A rather watery post
A couple of weekends ago Jeff and I took a trip down to Monterey for the weekend. Monterey peninsula, if you’ve never been there, is really quite pretty – the towns of Monterey, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach and Carmel are all fairly spectacular. But I’m less interested in the towns than the beaches and ocean. I am really getting quite fond of the Pacific coast, and I particularly like the waves in winter.
If the big rocks on all the very nice beaches were more comfortable, I could just sit and watch the waves for hours and hours. Oh wait. They have benches for that, so I CAN. And I did!
The waves and sky have lots of dramatic blue and gray at this time of year. Oddly, although the waves are big, I saw only a few surfers. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s all the large rocks there at the coastline. Or the billions of jellyfish floating about in the water, maybe. I don’t know. There are definitely both pleasant and unpleasant animals in the water.
Speaking of animals, one thing I did while there was go on a whale watching boat trip. And the picture below shows (just barely) the gray whale we saw! It was a pregnant female heading south for the winter. We followed her for a few miles at a distance, watched her breathe and periodically flip her tail up to dive. It was awesome! I also discovered that I’ve got my sea legs from riding the train every day, so no seasickness!
It was a lovely break from the craziness of, well, everything. I’ve got hardware failure craziness going on at work, and I’m here to tell you that fixing it is not the most fun thing I’ve ever done. Plus this whole baby thing is making me feel like I’m insane because I can’t sleep worth anything. Plus the supplies I ordered for making holiday presents came in two weeks late, leaving me totally behind. I thought was SO put together, but you know what? When your yarn takes 16 days to arrive instead of 5 and you get a sinus-ey problem in the middle of multiple crises on top of sleep deprivation, you just have to accept that you can only do what you can do.
Nevertheless I’ll note that despite all these sodding difficulties I DID finish my handmade gift projects, and I WILL show them, just … I have to wait a couple of days. My aunts read this blog, and one of the gifts is for one of them. So those will just have to simmer.
If I don’t make it back here before your particular winter celebration, Happy Hanukkah to those of you beginning that tonight, Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate that, and and a lovely Yule/Solstice to those who prefer to make note of the longest night. I wish you all a lovely appropriate holiday treat.
Too many triangles?
In my evenings, I’ve been working on crocheted triangles. It took me a couple of tries to figure out a pattern that I liked, but once I did it only took a couple of weeks to churn out 30 of them – all while watching old episodes of Remington Steele, of course. I should write down my pattern for them. About halfway through I realized that triangles would make a quick and fun afghan, also – so I might have to do that next. Perhaps a purple triangle afghan?!
This particular batch of triangles is destined to be bunting. You see, I found a picture of this really cute and colorful crocheted bunting that Loretta Grayson made, and decided to make some myself. There was no pattern, but when has that stopped me?
This is a fabulous stash-buster project, it does a great job eating through piles of yarn. Since it’s bunting and will be near the ceiling, no one will be touching it. Which means I can use up that crappy, scratchy cheap yarn I bought when I was first starting to crochet – the kind I despaired of ever being able to use. All it has to do for this project is look pretty! This is one way I’m fitting into my smaller craft closet – by using up supplies!
Now all I have to do is make all the tassels and attach the triangles together using some clever chain stitching.
Oh, and the pretty rainbow bunting is one of the handmade things I’m doing for the baby’s room, sort of a ceiling mobile, I guess. THERE WILL BE NO PASTELS FOR THIS CHILD. I don’t like pastels much. Too wishy-washy. Not enough mental stimulation. Babies don’t do well with colors that don’t have a lot of contrast anyway! I’ve never really understood that whole thing where all the baby yarn is pastel. This seems dumb to me.
This is the part of the year where it gets tough to post my projects because some of them are gifts. I try not to go overboard, but I do like making one or two handmade gifts each year. Last year I made a silk scarf for my mom, and in 2007 an afghan for my grandparents, and in 2009 I went crazy with cookies …
Small(er) Space Crafting
As you might imagine, impending parenthood has brought with it a variety of changes, and more to follow. One such change was the need to change my guest room/craft space into a Kid room. In the end, I decided not to move out, instead I just moved into the closet. Luckily for me and all my stuff, it’s a very large, deep nice closet. Behold:
In the following photographs you will see what a miracle of tidy organization that small closet has become. It has so many kinds of storage that it puts the Container Store to shame. You can’t go into it anymore, what I do is use a bar stool and sit at the tables behind the doors. I can access anything I need from that vantage point. The only real downside is that I can only have one side open at a time, since it is outfitted with sliding doors. But it’s only a minor inconvenience, and overall, I really love this amazing space.
When I started, though, I didn’t love it. I was deeply divided about this whole plan. Losing my crafting space to the baby was hard, in a symbolic way, and hard work, in a literal way. It was really the thing that brought home to me that I was actually going to magically produce a child in a few months. The trouble is that I am not a young chicken. I have been an adult for quite a while, and I am comfortable in my habits and identity. “What am I doing?!” I thought to myself as I worked. “Am I literally in the process of exchanging my identity for that of MOM?!” It was a panic-inducing thought.
Before you say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous” you should read this post from Kim Werker’s blog, in which she is scolded by a reader who thinks it’s terrible she doesn’t have “Mommy” in her blog blurb. Lots of times women do intentionally subsume their identities into Mom-hood, or prioritize motherhood above all other aspects of their identities. And there are women who can get quite nasty/condescending/scolding when that’s not your choice, as if it makes you a crappy parent. As for me, there are lots of private, personal reasons I chose to be a mother, but subsuming my identity into that role wasn’t one of them. In fact, it was one thing I really did not want to do.
So, no. Moving into the closet didn’t mean I was exchanging my identity, it just meant I was making room for a new aspect of it.Does that mean I’ll be a crap parent, or not care about my kid, as some might imply? No. It means I’m a reasonably happy, well-rounded, complicated individual, so it’s unlikely that any one aspect of who I am will ever completely subsume the rest of it. In the same way, the Kid won’t absorb all my writing here, either, because I would be bored senseless if all I ever made and talked about was baby stuff. It’s just rather new at this point and therefore interesting, and also I’m under the influence of Nesting Hormones.
I imagine everyone approaches these things differently. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to how you make room for parenting in your life, but as a rather independent feminist with a career I don’t intend to give up, this is how I approach it. With caution and thoughtfulness, and the knowledge that I am perfectly able to go to Ikea and outfit a closet as an awesomesauce sewing lab.
And you thought I was just going to talk about my crafting closet.
