin is too pasty. So please feel free to steal the idea! I would love to buy a copy of this book. It would be a wonderful addition to the knitting universe.

I was just telling someone this morning how it was a shame that I quit high school and went to Bible School instead of college because I really loved math and was very good at it, but I decided that math and science were secular endeavors that weren't worthy of my time. So much for the brains of a teenager figuring out what life is about, huh? (Hi mom, sorry, but it really was a stupid decision.)

At any rate, here's something I need:

Making Mathematics with Needlework: Ten Papers and Ten Projects edited by sarah-marie belcastro and Carolyn Yackel. It's also available on Amazon.

Not only does this book have some really cool projects in it, but it also has papers about mathematics! Frak, it's even published by a science and technology publisher. This is, sight unseen, the coolest knitting book ever published. OK, maybe it's only cool to nerds.

Here's the blurb from the book's website:

So, what is in the book? Every chapter (except for the introduction) has four sections. First, there's an overview intended for both crafters and mathematicians, so it should be understandable to mathematicians who don't know anything about crafting and also for crafters who don't know anything about mathematics. Then, there's a section of detailed mathematics which is intended for mathematicians. All of the authors have made an effort to include basic information so that mathematical enthusiasts who are not professional mathematicians can follow the bulk of the material. The third section of each chapter contains teaching ideas, and these range from elementary-school level to graduate level. Finally, every chapter has a project, with instructions written for and tested by crafters.

This is so cool (have I said that enough yet?) I will be ordering a copy before you read this. I found out about it in Craft, my favorite crafts magazine. It only has a couple of knitting projects per issue, so if you don't do other crafts as well, you might be better off just reading it at the library or your local Border's cafe.

A few other math/knitting/crochet related items of interest:

Knitting Nature: 39 Designs Inspired by Patterns in Nature by Norah Gaughan. There are some really creative projects in this book! You can see some pictures and read an interview with the author here. It's a fascinating discussion, not to be missed.

Unexpected Knitting by Debbie New has a chapter on cellular automata knitting. Oh my! Do a search on "cellular automata knitting" on Google and I promise you'll find some fascinating info.

Hyperbolic crochet is also hot! You can read about it in this article from Inteweave Crochet, or if you need more, there's a book on the topic. Unforutnately, I can't find my copy right now because my crafts books are buried under the contents of my kitchen, and I can't remember the title. Oh, found it online: A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space:
An Exploration of the Intersection of Higher Geometry and Feminine Handicraft by Margaret Wertheim. Again, a Google search on the term will yield a lot of amazing results.

Warning, if you're in the least bit interested in math, this can be addicting!

If you read my blog regularly, you know that, even though I am generally a happy person and I love my life, I suffer from bouts with depression from time to time. Most often it's pretty mild: I don't feel like working on anything and I just want to spend a few days eating chocolate and watching old movies. Sometimes it's worse, and when I finished Arctic Lace it was bad enough that I paid a visit to my doctor.

It's well known that creative people often suffer from depresssion. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Vincent Van Gogh, my favorite painter. Although he painted many bright and beautiful pictures, such as this sunflower painting that I saw during my visit to London last summer, his moods often did not match that of his canvasses. He had every right to be depressed as an artist. He didn't sell even one painting during his lifetime. But it's not clear that financial woes were the source of his depression. Was he mentally ill? Or was he suffering from a meaning crisis, unable to make his own life meaningful even through his art?

In the new paperback edition of his book The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression, creativity coach and psychotherapist Eric Maisel asks these kinds of questions and looks at what creative people can do to combat and stave off the depression that might be lurking just outside their doors.

According to the back of the book:

Creative people will experience depression—that’s a given. It’s a given because they are regularly confronted by doubts about the meaningfulness of their efforts. Theirs is a kind of depression that does not respond to pharmaceutical treatment. What’s required is healing in the realm of meaning.

