Drum Roll, Please!

It's big announcement day! I've been dying to let everyone know that I've been working on some crochet design projects for Chris, the master dyer behind the subtle, earthy, dramatic fabulous-ness that is Briar Rose Fibers.

I first met Chris at the Michigan Fiber Festival, on my first road trip with my friend Jennie the Potter, where she generously let us huddle around the little TV in her trailer to watch the spectacle of the summer Olympics. After many years now, I staunchly maintain that a more big-hearted, lovely person with a more big-hearted, lovely business ethic you will never meet. (well, unless it is Jennie...soul sisters these 2 are, you can't help but want to be a better, more shiny person being around them.) Chris, it turns out, is a lapsed crocheter, and my ever optimistic crochety-ness eventually rubbed off on her and she has asked me to work up a few things with her various yarns.

I finished a few small projects for them earlier in the year, a cowl and a very deeply v-d shawlette that are available in their little dollar card patterns at shows. (...and of course I don't have pictures of those...was too excited to ship them out as soon as they were finished) BUT, my first major on-taking has just been released. May I introduce you to Arachne's Path?

Isn't it a great picture? Those Briar Rose folks are just so talented. It's a one skein scarf out of their Sonoma, which is a 100% wool I would categorize as on the lighter end of the bulky yarn spectrum, worked in motifs you interlock as you go along. The openwork semicircles overlap one another giving quite a dramatic effect. Here it is on me:



...and here it is blocking out:

Hopefully I'll catch up with the other booth samples soon and have pictures to share of those as well. This is an ongoing project, so you can expect other crochet lovelies in Chris' fabulous fibers to pop up throughout the year as well.

This is becoming one very baaaad habit...

...but if I keep up the blog procrastination trend, I can keep posting entertaining catch-up notes. Here we go. New this summer:

1) Very much less hair. (about 6 inches)

With which I am trying new and exciting hair care things that involves much less sulfate-y shampoo product, banishing silicone from my head, and hopefully embracing the naturally not so straight mannerisms of my hair. If you need to know more, you can find a fabulous overview of this approach on this blog, or in the great comprehensive resource of Live Curly, Live Free. (There is also a website called naturallycurly.com, that I find hugely overwhelming, but it might just be helpful to you.)

2) Lots of brain-inflaming crochet designing. Thing like this:

...that I will be able to tell you about soon, soon, soon. More things that are not so soon to appear, but I can maybe arrange to slide in some sneak peeks now and again. Starting so many new things means there are not so many other things being finished, and that huge basket of packages still awaits me. I figure the longer it sits, the more surprising those surprises will be, right?

3) A puppy that isn't so much of a puppy anymore, who has decided that he is a swimmer:


4) Kids that cannot possibly be this big:


5) Family drama that just might finally knock me off my duff and make me build systems of self-care....if I can figure out how to do that amid spur of the moment eruptions of fever and vomiting whenever I even think of leaving the house without small people in tow.

6) Random spontaneous rants that seem to run rampant whenever I listen to or read the news. What news, you may ask? Really, any of it. State, federal, international. Is it just me, or is the world increasingly populated by the brainless? I really don't mind well reasoned, rational, fact-based discourse...I tend to learn something even if I don't agree with the conclusions...but where is that happening?? I see a lot of "just because I say so", and that makes me NUTS. Making things up and saying it over and over and over again does not at some point mean it is true. People are not evil or damned or your enemy, or even *GASP* wrong just because they don't agree with your perspective. Rational, respectful discourse is all but extinct and compromise seems to have become a taboo subject to even broach. Absolutism is more and more becoming the be-all-end all. It makes me want to institute mandatory remedial reading of some serious Dr. Seuss. Sneeches anyone? Zax? The Lorax? What's the one where everyone is dashing about thinking something's hot on their tail out to get them and as you follow the chain back it ends up being a frog stuck in a bucket or some such? Yes, Dr. Seuss could possibly be the savior of our times if only people would listen.

7) A shiny new cleaned up blog. That hopefully will see more regular use. ;)