crochet

Tying Up Loose Ends

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I have finally managed to get my brain-squirrels at least running in the same direction. I think.

I had a wild and unmanageable list of exciting and interesting possibilities for #The100DayProject, lots of potential for daily dopamine sparkles, but a couple days ago as I was vacuuming the rugs (I do that occasionally), I had a brainstorm: What if this year’s 100 Day Project would be about tying up loose ends? What if I made a list of all my Unfinished Projects, and pledged to work on one of them every day for 100 days? The daily dopamine hit would be less sparkly, perhaps, but the satisfaction in the end could be immeasurable.

So here’s the plan:
1. Spend 10-15 minutes every day on an Unfinished Project. If I have an occasional crazy busy day in which I am simply running all day from thing to thing, I can give myself a short break and do five minutes.
2. I must work on a project from my project list, and not create a new project mid-stream. I can still work on things off the list, just not as a fulfillment of this project.
3. I will take a picture of my progress on whichever project every day to log on my social media for accountability’s sake.
4. I do not have to finish one project on the list before picking up another–it’s about making progress on the things I begin but haven’t finished.

Here’s the List (for now–I may tweak it in the next two couple days before the project begins on Sunday, February 22):
1. The crochet shrug
2. The Alone Together Sweater (second attempt)
3. The Granny Square Yard Sale Cardigan
4. My Tanzania 2024 Book
5. The Rosary Zines
6. The Words Collection
7. The black Granny Squares–whatever was I doing with them?
8. 100 Hearts and Flowers for Pride
9. 20 more Little Protector Dolls for Radiance
10. Nisselue–the knitted and/or crocheted Norwegian Resistance Hat
11. Mending
12. The Red Thread Embroidery
13+ I feel like there are some more that I listed in my journal the other day, so I might add a couple from there.

I have a little cheaty thing going on in my brain right now. I have been inspired by a crocheter who makes elaborate neckpieces of different yarns and stitches, mixing knitting and crochet and different sizes of hooks and needles. If I were to begin one before Sunday, then it would be an Unfinished Project. . . Hmmmm.

I chose the name Tying Up Loose Ends for the project because I am trying to free up my mind for other projects. The image I am using is a crochet circle I am making. As I cut off ends of yarn from projects, I knot those that are longer than five or six inches to a ball of loose ends, and then I crochet them onto my circle. When it’s large enough, I will use it as the top for a beret. I’ll keep adding to the Ball of Loose Ends throughout the project.

The project begins on Sunday, and lasts until June 1. Go to #The100DayProject web page, if you are intrigued and want to join. My process is to:
1. Do the Project every day
2. Photograph or video it
3. Post on Social Media

At school, we are encouraging our middle and high schoolers to join us if they want, for the sake of creativity, mindfulness, or focus.

You can be very creative about your project choice: Try a new dance every day, give a compliment every day, do a watercolor a day, a Zentangle a day, doodle a face every day, do a breathing exercise every day, write a haiku a day, research a different animal every day, sing a song a day. . .

Prompt : Forgiveness

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Now that I have finished my friend Tim’s seven Rilke prompts, I am heading back to Write Better Poetry, Robert Lee Brewer’s blog on the Writer’s Digest site. I like the old name of the blog so much better: Poetic Asides. Now all their blogs are Write Better _________. Bland and unpoetic. But Brewer is still a good one to follow. Today’s prompt is to write about forgiveness. Ever defiant, I chose to write about the opposite. Perhaps it won’t seem very spiritually evolved. . . I’m not too fussed.

Gratitude List:
1. Warm weather
2. We’re doing poetry by analyzing people’s favorite song lyrics right now. Everybody wants to participate. They’re clamoring to participate.
3. Crochet Club. Finally enough of them are beginning to get it that it’s getting to be fun. Soon, we’ll be making hearts and stars and evil eyes.
4. I seem to be through that last period of intense inflammation. I was again beginning to dread getting out of the chair to walk. Sleeping felt like a dangerous thing–I was waking up with neck aches and numb shoulders and back aches. Feeling SO much better now.
5. The dawn chorus these days is riotous!
May we walk in Beauty!

“But it is over now; I have survived it.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.” ―Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” ―Emma Lazarus

“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.” ―Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” ―Robert Frost

“What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as One,
Received not in essence but by participation.
It is just as if you lit a flame from a live flame:
It is the entire flame you receive.”
―St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)

“We love the things we love for what they are.” ―Robert Frost

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” ―Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” ―Sarah Williams

“Resist much, obey little.” ―Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.” ―e. e. cummings

“If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?” ―Carol P. Christ

“Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.” ―Carol P. Christ

Vertigo

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2014 April 020
Last April, lichen

Sitting here in my grandmother’s chair
where she took yarn and hook,
made yards and yards of fabric
loop by precious loop
to cover her family

and reading Pinsky’s “Shirt”
about cloth, about the ones who leapt
to their death from the Triangle fire
and about Irma and her approval
of his own crisp cottons,

was it vertigo
or something else
that gave me the sudden urge
to check whether my seatbelt
is fastened securely?

Gratitude List:
1. Hike and Apple Picnic in the fields with the wee folk
2. The golden-green of the fields in sun across the bowl of the hollow
3. The delight of two happy children upgrading to the next level of bicycle
4. The Beautiful Words board and the way the students have taken to adding their own favorite beautiful words: serenity, wanderlust, wallflower, Nelson, and LOVE (“This is really the only one you need up there, Ms. Weaver-Kreider.”)
5. That sweet little hamster and how she watches for her man to come pick her up, how she gets absolutely still while he pets her

May we walk in Beauty!