In this groundbreaking book, Eric Maisel teaches creative people how to handle these recurrent crises of meaning and how to successfully manage the anxieties of the creative process. Using examples both from the lives of famous creators such as van Gogh and from his own creativity coaching practice, Maisel explains that despite their inevitable difficulties, creative people possess the ability to forge relationships, repair themselves, and find meaning in their work and their lives. Maisel presents a step-by-step plan to help creative people handle their special brand of depression and rediscover the reasons they are driven to create in the first place.

I've found this book very helpful in understanding my own moods and in making the bad ones less frequent, less severe, and more useful in my life and creative process. Putting on my skepchick hat, I asked Eric a few questions about the book:

---

Donna: Is creative depression related to clinical depression? If so, how does a reader who is feeling depressed know what treatment options they should explore? Do you recommend that anyone with symptoms of depression gets diagnosed by a physician?

Eric: Clinical depression is not the name of a disease but the name of a package of symptoms. All “clinical depression” means is “having certain symptoms for a certain amount of time.” No one knows what brings on these symptoms and antidepressants, which are the most prescribed drugs in America, are less effective than the ads let on. But that isn’t to say that a severely depressed person shouldn’t consult with a physician, as antidepressants do work sometimes and the depression may be related to some undiagnosed ailment that, when treated, will relieve the depression. But medical treatment is not really a substitute for experiencing life as meaningful, which requires existential self-treatment of the sort I describe in the Van Gogh Blues.

---

Donna: Your approach to treating depression in creative people seems very different than the standard medical approach. How did you develop this idea?

Eric: Depression has always been divided into at least four categories: biological, psychological, social, and existential. Then, over the last decades, because of the prevalence of antidepressants and the press that the medical model got, depression became primarily a biological problem and the reality of existential depression got lost because of the mass media attention on antidepressants. But I have always believed that existential depression is real, important—and crucial in the lives of artists. If you do not feel that life holds meaning, then you are in trouble, and creative people, who pride themselves on tackling meaning questions, are most vulnerable to such dire feelings. Existential psychotherapists talked about this fifty years ago, but their voices got lost in all the shouting generated by drug companies.

---

Donna: How effective has your approach been? Do you have any hard data on the results? For example, has your approach been compared to other medical approaches to treating depression in any double-blind studies?

Eric: No, I have no hard data, though hard data is an interesting concept about which one ought to be especially skeptical. A recent study showed that 95% of published reports find antidepressants effective and 90% of unpublished reports (the ones rejected by journals who are beholden to drug companies) find the effectiveness of antidepressants overstated and inconclusive. Be that as it may, I have only anecdotal evidence that meaning is an issue for a great many people, that a lack of meaning is a source of depression, and that for this sort of depression the treatment must be existential in nature.

---

If you've suffered depression and haven't found help from traditional treatments, if you're a creative artist and you struggle with finding balance in your life, or if you ever think about how to find or make meaning in this world, The Van Gogh Blues will help you look at things in a new way.

I don't want to work. I mean, I want to work on my memoir and nothing else, but I have huge to do lists so that won't happen for a while. At any rate, I'm glad today is a holiday so I have an excuse to slack off. Sorry if you thought this would be a substantial post. I just wanted to write about my laziness.

I'm reading my old journals. Here's something I found from December 15, 1997:

Knitting came back to me easier than I thought it would. A five minute lesson from mom, an hour of clickety-click, and I have a six inch square of stockinette stitch and ribbing. Fairly even stitches and all. Starting the hat (the prerequisite to the $160 sweater Kit dom bought me for Chrismas -- okay, it was 45% off), starting the hat wasn't quite so easy. 108 stitches. I kept losing count. And I could not keep track of K2 P2 all the way across. "The first row is the hardest," mom said. After two rows, I could already tell the pattern was off. Besides I had an extra stitch left at the end of the second row. Grandma, where are you? I have to learn to do this all on my own. After all, I won't even have mom around if (when) we move to Boulder. That's what the hat is for -- Boulder. Not exactly a required item for San Diego -- the knit stocking cap is much better suited to winter climates... So I cut the string and banished the two rows of my "hat" to the kitchen trash can. I'll start over tonight.

