Upcoming Shows and a Whole Lot of Books

Hello Everyone, Craft Show season is officially here. This weekend you can find me at Christmas in Petite. I’ll be in the fire hall. The show runs both Saturday and Sunday and takes place in several venues in beautiful Petite Riviere, Nova Scotia. It is truly a wonderful show with great quality crafts in a beautiful part of this province.

The hat above is destined to become a knitting pattern. I had a bit of an epiphany where I realized that my happiest knitting involves designing and that it was time to stop making excuses for why I am not publishing my patterns and put the work in. So, this is how I am currently passing my evenings. Because knit design, for me, is not really how I earn a living, I am allowing myself the luxury of fine tuning. I have a second sample on the needles and for this one I am going to explore a double layered brim. I think I can, I think I can…

I wake up in the mornings and I begin to knit. I continue knitting, sewing and spinning (with breaks for walks) until I can no longer see straight and remain upright. My reading of paper books happens either while I am knitting something very simple, or when I am in the bathtub. The state of this book is a cautionary tale. Yes, I fell asleep in the tub and dropped the book in the water. Such an incredibly sweet book and, fortunately, still readable. I love historical fiction. I find it so much easier to understand a moment and place in history when you can live it vicariously through the characters in a book. The German occupation of Guernsey was something I had peripherally heard of, but this incredibly gentle, amusing and touching book really brings it home.

While I work, I love to listen to audio books. The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris is a true gem of a book. It takes you to the moment in history where the US civil war ends, slavery has been abolished and lives have been upended. It’s heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. I walked away from this book with a deeper understanding of the tensions that ignited the Civil War and how in some ways they are still unresolved.

The Winter Orphans, by Kristin Beck, is based on the true story of The Chateau de La Hille, a home for refugee children, in France, running from the Nazis. The home was run by the Red Cross, who, as an organization chose a policy of betraying the children in the name of neutrality. But the story is about the several brave women who defied their employer’s demands and helped smuggle the children into Switzerland and Spain. History books are excellent sources of information, but a good historical novel can go deeper into the human experience and help us understand history on an empathetic level.

OK, The Signature of All Things is nothing short of epic. The book follows a female botanist in the early 1800s, in Philadelphia, from her birth to the end of her long life. There’s hardly a theme that isn’t in this book, The Female experience, the origin of species, abolition, exploration of the world, colonialism, it’s all in there. Mostly, though, it’s a beautiful story told through botany. There’s one part of the book that will never leave me. The main character, who falls in love with mosses, explain the four concepts of time…Divine time, geological time, human time and moss time. It is a book that changes the way you see the natural world. I can’t recommend it enough.

This is what I am currently listening to. I seem to be on a lucky streak when it comes to good books. The book takes place in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and it is the story of the beautiful relationship between the Black and Jewish community. As much as I love audio books and I think I absorb as much of the story as when I am reading, I miss being able to read a beautiful line over and over again. I heard this passage yesterday and had to stop to write it down. They are the thoughts of a dying woman “…she’d fritted hours away reading about unions and progressives and politics, and corporations, fighting about a meaningless flag that said, I’m proud to be an American, when it should have said, I’m happy to be alive and how one’s tribe can not be better that another tribe because they were all one tribe.” Words are often understood through the lens of our own feeling and experience. These words just so happen to reflect how I am feeling right now about the state of our world.

I don’t want to say that politics don’t matter. Of course they do. Politics is how we create just and unjust societies. I have so much respect for those who truly put themselves forward and into this difficult milieu. But politics are one plane of existence and there’s a deeper, more important one, the one we will likely understand at the end of our lives, that is being suppressed by our overly politicized world and by these terrible social media platforms that suck empathy out of the atmosphere.

As a society, we have assigned great value to “speaking up”. There is value in speaking up, but what happens when everyone, on every side is speaking up at the same time? Can we actually hear each other, or can we only hear ourselves? Are we being activists or building echo chambers? If we hang signs in our windows, or on our social media platforms, proclaiming our world view are we calming an explosive world full of outrage and pain, or are we lighting one more match and alienating neighbours with a different perspective and life experience. I believe there is value in and need for creating spaces where we can connect on a level outside politics. When we can come together through a shared love of knitting, hats, gardening, farmers markets, coffee, food, books and art, we learn that we are so much more alike than we are different. Speaking up can be important. Sometimes staying quiet is also important.

There’s a line from a Bob Dylan song that has been running through my head for most of my adult life, “Lay down your weary tune, lay down, lay down the song you strum, and rest yourself ‘neath the strength of strings. No voice can hope to hum……

Thank you for spending some time with me. Hope to see some of you this weekend. xoxo, Anna