I'm back!
I feel I owe you an explanation for all the silence, dear blog, so here's a post that I started earlier this year. I'll add more at the bottom....
"Before it gets to be a whole year since I last posted, which I am aghast about, I want to breathe life back into this space. Thank you for your patience. Actually, if you're like me, you won't have noticed much that I haven't posted in so long. We are all so distracted. Which leads me to the chunk of this post.
For the past couple of years I have been highly distracted by our life changes. We sold our house in Tacoma, WA, after calling it home for fifteen years, moved into an apartment in the same town, then moved to my mom's house in North Carolina where Fred found a job in Greensboro in just a couple of months, so we moved to an apartment here to be near his job, and in about six weeks we will move into a new house here in town! Well, it's new to us. We don't much like "new" houses. This one was built in 1969, which is just great with us.
Anyway, all that change of domiciles has had me quite jangled. I am a Cancer, after all, so my home life is extremely important and Fred's the same. Another thing that disrupted my flow was the recently-discovered-by-me fact that in my adult life I have changed vocations about every ten years. First I was a singer/vocal instructor/mom, then a high school teacher/mom, and then a knitwear designer. I'm still a mom, but I no longer have to take care of my children as part of my job. They've been doing that for about 17 years now, some for longer, since I have 38-, 36-, and 34-year-old daughters now (two of them with their own children).
That ten-year-career-change thing? Well, I passed it with the knitwear designer job in 2015. That was just before we started getting our house in Tacoma ready to sell. My seemingly in-born desire to restructure my life every ten years came at about the same time that life threw me into turmoil anyway, so my designing took a back seat. At times I wondered if I even wanted to keep doing it. I never stopped knitting and crocheting, though. The love has stayed with me.
Flash forward to 14 years into this last occupation and I find my self wanting to revive the whole darn thing. I have ideas for other pursuits, some related to knitwear design, but I want to keep up maintenance of my two pattern lines and to keep bringing new ideas into the world. There are never too many!
I can't wrap up this post without talking about other distractions, ones we all have. When I started my business back in 2005, I knew nothing of Facebook, there was no Ravelry, no Instagram, no Pinterest, and certainly no Twitter (which I have never joined anyhow). Heck, we still barely went online and we still got our news from the physical newspaper that was thrown onto our front stoop every morning. So hard to imagine now, only 14 years later. I admit to spending way, way too much time on my phone every morning, scrolling and scrolling. One of my determinations is to return to a life with much less of this. I appreciate all these online treasures, especially Ravelry, but I need to return to a life away from the internet. I'll admit that the day I got on Instagram was the day my blog posting took a nosedive. It also stopped me reading other blogs. I want that to change.
I spent an hour or so this morning clearing out my favorites list of blogs, finding that many had been stalled for much longer than mine and some had been closed. I can certainly understand. It's hard to tear ourselves away from the endless onslaught of information and imagery too easily available to us online these days. We can use the excuse that it is inspiring, as I have for years. To be honest, it really mostly just inspires me to keep scrolling, not to do much of my own creating. For that we need to get outside, go to museums, contemplate, drag out our materials and try things, meet with other creative types, etc. None of those things involve screen time. So I must limit that screen time and get back to making words and making pretty (and sometimes ugly) things.
I'll be back! And it'll be quick this time."
And months and months later...well, I meant it to be quick and then we moved and then we had a new house to get in order and then I got to work on a new pattern and then I got to work on updating older patterns and here we are. The Whalsay Gansey Pullover is published, 19 Figheadh patterns have been updated, and I am busily working on lots more updates. Next post, I'll let you know which patterns have gotten makeovers and provide links in case you want to see for yourself.
I hope I'm back for real. I missed this blog.
Have a hopeful, peaceful day!
"Before it gets to be a whole year since I last posted, which I am aghast about, I want to breathe life back into this space. Thank you for your patience. Actually, if you're like me, you won't have noticed much that I haven't posted in so long. We are all so distracted. Which leads me to the chunk of this post.
For the past couple of years I have been highly distracted by our life changes. We sold our house in Tacoma, WA, after calling it home for fifteen years, moved into an apartment in the same town, then moved to my mom's house in North Carolina where Fred found a job in Greensboro in just a couple of months, so we moved to an apartment here to be near his job, and in about six weeks we will move into a new house here in town! Well, it's new to us. We don't much like "new" houses. This one was built in 1969, which is just great with us.
Anyway, all that change of domiciles has had me quite jangled. I am a Cancer, after all, so my home life is extremely important and Fred's the same. Another thing that disrupted my flow was the recently-discovered-by-me fact that in my adult life I have changed vocations about every ten years. First I was a singer/vocal instructor/mom, then a high school teacher/mom, and then a knitwear designer. I'm still a mom, but I no longer have to take care of my children as part of my job. They've been doing that for about 17 years now, some for longer, since I have 38-, 36-, and 34-year-old daughters now (two of them with their own children).
That ten-year-career-change thing? Well, I passed it with the knitwear designer job in 2015. That was just before we started getting our house in Tacoma ready to sell. My seemingly in-born desire to restructure my life every ten years came at about the same time that life threw me into turmoil anyway, so my designing took a back seat. At times I wondered if I even wanted to keep doing it. I never stopped knitting and crocheting, though. The love has stayed with me.
Flash forward to 14 years into this last occupation and I find my self wanting to revive the whole darn thing. I have ideas for other pursuits, some related to knitwear design, but I want to keep up maintenance of my two pattern lines and to keep bringing new ideas into the world. There are never too many!
I can't wrap up this post without talking about other distractions, ones we all have. When I started my business back in 2005, I knew nothing of Facebook, there was no Ravelry, no Instagram, no Pinterest, and certainly no Twitter (which I have never joined anyhow). Heck, we still barely went online and we still got our news from the physical newspaper that was thrown onto our front stoop every morning. So hard to imagine now, only 14 years later. I admit to spending way, way too much time on my phone every morning, scrolling and scrolling. One of my determinations is to return to a life with much less of this. I appreciate all these online treasures, especially Ravelry, but I need to return to a life away from the internet. I'll admit that the day I got on Instagram was the day my blog posting took a nosedive. It also stopped me reading other blogs. I want that to change.
I spent an hour or so this morning clearing out my favorites list of blogs, finding that many had been stalled for much longer than mine and some had been closed. I can certainly understand. It's hard to tear ourselves away from the endless onslaught of information and imagery too easily available to us online these days. We can use the excuse that it is inspiring, as I have for years. To be honest, it really mostly just inspires me to keep scrolling, not to do much of my own creating. For that we need to get outside, go to museums, contemplate, drag out our materials and try things, meet with other creative types, etc. None of those things involve screen time. So I must limit that screen time and get back to making words and making pretty (and sometimes ugly) things.
I'll be back! And it'll be quick this time."
And months and months later...well, I meant it to be quick and then we moved and then we had a new house to get in order and then I got to work on a new pattern and then I got to work on updating older patterns and here we are. The Whalsay Gansey Pullover is published, 19 Figheadh patterns have been updated, and I am busily working on lots more updates. Next post, I'll let you know which patterns have gotten makeovers and provide links in case you want to see for yourself.
I hope I'm back for real. I missed this blog.
Have a hopeful, peaceful day!
Comments
-olga