I want to knit because Grandma did and because she's gone. I want to knit because Aund Phebe did -- probably still does -- and she is the ultimate role model to me. I want to knit because I love hand made sweaters and I want to fill up my dresser drawers (when I buy a dresser!) and give away lavish gifts to my friends. Lavish because of the time put into the loving creation of the piece -- not because of the amount of money spent. It's like three months of weaving loving thoughts into the fabric. You can feel the magic when you wrap the sweater around yourself or bury yourself in the afghan. A little bit of your soul is infused into the yarn. Or maybe into the paces between the stitches. I don't really know how it happens, but I know it is special.

Grandma, can you see me knitting? I know you'll help me. And I will think of you every time I pick up my needles. I miss you so much. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still feel you smiling down on me."

So there you have it, I started knitting for the second time ten years ago! I'll post a few more knitting memories later. Sometimes I think my journals are just filled with garbage and that they're a waste of time. But then I find stuff like this buried between complaints and whining and, yes, lots of garbage. The funny thing is that just after something that captures my attention in an old journal I find complaints that I can never think of anything interesting to write about. Just goes to show that you should just keep putting the words on the page and trust the process and yourself.

Contemporary Knitting for Textile Artists by Ruth Lee

Wow, this book is amazing resource for creative knitters. I saw this book on Amazon a few months ago and was immediately curious, after reading and enjoying KnitKnit. From the description of Contemporary Knitting, however, I thought it would be a collection of unusual projects and patterns, and so I didn't buy it online. Still, I couldn't resist popping open the copy I found at my local yarn store today and I was completely surprised by what I found inside. This is not a pattern book! It's a book of creative techniques that you can use to design your own knitted art pieces or unique garments and accessories.

The author explains her goals on page 7:

Ideally, learn to develop patterns from scratch, just as you learned to write ltters of the alphabet, words, and -- finally -- joined-up text, rather than following existing patterns on automatic pilot.

I encourage you to explore hands-on experimentation and to hone your craft skills through practice, so that they become second nature and you can go on to translate your own creative ideas into something tangible and original.

This matches my own design philosophy exactly, although I haven't yet stretched my legs into creating knitted art.

From knitting with odd materials at unusual gauges, to adding decorative embellishments ranging from beads and washers to needle felting and varnish, to knitting 2 and 3 dimensional shapes, to working with straight and circular needles as well as knitting frames, this volume covers many techniques that you won't find in more traditional knitting books.

Chapters include:
1. Essential Tools, Equipment, and Know-How
2. Yarns, Fibres, and Other Materials
3. Big Knitting
4. Borderlines
5. Knitting with Beads
6. Spool and Frame Knitting Techniques
7. Advanced Techniques for Knitting in Rounds
8. Pattern on Pattern
9. Decorative Surface Treatments
10. Creative Journeys

For anyone who wants to move beyond just knitting from patterns and especially for all knitters who want to explore knitting as a visual art form, this book is an excellent resource. It will definitely get your creative juices flowing. This will be one of the few books I keep near my work area instead of on the bookshelf in the other room.

As I was looking through the front and back matter of the book, I disovered that the publication of Contemporary Knitting has been supported by the Cumbria Institute of the Arts at the University of Cumbria in England. I went to Cumbria last year to teach at Woolfest and will be going back again in the summer of 2009 (I was invited this year, but I'll be in Lithuania during the Woolfest dates). I will have to make sure to meet the author if she is in the area! Lee is listed as a knitting artist on the Victoria and Albert Museum website, and you can read an interview with her here. Do take a few minutes (or hours) to look at the other items about knitting on the left-hand menu. You won't be disappointed. The V&A has some amazing items in their collections and a well-rounded selection of information on their website.

As I've mentioned a few times here over the past year, I'm working on a book about my journey from born-again Christian to atheist. My book is different than the other recent atheist books that have been published primarily because of my positive experiences as an evangelical Christian insider. If my experiences were positive, why did I leave it all behind? That's the story I want to tell.

