Archives for March 2009

Books around the house

March 28, 2009 by Susanne 7 Comments

Last week I met with some fellow kindergartener’s mothers, and when I entered our hostess’s living room my first thought was, “Where are the books?”. There weren’t any. None. Not a single one.

Now, I understand that not everyone is as book-addicted as I am but slowly I’m starting to see why some of my students (or of the people visiting our home) are asking, “Have you read all of these books?” or “You sure do have a lot of books!” when they enter the room where I teach. This always leaves me confused because, well, the books in my room aren’t really “the books”. Most people who ask me if I have read all of these books are actually looking at the comic section. And yes, I have read all of those.

And this ties in with something I saw on somebody’s blog in 2006, and have been wanting to do every since, taking pictures of the books in the house. Also I will tell you a something about them to add a bit of extra interest. (I looked up what I remembered about that blogger and her blog, and here’s the actual post.)

So we’ll start with the room most of my visitors see first, my own room, the room where I’m teaching, surfing the net, doing my office stuff, write my morning pages, meditate,make music, and spin:

This bookcase is placed behind the door so that students coming to me for the first time don’t really see it. It holds my comics (a lot of DC comics, especially Green Lantern, Bone, Sandman, Blankets, Cages, a jumble of graphic novels and plain superhero comics). On the bottom two shelves are my new age books, astrology, tarot, self-help, Julia Cameron, Feng Shui and my books about writing. On top of this shelf are my knitting and sewing books, and there are also a few books of sheet music crammed in between. (Today, when a package from Amazon arrived, my husband asked me if I had ordered new shelves with them, or better, a new room. Notice that the crafting books are threatening to push the box off the shelf.)

Left of my desk is a bookcase with more “respectable” books:

In the middle of the top shelf are the books I bought but haven’t read yet, a book on html next to one on Buddhism, under that there’s the “biographies and memoirs”-section that holds Rita Mae Brown, Bill Bryson’s books (that I really loved reading but I can’t stand re-reading them, maybe I should get rid of those), artists’ biographies, and much loved, the letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, one of my very favorite authors ever. Anne Modesitt’s book “Knit With Courage” about the year when they found out her husband has cancer, and “Eat, Pray, Love” are obviously the latest additions. I loved them both. And, coming to think of it, I seem to be drawn to memoirs by either artists or people with cancer.

Under that you see miscellaneous music theory textbooks, and remnants of the days when I still was very interested in academic research. Books about Robert Schumann and his wife, books about female composers, about the “Matriarchy Myth”, cutlural anthropology, the almost complete works of Howard S. Becker, books on jazz, music theory, Brazilian music and such.

Of course books aren’t confined to shelves only:

I often have the feeling that this corner of my desk shows my life in one glance. There’s a plastic Buddha next to the phone, a couple of knickknacks, a wooden box that my great-uncle (whom I never met) made for an aunt (whom I never met either because she died of tuberculosis when she was only 20), and that was a cherished possession of my maternal grandmother. The box holds my tarot cards. In the foreground is a pile of official papers, knitting and sewing patterns, magazines and books. There is “The Idle Parent” a book I love with a vengeance, and one of the few books I read in the last months that made me nod my head constantly, and then there’s a book called “Zum Buddha werden in 5 Wochen” (Becoming a Buddha in 5 weeks) that’s probably more of a joke than anything else but it looked entertaining in the book store.

Now to the last bookshelf in my room:

It’s right next to the piano and holds most sheet music, an anatomy book for showing my singing students how their voices work, Tori Amos songbooks, Dresden Dolls songbooks, four or five tomes of Jazz standards (middle shelf), and my practice journals.

(I’m beginning to think I should have made this into a series. I didn’t know I had so much shelves in just one room.)

I’ll spare you a picture of my husband’s books in his teaching room/office/studio but there are about two shelves holding books about music, and musicians there. Also a nice little pile of what he is currently reading.

