a good yarn spun

or - pulling at invisible strings

She knitted mufflers endlessly

Cheryl, my incredible wife, has found a burgeoning world of opportunity, community, excitement and satisfaction through crafting, mainly knitting. She loves to knit and it has paid off well in a rather unexpected and serendipitous way. For over a year now she has been blogging about her projects and process; she joined a high profile online knitting group, Ravelry, which has had a long waiting list just to get on. Through these means her art has been recognized by others, especially a sweater that she designed and knitted. The owner of Webs, a local yarn store, recognized her sweater while she was shopping and they fast became good acquaintances. Soon she was approached by the store and asked if she would be interested in knitting store samples for credit, which she accepted with excitement. Cheryl had been hoping to someday merge into spinning her own yarn, and this gave her the perfect opportunity to not only acquire bushels of yarn but to obtain her own spinning wheel at little to no cost. Web's approached her again and asked her if she would be interested in teaching a knitting class, which she also accepted and is now on her third week in.

As if that isn't enough, she has also won awards for her knitting at the annual Eastern States Exposition for the past two years.

None of this was planned. much of it came about after she began to blog about her interests and share them with others. Honestly, she was skeptical about blogging for at least six months but was somehow won over to the idea and has been blessed by it. Sure, blogging takes more time than she would care to invest in and expend toward, but it has taken her places she never expected and given her friends she would never have found otherwise, and that is an invaluable achievement.

If you like crafting, knitting, yarn and other such related arts, pop on over into her sphere of cyber creation - a world of color, discovery, creativity and community. You can find her at:
Yarnbee
Ravelry
Etsy
Flickr
& at her website at:
busy bee printing press
(amazing graphic designer by day, incredible craft maker by night)

Drop by and tell her Elliott sent you. I think you will love Cheryl almost as much as I do!

winning women

I am a bit more introspective than usual during the fall season. Maybe it's just the all too sudden change over in nature and the weather or just a gasp of relief that comes after the bustle and rush of the end of summer back to school thrust, but other incidents have a strong bearing on it as well. My mom has her birthday on October 12th. She passed away early in 2004 and I have some difficulty in commemorating her birthday in silence and solitude. I received a phone call several weeks ago from a cousin who I haven't seen nor talked to since I was a very young teen. She had a couple of folders of family photos that she wanted me to have and after catching up on each other's lives, she sent them to me. It had several photos of my mom when she was a little girl and a young woman, photos that I'd never seen before and at an era of her life I'd never known, whether through stories or pictures. She never shared much of her life with us and, with her passing on, she remains in many ways a mystery to me. My mother was beautiful and was considered a real "looker" in her teens and kept her youthful beauty through her life. Honestly, my mom is about 14 years of age in this photo even though she appears to be a mature early twenties.



Cheryl and I officially got together on October 11th of 2004, the day before mom's birthday and about eight months after her death. It seems fitting to have met the woman who would become my wife on this anniversary. I'm often sad that they never got to meet. I know my mom would have approved of Cheryl and would have gotten along well with her. Cheryl is extremely talented and handy with crafts, especially knitting and sewing, and sometimes when she is busy about her latest project I recall similar memories from when I was a child. My mother and sisters would on occasion go to the fabric store and buy material, patterns and the such, and the home would be buzzing with craft activities that I had a minor fascination with but little other interest in. The other day, after Cheryl had gone shopping to buy buttons for her new sweater, she was showing them to me and asking my opinion of them. It reminded me of being a young boy, hanging out with mom and my sisters, sifting through the tin of buttons they had, looking at the variety of colors and shapes there were. It had an odd attraction to me and probably fostered an unusual love of collecting random things. I guess my mother is partly to blame if I came home with junk to showcase in odd, random nooks about my room.

Over the past two weeks the Big E - the Eastern States Exposition - was in town. It's also an odd assortment of sideshows with unusual attractions, tchachkas, midway fare and all of the rich, deep fried food you can eat, centered around 4 H club exhibits, breeding competitions (no, not that kind - we're talking dogs, cows, horses, llamas, pigs, sheep, etc....), butter sculptures, gigantic squashes and entertaining acts. Cheryl entered several items in the Big E fiber competition and came home with three ribbons. She should have won more. She's that good. I think my mother would have beamed with admiration and pride for her daughter in law. I know she would have been impressed with her talents and abilities to create and knit so well. Maybe sewing would have been at least one area they had in common and could have talked much about.