When I was watching a video of a Galapagos tour with Richard Dawkins, this question from a reader of the paperback edition of The God Delusion resounded with me:

I agree with you that preaching to the choir is a good thing, even if you don't necessarily preach to everyone else. Sometimes it makes sense to talk to people in a certain cognitive framework that they understand. And while I don't think that it's good to dumb down things, do you think that it woud be a good idea for someone such as [Richard Dawkins] to write a book about religion that is in a cognitive framework that is accessible to [religious] people? And what would that book look like?

I'm not Richard Dawkins, but that's exactly what I want to do. I want to write a book that simultaneously helps unbelievers understand what it is like to be a Christian -- the allure, the enticements, the rewards of both the mindset and the community that comprise the born-again experience -- and helps Christians understand why one of their own -- a born-again and spirit-filled believer -- would ultimately reject the teachings of the Bible and leave faith behind. This is something that Richard Dawkins cannot write, because he hasn't lived it.

I want born-again Christians to see that I have not backslidden; that is, I have not gone backwards or fallen away from a higher plane where I once lived, but I continued to develop spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually so that I outgrew the faith of my youth. I did not fall into sin; I did not get mad at God; I did not become jaded because I witnessed hypocrisy. Nothing bad happened to me to instigate this journey. Yet I now have more peace and joy than I ever had as a Christian, and I give more of my time and money to charitable causes. The day I realized I no longer believed that God exists, a huge weight fell off my shoulders and I felt like I was set free from a lifetime of bondage.

I want skeptics and unbelievers to see that most Christians are not the evil, bigoted fools portrayed by the media. Although these people do exist, primarily as hypocritical leaders who care more about power or money than they care about spirituality or charity, the layperson sitting in the pew is much more likely to be sincere and compassionate, with a burning desire to please God and to help humanity. I want skeptics to feel what I felt as a Bible school student when I listed to Norvel Hayes preach at New Life Bible School in Cleveland, Tennesse, or what I felt sitting in the congregation when Bill and Renee Morris sang at Love Church on Long Island, New York -- the hush and awe and power that comes into the congregation, the experience of mystery and desire and ecstacy that is most often attributed to "God's presence in our midst," but that I now believe is a natural uprising of human consciousness that arises out of physical interactions of neurons and chemicals and hormones in our brains and bodies.

My book will be my testimony -- the story of my personal journey. Interjected between scenes from my life will be passages that explain my past and current thinking about the things that happened to me and my immediate and delayed reactions to these experiences. I will explain spiritual experiences in both Biblical language and in psychological language, to provide a window into my soul for both the believer and the unbeliever.

Jonathan Swift said, "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." Because I was not converted by apologetics, nor was I deconverted by anti-apologetics, I will not attempt to debunk the Bible or to give a scientific explanation for or against the existence of God. Neither will I attempt to critique religions, sects, or doctrines other than the ones I followed. Instead, I will take the reader with me on my quest from young skeptic and nominal Christian, to fervent believer, to questioning agnostic and finally, atheist.

I started working on this book last year, and to date I have about 300 pages written. In the coming months, I will be putting this raw material together into the draft of a book, and will share some of my experiences with you all here.

---

Cross-posted on Skepchick.

This kitted pegasus was featured in my article about Lithuanian knitting in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Piecework but they could only include a tiny picture. Here are some more photos for your viewing pleasure:









I bought this from a fiber arts studio in Vilnius, Lithuania. Isn't it totally amazing? It's sitting on top of the dresser in my bedroom, but it looks like it belongs in a museum.

The name of the studio is Aukso Avis, which means Gold Sheep or, more poetically, The Golden Fleece. There's some information about them here.

Here's a video pocast about how to knit lace from charts. The video format is great for showing the direction of knitting! There's also a review of Arctic Lace near the end.



Enjoy!

Hey everyone, I'm going to do a Kitty Knits blog book tour next month. If you have cats and you blog about knitting, I'd like to invite you to join in!

I would love to do a blog tour where I visit a bunch of blogs by cat lovers who write about knitting and we can talk about our knitting and our cats.