The next room would be our former guest bedroom. Since we have removed the bed from there, and are using it as a TV room we probably should be calling it a living room, only it’s so small that we don’t even have a sofa in there, only two chairs.

It holds books that don’t fit in anywhere else, like our bibles, the ephemerides, my husband’s astrology books, fairy tales, children’s books that we don’t want to get rid of, things like that. Under that bookcase is a table that has my knitting basket and a pile of my son’s books that I don’t want to get rid of yet but they don’t have a place either. Books in transition:

Now we enter the old part of the house, the room that once was our living room, and will be again some day, but for now it’s my son’s room. Where we also cook on the wood stove, dry laundry, and keep most of our books:

First, the actual in-use children’s books. There is a very good series of non-fiction books called “Wieso? Weshalb? Warum?” about the usual topics, dinosaurs, Native Americans, space, the earth, numbers, letters, and such. There are a few treasured stories, classics like “Pippi Longstocking”, or newer ones like the “Drache Kokosnuss” (Dragon Coconut) series. The lower left shelf holds the books we got from the library.

This one mostly holds my husband’s older books. The complete works of Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, Adorno, Benjamin, Trakl, some Proust, a lot of philosophy books. On the top shelves are our art books, most of those also belong to my husband. The thing above the tea kettle is our encyclopedia, by the way, my husband gave it to me as a birthday present, and it has got art by Udo Lindenberg, a German musician. the art is a bit weird, and I have frequently found myself in a position to explain to my son why there are aliens, and nuns, the devil and all these women without much clothes on there. That’s what you get when you keep pulling out the encyclopedia to look things up all the time, I guess.

Next you see the “wall of books”:

This is where I keep my “real books”. (There’s also a guitar, I know. I could easily have done a post on “guitars around the house, too. this one belongs to my son. No, he can’t play it.)

Top left is fiction. In alphabetical order you’ll find authors like: Rita Mae Brown, John Irving, Tom Robbins, and a few others that I don’t remember at the moment. (In case you’re wondering, I did start to read “Ulysses”, and rather liked it but then I lost the groove and never finished it.) Under that are two shelves of detective stories, again Rita Mae Brown, Amanda Cross, Diane Mott Davidson, and my all-time favorite Dorothy L. Sayers. If I ever get rich I’ll buy all her novels again, this time in English. I only own the German translations to most of them because I started reading her when I was 12 or so. Recently I bought all the Miss Marple-stories, those are the fat books lying on top of the others. (Maybe I really should stop buying books.) Under that are spy thrillers. I especially cherish the original James Bond novels (which I can’t seem to find in English, what a pity, so I have to content myself with translations) and the “Modesty Blaise”-series which I can’t seem to find in English either. Weird.

The lowest shelf holds all of the cookbooks we use. There are more in a box in the garage but these are the ones we’re using. We’d still like to have one on Chinese cooking but we don’t really cook much from recipes. Mostly it’s my husband starting out with whatever I brought home, and a vision. He’s a fabulous cook. Mostly we pull them out on Sundays and drool over the pictures.

The middle and right bookcases hold all of my science fiction and fantasy novels: Douglas Adams, C.J. Cherryh, Alan Dean Foster, Neil Gaiman, Robert A. Heinlein, Terry Pratchett (a lot of Terry Pratchett, in hardcover), J. K. Rowling, Stephen Donaldson, Cailín Kiernan, Tad Williams, a bit of Marion Zimmer Bradley, and then the poetry section. Emily Dickinson, Wilhem Busch (not exactly poetry but it rhymes), Christian Morgenstern, I’m not much of a poetry reader.

Then there’s another shelf of comics, mostly Ralf König, and some indie comics from the 80s, a shelf of self-help, and medicine books, books about weight loss and such, and on the top most shelf that you can barely see, the parenting books.

Next room: the kitchen. You might ask why we have books in the kitchen (and those aren’t cook books). Well, there’s this:

And this:

The magazine rack is for storing current reading, magazines and books, and I installed it to prevent the kitchen bench to look like the picture above. It looks untidy and things keep falling off the bench. Mostly through the crack where you can’t retrieve them without crawling under the table, and contorting yourself, and getting dust all over you and the books.

