It's a glorious day outside. The sky is a tranquil blue and rays of light are filling the sunroom at the cabin. I have been up for a few hours, listening to Sunday Edition on CBC while uploading software to my laptop. It has been a very trying year for me emotionally, which I will get into evenutally as my exhaustion subsides. All that matters is that Monte and I are upstate at our own little private retreat and we are doing as little as possible.
Summer unofficially starts tomorrow, although it did come a week earlier in Canada. There is something about the warming effect of sunlight that energizes me and which allows me to break out of my extended funk and finally post something to my blog. It doesn't even matter to me that I have probably lost all of my dear readers, although I do know that some of them have been worried about me.
The programming on CBC Radio makes me think of Ted and, sure enough, when I check my voicemail this morning, there is a message from him. (Obviously, cosmic forces are at work.) When I head over to his blog to get his URL, I notice that I missed the Men's Knitting Weekend held last weekend, less than an hour from where I am now. No doubt, I was the topic of several conversations. Wish I were there, but just too overwhelmed this year.
Rather than bore you all with what I have been up to in the months that I have been absent, I thought you would prefer to see some of the knitting that I have managed to get off the needles recently. Our offering today is the one thing of which I am most proud. I have had a lot of people at work ask me if I would knit them something and most of them even offer to pay for the cost of materials. However, I much prefer to knit items and send them off as gifts. After all, most people could never afford to pay us what we truly deserve when the amount of time that is devoted to a project is factored into the equation.
This got me to thinking: if I were to change my focus and consider my knitting as works of art, I could represent these items in this way and charge whatever I wanted. I always found it amusing that most people won't pay $100 for a handmade sweater, but they will spend a couple of thousand dollars on something that looks pretty over the sofa. At the end of the summer, there is a Harvest Festival every Sunday at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which is on the site of the original Woodstock site and which is about five minutes from our cabin. There is a variety of artisans who set up shop and sell their wares and I thought that I might knit some landscapes and explore a career as a textile artist.
My first attempt, Spring Meadow, Op.1, is displayed above. I didn't work from a drawing or painting; I simply cast on and started playing. I had never tried intarsia before, but as I came across a paricularly enticing color in the first skein of Noro that I used, I dropped my yarn and picked up something else. For any of you who remember my Camel Toe Hat, I approached this work in the same way. I can't tell you how freeing it was to just knit or purl whenever I felt like it, tossing in different techniques and color combinations along the way. Friends would rave about my colorful improvisations and so I just kept plugging away until it was finished in about a week.
I have since started collecting colors for the next three seasons by cutting up another skein of Noro into manageable balls of complementary hues and shopping for new yarn based on my palette instead of previously important factors, such as texture. I still have to figure out how to stretch and frame my work economically, but at least I have rediscovered my love of knitting.