I’ve done blog book tours before for my other books, Arctic Lace and Ethnic Knitting Discovery, mostly talking about technical knitting stuff, but I think it would be fun to do one where we talk about cats and put up pictures of our cats. I know my cats love to test out anything I’m working on and sleep on it, and I have one who just loves to unravel balls of yarn.

For the book tour part, I’ll send you a picture of the book cover, a little bit of info about the book that you can put at the end of your post with a link to my website or to amazon, and you can ask me two or three interview questions – anything you want to know about me, my cats, writing, or knitting.

If you’re interested and you think you’d like to participate, let me know by email or in the comments. Make sure to include your email addy and a link to your blog.

Thanks!

Donna

P.S. I think Kitty Knits may become a best seller. It's already over the 10,000 7000 mark on Amazon and it's broken into the top 25 15 knitting books and it's the number 3 book for cats -- and it's still only available for pre-order. One can wish anyway, right? :-)

Does anyone else ever feel like just doing nothing for weeks at a time?

The books I'm not working on are killing me. I go back and forth between my head exploding and feeling like I am going to throw up. I'm not particularly busy right now, and still I am not writing.

Last year I wrote 300 pages of my memoir. Actually, I wrote 300 pages in two months: May and November. I spent the rest of the year procrastinating, planning research, worrying about writing, thinking about writing, reading about writing, and not writing. I think my brains are oozing out of my ears.

The only things I find relaxing are reading and knitting, but when I'm done, the anxiety comes back at even a higher level.

Why do writers torture themselves so much? Do designers do this too?

for me... Yesterday I gave a lecture and signed books at A Knitted Peace in Denver. Today I'm just knitting, watching movies, and napping. But Dom spent the weekend -- and the last week or so -- starting a remodel on our kitchen. You can follow along here, on his website.

Remember a week or two ago I metioned that my knitting fancy had finally been caught by that shawl from the upcoming book Knit So Fine by Lisa Myers, Laura Grutzeck, and Carol Sulcoski?

The stitch is from Barbara Walker's, A Second Treasure of Knitting Patterns, on page 282, and the instructions are on several places on the web, so I figure it's OK if I post them here. If you want the actual shawl pattern, you'll have to wait for the book.

PORCUPINE STITCH (Multiple of 12 sts)
Row 1: (Yo, k2tog) across.
Rows 2 & 4: Purl.
Row 3: Knit.
Rows 5 and 8: *Sl 1, k2tog, psso, k4, yo, k1, yo, k4, rep from * across.
Rows 6, 7 and 9: *P3tog, p4, yo, p1, yo, p4, rep from * across.
Rep rows 1-9 rows patt.
Note: Because this pattern has an odd number of rows, it is completely reversible with every other rep beginning on the wrong side.



For pictures, check out these sites:
http://thewalkertreasury.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/porcupine-stitch/
http://www.berroco.com/exclusives/tempest/tempest.html

The Winter issue of Black Purl Magazine is now online. Instead of my regularly scheduled column on World Knits, you'll find a roundtable discussion on ethnic knitting with input from:

• Marianne Isager, author of Knitting Out of Africa


• Gina Griffin of Mad Love Knits


• Kristin Nicholas, author of Kristin Knits


• Sahara Briscoe, of SistahCraft


• Susan Lazear, of Cochenille Design Studio


• And me!

We all answered questions about our inspiration, passion, process, and style, and we've each given a bit of advice to knitters wanting to expand into the world of ethnic knitting. Don't miss this one. You've never read anything like it before.

There's also a review of Ethnic Knitting Discovery:

Without taking my fearless knitting pill, I would never consider knitting a traditional Norwegian sweater – with its intricate stranded knitting and steeks (eek!) – much less design one. After reading Ethnic Knitting Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes by Donna Druchunas, I think I can. I think I can.

I love Ravelry. If you don't have an account there yet, get on the waiting list. It's definitely worth it. I don't spend enough time there setting up my own patterns and pages because I get sucked into the discussions too much. And I already have too many friends. I feel bad because I don't reciprocate everytime someone adds me to their friends. I'd like to, but I think if you have 100s or 1000s of friends, it becomes meaningless, so I've only beed adding people that I've spoken to in the past or that I've met in person.