In theory each family member has a place for his or her stuff on the rack. As you might have thought, the top rack is mine. There you’ll find: “The Writing Diet”, “The Mindful Way Through Depression”, “Was glückliche Paare richtig machen” (What happy couples are doing right), and “Outsmarting the Midlife Fat Cell”. All of those have bookmarks in them which means that I’m in the process of reading or re-reading them. All of them haven’t been opened in weeks, too. None of them has been returned to it’s proper place because I still think they’ll help me. (Come to think of it I could really put the marriage book away. I read it through and it did help.)

The books I am currently reading are laying around on the kitchen bench. You can’t see them properly because I opted for realistic shots but there is “Drawing With Children” which I love, “No Idle Hands” a history of hand knitting in the US, “Custom Knits” which arrived today, and I already love it, and “The Creative Family” which I pulled out because I wanted to show my son what children are able to sew and make. There’s also a spinning magazine, and knitting bags.

Now we are going down into the basement:

Travel guides. I threw most of them away because the information in them gets dated. Also I doubt that I will be going back to places I already visited anytime soon. You can tell that we aren’t big on traveling.

More ethnology and cultural anthropology, and music education, and sheet music, and books on African and Brazilian and Indian music. Both my husband’s and mine. Also all the papers I wrote in university.

And books about teaching music, “Mr. Nice”, and back issues of “Gitarre & Bass”, a guitar magazine my husband has been reading and collecting for decades now. We shouldn’t be storing these down here because the basement gets very damp in summer. All the books down here have a musty smell, and if you put anything on the floor it will get moldy. But as you can see for yourself, we’re running out of storage space here. And I’m actually going through the books at least once a year, and give some away.

As I said before there are still boxes of books in the garage (books that we don’t really use anymore but do want to keep anyway), boxes in the attic (books that I once wanted to sell but never got around to).

If you’re still with me you might be wondering about the books in the bedroom. And I thought to myself that there aren’t any books in the bedroom because I gave up reading in bed some time ago. When I do read in bed I’m always staying up too long, but then I remembered, and I had to get back and take yet another picture:

This once was the place I kept the diapers, and my son’s clothes. Now it holds dictionaries. And the hand-dyed sock yarn. There’s a French dictionary, and Italian one, several German ones, a book of names, some grammar books, two Portuguese dictionaries, and two etymologies. By the way, which English etymological dictionary would you get? Or would you look on-line? We have two german ones, and I’m not really happy with those. I always have the same problem with dictionaries and encyclopedias, they are too small, and don’t hold the things I’m looking for.

On the other hand I might have just enough books for the moment…

What I’m doing these days – stream of consciousness

March 23, 2009 by Susanne 3 Comments

spinning brown wensleydale on my drop spindle, knitting socks and lace, yelling at my family, dreaming, sleeping intermittedly, eating too much, thinking about my life, playing “coin-operated boy” on the piano, singing my heart out with “my alcoholic friends”, teaching new adult beginners, figuring out how to bring my wheel to a meeting next weekend, reading about “drawing with children”, talking with my husband, talking with my son, picking things up, putting things away, feeling despair looking at dust bunnies, deciding to lose weight again, starting now, not eating jelly beans, drinking too much beer instead, not going to improvisation workshop, seeing pictures everywhere, wanting to take my camera outside, smiling at other people to avoid talking with them, attending parties and leaving early, preferring an episode of “how I met your mother”, a beer, and talking with my husband over a fabulous party with 150 people, buying presents for my son’s friends, avoiding playdates, rejoicing at my son starting to read, telling him about Battlestar Galactica, looking up the capital of Rumania in the encyclopedia, neglecting my blog-duties both passive and active, going for walks almost daily, making dates with internet friends to exchange books, talk about “Farscape”, and drop spindeling, reading comics, writing book reviews in my head, turning to self-help blogs only to find that I already tried all their tips and have reached a new level of problems, watching youtube videos, buying music on-line, listening to my husband teaching jazz-improvisation in the next room, watering plants, carrying groceries home, helping my husband with cooking lunch because he’s tired of being cook in charge every single day, trying to make space for my husband’s music, not going to the hairdresser even though my hair looks terrible, buying train tickets for June, planning a workshop in September, easing my way into a new story, feeling disconnected with my own music, meditating, talking to my bloggy friends in my head, listening to incubus, to amanda palmer, twittering