At any rate, I recently heard from reandbean, who made these gorgeous Lithuanian gloves:



If you're on Ravelry already, you can check out more photos here, otherwise you can see the photos on flickr.

If you've read my article in Piecework, you know that flower motifs have been very popular in Lithuania. These gloves, made with charts from Lietuvininku Pirstines (Gloves of Lithuania Minor) by Irena Regina Merkiene and Marija Pautieniute-Banioniene, show the larger motifs beautifully. The large lilly on the back of the hand was used on many gloves made in the Klaipeda region near the Baltic Sea in the 19th and 20th centuries, and using contrasting colors for the cuff was also quite popular. The baby mitts I made to accompany my article only had room to showcase a small flower-bud motif, and I used a traditional striped cuff which was easier to fit in the small number of stitches I had to work with.

I picked up a copy of Vogue Knitting's winter issue today (damned if I'll ever be smart enough to subscribe) and found out that Mary Walker Phillips died in November.

According to the New York Times:

Mary Walker Phillips, a prominent textile artist who took the utilitarian craft of knitting and gave it bold new life as a modern art form to be displayed on the walls of museums around the world, died on Nov. 3 at her home in Fresno, Calif. She was 83.

Like Elizabeth Zimmerman and Barbara Walker, Mary Walker Phillips was one of the most influential knitters of the 20th century. I think it's interesting to note that none of these women were traditional designers, creating books of project patterns or designing runway fashions, but all three explored the boundaries of knitting and exhibited independent thinking with their needles.

In her book Creative Knitting: A New Art Form, Phillips encouraged knitters to break out from making sweater after sweater and to explore knitting as an artform, using unique stitches and unusual materials. As one reviewer on Amazon notes, "Mary Walker Phillips sets out not to provide her readers with more endless patterns to be followed without thought, but to encourage the adventurous to push their work to new heights by presenting an overview of the possibilities of knitting, from a brief history of the discipline to images of her own work and a few stitch patterns." As perhaps the first person to use knitting to create fine art pieces, Phillips's legacy continues today with the work of the many artists featured in the Knitknit zine and book. She studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and, according to Wikipedia, her works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal Scottish Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design.

Knitted Counterpanes: Traditional Coverlet Patterns for Contemporary Knitters, another of Phillips's books, is perhaps my absolute favorite lace knitting book. Although the designs presented were originally used on knitted beadspreads, they are perfect for a variety of contemporary projects. I'm partial to lacy leaf designs, and this book includes quite a few, and pairs them with coordinating borders and panels with other types of stitches. Phillips studied counterpanes in museums and private collections around the world collecting stitch patterns and transcribing them into instructions for other knitters to study and use. Like the stitches from Barbara Walker's collections, these also show up repeatedly in newly published designs, a testimony to their classic style and longevity.

Both of these books are out of print and going for $185-275 on Amazon. (For more options in buying used books, check out the site bookfinder.com which links to many used bookstores in the U.S. and in Europe.)

I was thinking I'd been a little lax on getting knitting content posted lately, so here are a couple of fun things:

1. Here's a little knitting personality quiz from The Knitter's Book of Yarn for your entertainment. This is what it says about me:

Angora – Soft and warm
Angoras are eager to please and are highly sensitive. Flexibility and adaptability are your strengths and sometimes your weakness, as well. You are essentially a warm and feeling person, and little escapes your impressionable mind. You are generous with others and strive for harmony in your relationships.

I really thought I'd be in the oddball category, and I don't think this sounds like me at all. So those who know me, feel free to comment on the accuracy of these results.

I haven't looked at this book yet, but Deb Robson has written a short review along with a posting about her quiz results.

2. My article on Lithuanian knitting along with a pattern for baby mitts with a Lithuanian floral motif is in the the Jan/Feb issue of Piecework, along with a collection of other interesting articles about historical knitting techniques. Last year the special knitting issue sold out, so make sure to get your copy in a hurry. It goes on sale in stores on January 15.

A chapter on Lithuanian knitting will be in included the second book in my Ethnic Knitting series, and I'm also planning a big book about Lithuanian knitting that will be a lot like Arctic Lace except, I hope, with lots of color photos. Bit it will be at least a year before that's even written. I'll be in Lithuania for six weeks this summer at language school and doing research, and then I'll start working on the book. I'll have a co-author on this, June Hall, who I met at Woolfest in England last summer. She's been doing a lot of research in Lithuania over the past few years, and I can't wait to work with her on this. She's written a short sidebar about her experiences that's included with my article in Piecework.

I love the mittens on the cover of this issue, too. Someday I want to do a book of poetry mittens, a collection of mittens made from handspun, natural-dyed yarns combined with a collection of poems about winter. It's about 29,567 on my to do list.

A few weeks ago, I decided to write a column on skepchick about my experiences as I'm writing my memoir. Yes, that's a little convoluted. But I'm blatantly copying what Shalom Auslander did while he was writing his memoir, Foreskin's Lament. I'm doing this because I find myself writing about my writing to sort out my thoughts, I figured, why not share this stuff with the world? OK, with the dozen people who read my posts. But I digress...

As I started working on my first post, reading it over in preview mode, I found myself thinking about the voice I use when blogging. It's very personal. I write as if I were writing a letter to a group of friends. This is how most people write on blogs. But I couldn't help comparing it to the voice of the books I've read and loved, which are usually written in a more formal or perhaps a more distant voice. Rather than addressing a group of close friends, these books seem to be written into the ether, not addressed to anyone specifically but just sending beautiful prose out into the air, like a song. Then I started worrying about my memoir. Do I want to write it like a blog entry or like a song? Do I want to talk or do I want to sing? Can I even sing? Can I keep a tune? I don't know yet, because my knitting books are closer to my blog style, although a tad more formal. I tried to write Arctic Lace in a more distant or formal style. It came out like crap and my editor made me rewrite the whole book after I turned in the manuscript because it was too stuffy and, she said, "You left yourself out of the story."

I guess there's not much chance of leaving yourself out of a memoir. And it's not that I don't want to be myself in my writing, but I want to write something of literary merit, in addition to writing something that gives me a voice and lets me share my experiences. I generally don't feel like my blog posts have any literary merit. Zero, null, nada, zilch. Yes, you might enjoy some of them. But they're not publishable in any media besides a blog. Mostly because they're not edited. Sometimes I reread blog posts and correct typos, but otherwise, what you get is just what comes off my fingers in an unedited stream of consciousness.

Last month my editor and writing coach, Deb, gave me this book. Do you think it was a hint? Actually, I'd been sending her whiney emails like this post, about how I don't want my memoir to come out like crap, or even have it be mediocre. And it would be worse if it sucked and I didn't know it. The real problem is, the more I worry about these things, the less I write. Sitting around and thinking about writing will not result in a book. So I guess I'd better say goodbye and get to it.

Oh, but what voice should I use to write my blog posts about writing my memoir? I still have no idea.

This is exactly how I feel working on my memoir lately. I love it when other -- sucessful and talented writers -- feel the same way I do about their work:

Neil Gaiman

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue -- I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.

Wil Wheaton feels this way too:

"If Elizabeth Bear thinks about some of the same things I do," I thought, "it must mean that I'm not wandering aimlessly in the fog as much as I thought I was."
If you'll allow me a semi-literary moment: When I started reading her LiveJournal, I was still trudging through fog, but after a few days, I could see a path through it. It was like a fellow traveller had left a map, some provisions, and a +3 cape of awesome, just for me to find and use on my journey. Which is still a long way from completion, by the way.

Elizabeth Bear:

I usually only outline when I get stuck. Then I go back and outline what I've already written. Or, you know, when I think of stuff that happens in the future, I write it down. But I don't always wind up using that stuff. (There was a great couple of scenes for Refining Fire that never got written. Alas.

and

The scene does not have to be perfect. The scene has to be written.