Doll fashion collection

March 20, 2009 by Susanne 2 Comments

Lo and behold, here are the pictures of the doll’s clothes (is this a doll or a stuffed animal?) I made between 1976 and 1981. (I wrote about the first of these clothes that I made when I told you how I learned to knit and crochet.) In chronological order:

Nice summer combination of sleeveless top and short skirt. Think of a day spent sailing on a lake.

Cozy and practical sleeping bag. Removable pack of tissues as a pillow. Notice the border in contrasting color. (The designer probably ran out of yarn.)

There’s a few year’s gap between the above models and this one. Here there’s actual seamless construction in a floor length sturdy gown with puffy long sleeves. The dress is buttoned at the back and features single rows of single crochet in a brighter color to add interest.

This model is meant to be worn at elegant tea or garden parties. A black skirt sets off the brightly pink top, again with long sleeves. The bow at the neck adds a little extra touch, and for those chilly evening breezes there is a nice black shawl to complete the outfit.

City wear in bright colors. This is an 80s model after all. A simple straight and sleeveless dress that can be worn with or without the matching short sleeved jacket. The simplicity of the piece draws the attention to it’s cheerful color, and the interesting texture achieved by irregularly placed rows of single and double crochet.

The next dress is actually my very first piece of sewing. My mother made herself a dress at that time, and since I was so interested she decided to teach me machine-sewing. The fabric is leftovers from her dress. She helped me measure the doll, and cutting the pieces, then I sew the front and back of the dress, and the hem. My mother helped me gather the skirt and then she sew it to the top of the dress. She also made the hat. (So this time my mother’s the designer, not me.) There was a matching shawl made from thin red cotton but I don’t have it anymore.

A light summer dress made of brightly printed cotton. Notice the matching sun bonnet with it’s pretty rick-rack at the brim.

Again a summer dress, lacy and flowing, fit for a party in a nice dusty pink. Unlike the earlier works this one is knit instead of crochet which gives the fabric a nice flowing drape.

This one is for colder weather, a wooly coat and matching hat. The moss stitch fabric is gathered at the cuffs. The double-breasted front is once again closed with bows. The crocheted hat has a ruffled brim that frames the face and a bow in contrasting yarn to add more visual interest.

Another evening gown, a straight top and skirt with embroidered detail at the neck and shoulders made from a sleek, silk-like material. This model also features a matching bag with embroidered detail, and matching shoes (not pictured because they didn’t fit the model).

It’s really interesting to me to see all these in one place. I find that I still avoid seaming as much as I can. I even used pinky shears to cut out the pieces for the green, hand-sewn dress so that I didn’t have to sew more than absolutely necessary. The preference for bows and yarn as closures is due tot he fact that I didn’t have any buttons. Later I took inexpensive snap-fasteners that my mother didn’t mind giving me.

The other reason for why I tend to knit as seamless as possible came to me just a few days ago when I used my little sewing kit that I got from my grand-aunt when I was 14. I needed a tapestry needle and when I took it out that I had another one tucked away in there which I hadn’t known about for twenty years or so. In my youth there was the tapestry needle. One. It lives (to this day) in my mother’s knitting basket. We were not allowed to take it without asking, and we had to put it back immediately afterwards. Of course I avoided asking for it as much as possible.

I thought tapestry needles were expensive and rare. I don’t know when I decided to buy my own, certainly some time before I moved out of my parent’s house, and imagine my surprise when I found that tapestry needles are actually quite cheap, and that you can’t buy one only, you have to take a packet of two. At the moment I’m the proud owner of about four or five of them, the two I bought myself, and two or three that came with the sewing basket I inherited from my husband’s grandmother who was a seamstress.

Of course the doll clothes you see above aren’t the only ones I made when I was young. But these are the only ones I still have. I kept them because I liked them so much. I remember making clothes for a stuffed ape in bright yellow, blue, and pink cotton, crochet dresses for Barbie dolls, purses, and hats, and such. All made from leftover yarn and fabrics. I’m not sure but the yarn in the first picture on the top might actually be leftover yarn from my third big knitting project, a Norwegian sweater with colored yoke. When I was a child, I didn’t know you could have a home without a sack of leftover yarn and fabric in the attic.

music? what music?

March 17, 2009 by Susanne 1 Comment

I distinctly remember coming back home from an improvisation workshop last year in May with the firmly set conviction that I had to post an improvisation a week on my blog. Or at least once a month. Since then there was music exactly – once.

I also distinctly remember that the reason for me to move my blog from blogger to my own domain was that blogger no longer allowed me to play my music on my blog because it didn’t accept the code for the player anymore.

So, since music seems to be so important to me, why is it that I don’t make more of it, and don’t post any of it on my blog?

At first I thought I was lazy. And that I’m fooling myself by telling me that I want to be a musician when I grow up. Then there was this day, two weeks ago, when I suddenly felt a bit better than the months before – you know, with the on-going flu – and I sat down and played my piano and sang, and improvised a bit. Something I hadn’t done in months. I did sit down and play during those months but always other people’s songs. Never my own thing.

And then it hit me: I hadn’t been lazy. I had been in constant turmoil, health crisis after parenting crisis, after another. Since fall. It hit me that I took one of the first moments I had, a moment when I felt a bit more myself, and I sat down and made myself some music.

Of course I only sat down twice since then but there might be more space for that in the near future. I hope.

I’m not quite ready to record anything yet, at the moment I feel like someone who hasn’t rode her bicycle all winter long, and now it’s the first time she gets up again. All wobbly and insecure. Nevertheless.

For those of you interested in my music, however little there is, these are the posts where you can hear me sing.

How I started to crochet, and knit

March 15, 2009 by Susanne 4 Comments

When, about two years ago, I became obsessed with knitting and sewing again, my husband was very puzzled. He asked me, since when I had become a crafter. My first reaction was, “Well, always.” but then, if this were true he wouldn’t have been puzzled. The fact is that I was crafting like crazy all through my teen years, then I did less in my twenties, and when my husband and I met, I only had one knitting or crochet project going on, and those projects tended to spend months and month in my knitting basket without being touched.

So, while my husband knew that I sometimes knit or sew a bit he was quite unprepared for today’s situation where yarn, fabric, and needles are everywhere. There’s an on-going knitting project in every room of the house (well, not the basement at least), and my fiber-related paraphernalia is crammed into every available closet. For example I now am the proud owner of three functioning sewing machines (I only use one of them, though), and I own at least two pairs of knitting needles in every size available.

Of course I started thinking about when did this start, and why did I have the feeling that it never stopped. And I realized how important making socks, and sweaters, and skirts had once been to me, and how I slowly gave it up. First the things I sew almost never fit, and the sweaters didn’t either, and then I stopped wearing hand-knit socks in the house because I started wearing sneakers indoors. So there was no need to knit new socks because the old ones didn’t wear out.

And then I was looking for a warm woolen cardigan, and there were none to be found, so I bought wool, found a pattern and made one. And then I found knitting blogs, and ravelry, and since then I have been knitting like a madwoman. With occasional sewing. (I just made an apron for my son last weekend. Fun, and quick.)

It all started when, in the summer of 1975, my parents, sister, and I were vacationing in Hungary. We were camping, and some other woman that we met had a crochet shawl. My mother loved it and the woman showed her how to make one. I wanted to make one to, and so we bought yarn (very acrylic in orange and blue), and my mother showed me how to do double crochet and chain stitches. It is a nice simple pattern like half a giant granny square. I actually finished the shawl on my own. I only never got around to attaching the fringe, I think my mother did that for me. Seems I always had a problem with the finishing.

Sorry for the bad quality, this was a group shot from a carnival party. I was supposed to be a gypsy. My mother made a skirt for this. As you can see, already the orange and pink-combo appealed to me. The look and face remind me of my son a lot.

The summer after that we had to learn crochet in school but since I already knew how to do it, I got to make advanced pot holders. I was so proud!

That year a friend of mine and I met to play with our Monchichis (those were all the rage, then, I had to buy my own because my mother is against horrible plastic toys), and lamented our lack of Monchichi clothing. Since we didn’t have any money we asked our mother’s for yarn, took our crochet hooks, and this is what I made:

My very first “design”:

A dress, complete with a slit for her tail, a coat and a hat. I actually have more of the clothes I made for this doll and another one, and I took pictures of all of them. Shall I show them to you?

In the summer of 1977 our vacation lead us to Cornwall. Here we met another German woman who knit sweaters for all of her four daughters. Again, my mother loved the sweaters, and that woman showed her how to make them. And I got more yarn and needles and learned how to knit. I wanted to make a sleeping bag for my Sindy-doll. To this day the two parts haven’t been sewn together.

That’s me, age 10, playing. It’s a bit weird that I have a picture of the very first garter stitch square that I knit, and almost no pictures of any of the dozens of sweaters I made. Maybe my parents have more pictures of that time than I do.

Back at home I picked up a book on knitting from the library and tried to teach myself how to purl. If I had been left on my own I would have become a combination knitter but my mother looked at my purl stitches, and showed me how to to them “right”. The first thing I knit after that “sleeping bag” was a horrible vest, made of bulky yarn. My mother made me knit it because she thought it was the perfect beginners project. Quick, and easy. She always tried to dress me in blue because she likes it, and she thinks I look good in blue. Of course I don’t like blue, never have, never will, and avoid it as much as I can. Knitting things of blue yarn actually makes me feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless I eventually finished the vest because I only got new yarn after finishing a project.

The next thing was one that I chose myself. It was a glorious cardigan, made with four different colors, it had stripes, and textured patterns of knit and purls, set-in pockets, buttonholes and everything. The brochure from the yarn shop showed it in different olive, and rust-colored yarns but my mother was adamant, she didn’t like those colors (I still dream of them. I would have looked so great in that sweater!), so I got to make it in four shades of – blue.

I guess my mother secretly resigned herself to make something out of that yarn after I would have given up on it. She never would have finished it for me since she doesn’t like her knitting to be complicated. Well, I do like it to be complicated, obviously, because I finished it. The project after that was a Norwegian sweater with a yoke in stranded knitting. Again, I had to do it in blues.

The next thing (I think) was a sweater that was knit in one piece from the front to the back, increasing for gigantic sleeves of the kind that we call “bat-wing”-sleeves in German (I don’t know how to call them in English, they basically start after the waist, and look as if you could go hang-gliding using only your pullover). It had an intarsia pattern with 12 different colors. Again, I couldn’t have the yarn the pattern called for, the only yarn available that had that many colors that worked together was a mohair yarn. My father sat down and re-calculated the pattern for me, which was very, very nice, only since he didn’t have a clue how knitting works (and I basically was a beginner, too), I tried to do things that are impossible with a yarn that you can’t rip back. It took me a long time but I finished this one too. It never looked as it should have, though. The colors were wrong, the drape was wrong, and I had made the increases and decreases for the sleeves in a way that made the sleeves much too tight, also it was too warm.

After that I stopped using patterns and made up my own designs. The first of those was a bright pink cotton sweater with a lace pattern. Sadly, there are almost no pictures of me wearing my sweaters, and I have thrown them all away over the years. You also have to remember that those were the 80s when sweaters were boxy and had no shaping. I designed a striped hat when I was thirteen that was very popular with my friends, and I made several for them as gifts. I taught myself how to knit socks from a book, I figured out how to knit gloves on my own, and I learned to look at other people’s sweaters and copy the stitch patterns. A friend of mine had an entrelac sweater her grandmother had made for her, and I remember sitting in class one day, looking at her back and trying to figure out how that was done. (I did figure it out, and made myself a white cotton vest). You have to know that I knit so much at that point that my English teacher said he didn’t recognize me without my knitting in my hands. (Back then we were allowed to knit in class.)

Over time I got weary of the fact that most of my sweaters didn’t fit, and I thought this was because I never could use the yarn the pattern called for. I didn’t know then, that swatching is more complicated than knitting up a tiny piece of stockinette, measuring it any which way, and guestimating how many stitches to cast on. In the nineties I started knitting from patterns again. I made a silk lace cardigan with a crochet edging I have worn so often that it’s starting to fall apart. That one didn’t fit either, at first, I had to make the back much wider than the pattern stated to save it.

Then I made a couple of sweaters using fashionable novelty yarn. None of them fit, and you can’t rip back novelty yarn, so I threw them away, knitted sweaters got out of fashion, and it took me three years to make a measly crochet scarf.

Until about two years ago. Now I’ve found a new determination. I’m much more thorough in preparing and executing my knitting, and I’m also willing to rip back everything and start anew. Also, I no longer use novelty yarn or mohair which makes the whole ripping back-approach much easier.

I have always been proud of how independent and fearless a knitter I am. I will approach everything in knitting with fierce determination, and work my way through it. I like to learn from books, and the internet helps a lot. But only the other day, when I was threading my tapestry needle, was I realizing how much I have learned from my mother. She has a hard time following a pattern, and she doesn’t like intricate stitch patterns, complicated construction, or doing colorwork. But she was the one who taught me how to cast on, and off, and how to sew knitting together, how to thread a tapestry needle, and how to alter a pattern on the go when you see that it won’t fit. She was the one I could take my failed attempts at self-designed sweaters too, and then she’d help me think of a way to save it.

I’ve been so much in my own with my knitting that only last year did I realize how firmly I am embedded in a tradition of crafty women. My maternal grandmother was the master-crafter. All her daughters know how to knit, and sew, and crochet, and do embroidery. Every one of the them has something she likes doing best, one is knitting socks for children, one is making embroidered tablecloths out of the linen their mother weaved, and one is quilting, and sewing.

I’ve always considered myself to be on my own but I’m not. Even my sister is knitting, and crocheting, and quilting, and making things, and has a spinning wheel. It seems to be a family thing.

You know it’s your blog’s third anniversary

March 10, 2009 by Susanne 4 Comments

when you forget that it is, and then a blogger friend announces the third anniversary of her blog, and you think, “Wait a minute, when she’s been blogging for three years I must have been too!”

So, my blog turned three. In February. Without me noticing. Seems like the honeymoon is over. Still, three years, that’s a lot of time. In blog years, anyway.

And then I went back to the beginning (I had to because I had to look up how long I’ve been blogging), and I found that in my third post I had written about temper tantrums, about conflict with my son, and how to cope. By changing just a few words I could have posted the same post last week. That surely makes me feel a bit strange, as if my life were an endless loop of repeated behavior.

But then I can’t take every post from three years ago and post it as new without changing much. I guess it all evens out.

You probably know this from your own experience, I constantly think about how much blogging and blog-reading I want to do, or I can do with all the other commitments in my life. About every other week I have the feeling that I don’t have anything to say that’s worth reading, and then I contemplate quitting.

But I won’t. Not now anyway.

My head is full of things I’d like to write about if I had a bit of space in my life. Some day I’ll get around to do it. Who knows, maybe some day I’ll even post some more music here.

And I would never had thought, back in 2006 when I started blogging for real that I’d still be doing it 295 posts later. That’s a lot of words. And the most amazing thing is that some of you have been reading all of them. Thanks.