I can fix it on the second draft. I can fix it on the second draft. I can fix it on the second draft.

Right. Beginner mind. Just because you aren't good enough to do this, and never will be, doesn't mean you can't do it.

I don't know when my book will start to come together, but I get very impatient about it. I keep writing and writing and writing -- I have over 300 pages -- but it's still a shapeless mound. I want to start putting it all together, but I keep writing more bits that are missing. I keep finding more parts of the story I haven't told yet. I haven't written this in order, which perhaps is making it more frustrating than it needed to be. But I had trouble getting started, so I just wrote whatever bits came to my mind. Since it's my life story, I don't have to make it up, so I know what order it goes in anyway. I never write in order, but I really would like to try that someday. Just start at the beginning and keep going. Of course the beginning I start with may get cut eventually, but that would be OK. I just want to experience what it is like to write something straight through instead of piecemeai. I wonder if the end result would be better than the way I now write, which is just putting down whatever part strikes my fancy at the time, and then having to come back at the end and somehow make all the small bits into once narrative that can be called a book.

Excuse me now, I must go play fetch with my cat....

I was going to work yesterday but I got off track. First, I thought I'd read the first chapter of Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I couldn't put it down.

If you haven't read this book yet, you must. Ayaan is an amazing woman. Her story is perhaps the most important one to be told so far in this century, and the issues she brings up in the last chapter will be important well into the coming decades.

As a child, Ayaan lived in Somalia, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia -- all Muslim countries -- and spent a short time in Ethiopia -- where most people were godless infidels (Christians). Because she was a girl, Ayaan was never allowed to make any decisions about her own life. Under Islam, women are treated as property or as children for their entire lives, first under the rule of their fathers, then their husbands, and finally (should they outlive their husbands) they become wards of their sons.

Ayaan was promised to a Canadian Muslim man related to her family by her father, and when she was enroute to Canada to become his unwilling bride, she had a short stay over in Germany. She was so amazed at the freedom she saw around her, that she went to Holland where getting asylum was easier, and ran away from her family. She ultimately got a college education and became a member of the Dutch parliament. Since writing a short film about the plight of Muslim women, Ayaan has needed round-the-clock body guards to protect her from Muslims who want to kill her because she has become an infidel and because she is telling "lies" (read: the ugly truth) about Islam. This book will do nothing but increase the hatred toward her.

There's so much more in this book, I can't begin to explain it in a short blog post, and I'll be writing a full review of the book on skepchick next month, so I don't want to give too much away now.

Ayaan is now living in America and the Dutch government will no longer pay for her protection, so a security fund has been set up to help with the costs. I encourage everyone who cares about freedom from tyranny, women's rights, or free speech to donate to this fund.

I finished Infidel last night at the emergency room, where I had to drive Dom because he has another kidney stone. (Update: Dom passed the stone this morning. Ouch!)

Today, I didn't wake up until 9am. I can't even remember the last time I slept in past 7, and I am going to a friends 90th birthday party this afternoon. So the weekend is shot as far as work goes. But I did get one cup of a condom bra knitted -- the last project I have to finish for the Safe Sex and Dangerous Knitting zine!

Nope, I'm not in Alaska right now. But I got an email message from a reader who lives in Unalakleet, the Eskimo village where I met Fran Degnan, one of the knitters of the Oomingmak Musk-ox Co-op a few years ago when I was doing my research for Arctic Lace.


Check out Nancy's website. The photos are gorgeous.

One thing I'd really love to do someday is spend a summer in Alaska preserving food. I'd love to pick berries and make jam and go fishing and smoke my own salmon. I don't know when that can happen, because I'll probably be in Europe for the next three summers. But it's definitely on my list of "things to do before I die."

Last I heard Brown's Lodge in Unalakleet had closed, so I'm not sure what accomodations there are for visitors any more. There's at least one fishing lodge, but I'd heard that they were pretty far out of town and also quite expensive. It also looks like they're not open year round -- just when the river isn't frozen.

Here's the view we had out of our hotel window when we visited in 2004: