Freaking Non-Knitters Out...

Yesterday’s Inhale and Exhale wouldn’t post properly, so I will try to add them in a post edit. There are days when it won’t let me make the icons as small as usual as well, so I am learning to go with the flow and tame my inner perfectionist.

I also posted about the two scarves that I’ve been working on since acquiring new wool in Toronto.  If I hadn’t been teaching classes there and staying up so late at night, but the weather is getting cold since my return home as well, so the urge to knit new things for my neck is just too strong to ignore.

When I worked on this one in the staff room at lunch yesterday, I had several people come over to feel the combination of the two yarns put together.  I also had a few teachers ask me how many things I knit in a year.  This might be because I’ve already knit 3 baby blankets for half of the staff that is pregnant and they’ve also seen me working on my socks. I don’t think I’ve ever kept track of the number of projects I knit in a year.

I also took out the scarf during Guided Study period.  This is a half an hour period for enrichment, extra help or catching up on homework that changes every 5 or 6 weeks as the marks are handed in by teachers and students who are struggling or excelling are identified.  I’d planned to read a bit since every student who doesn’t have work to do is encouraged to bring a book, but I realized that I couldn’t keep an eye on the entire class that way. Hence the knitting.  I knit by feel.  I’ve always been able to handle basic knitting stitches (anything short of cables and patterns with lots of counting) without looking since University when I would knit and study or knit and watch TV.  This has come in handy when I’ve had to divide movies into which ones I need to watch (knit) and which ones I can listen to while glancing up now and then (stitch).  It also keeps me from being a nagging passenger on long car trips and I can knit in the dark if I have to talk to Nick to keep him awake at the end of a long journey.  It is also really good for freaking high school kids out.

I began to knit while the kids were working on their projects.  Every now, one of the teenagers would glance up and find me watching them while my hands knit.  Whispers began, nudges as I continued to glance around the room surveying them.  Finally, one brave girl put up her hand and spoke. “Excuse me, miss, are you doing that without looking down at it?”  I just grinned and nodded.

Who says knitting is boring!

Even when you are fairly well practiced at a skill, you can also continue to learn and be inspired.  While I was up in Toronto, I found this wool for Bethany that brings a  hint of orange into the blue, white and pink mix.  The soft colours will be perfect for her and they also tied in nicely with my “use more of the colour you like the least” challenge.  By now, I am actually growing a little fond of orange.

While I was in Toronto, Jocelyne was knitting a cool scarf pattern before one of the classes.  When I commented on the pattern, she showed me how it was a  short pattern that you repeated on EVERY row until you either ran out of wool or got sick of knitting the scarf.   You can find it on Yarn Harlot’s website here .  This is what mine is starting to look like:

Go ahead... practice being Creative in public and see what happens!

INHALE:  Being Creative in new ways or learning a new variation of a skill we already posses can bring a deep enjoyment into our lives along with an excitement that keeps us hooked.  When things become routine and predictable, they can also become boring.  I don’t ever want what I create to bore me. If it does, then it’s time to find something new to try.

EXHALE:  Which hobby, craft or skill do you feel most confident in?  It may be one that you have practiced for a long time or one in which you developed a sense of mastery quickly.  In order to keep this well-practiced skill from growing stale, try one of the following.  Try starting something that you have never attempted before (a new style of pattern, a new stitch, a different technique).  Visit a craft store, website or guild meeting where you could learn from someone else who practices this skill and get inspired.  Look through books and dare to try something you think might be too hard for you.  When we push ourselves, we can grow.  Or, find something new that absolutely delights you, as I did with this scarf pattern and savour the new experience.

Looking Deeper...

Mondays often feel full of potential until the first disaster of the week hits and then we feel like this photo that I shot a few years ago...

One of my favourite stories about not giving up is the example of accidentally dropping one egg out of the container.  Just because that one breaks... do you smash the other eleven?

Today was filled with the joyful chaos of substitute teaching all day, coming home to a house that smelled wonderful thanks to the chili ingredients I’d tucked in the slow cooker this morning and then watching the girls get homework done before volleyball practice for Erin.

She showed up at the first practice of the new team after last week's tryouts to find out that  some of her new team members had jumped to another club in town without telling anyone until the last minute.

No, life does not always go as planned.

So I dug out this picture instead of the one I’d shot earlier today of floor tile.  This week, I am challenging myself to look DEEPER...  to really see what might lie hiding in shapes and shadows when you look beyond the obvious images.

When I look at this photo, I see a dragon’s wing, a dog’s head, a snail, a bull frog, a square pig and a treasure trove of other things.  What do you see?

INHALE:  We tend to just books by their covers, success by how much money someone makes and hundreds of other SURFACE things.  Creative wonders are waiting all around us if we just take the time to really LOOK at them.  Stop. Look beneath the surface. Look deeper than you usually do.  Part of becoming more creative is taking the time to see with more than just your eyes!

EXHALE:  Find something with a pattern in it.  Tile flooring works well as do wood grain patterns.  Crumple some tinfoil then spread it out again.  Stare at the clouds.  If you have a digital camera then try to capture the image you see so that you can look at it more closely.  What images do you see to sketch?  What stories d o they conjure in your head?  Follow where they lead and see what you can find when you look deeper at the world already around you.

Doodling Rocks!

When you fall off a horse or a bicycle, you are supposed to get right back on again.  Small children certainly pick themselves right back up when they fall down while learning to walk.  They don’t become afraid of looking foolish the way adults do.  That tends to hold us back more often than we realize.

I did manage to make our favourite recipe from Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution cookbook, the Ground Beef Wellington for supper on Sunday night which restored my family’s faith in my ability to be creative in the kitchen... but the fear I felt about blogging on the Saturday night of the Creativity disaster did make me aware of the time lag between when I explore a topic BEFORE I share it with you or do if AFTER I propose the idea.  I’m sure it will all work out in the end.  While I am planning to explore something every day in my sketchbook, they may not all be worthy of sharing.  Life may also interfere as I have seen it happen to so many people from Yarn Harlot to Burghild Nina Holzer the author of A Walk Between Heaven and Earth.

But to bolster my sense of self-esteem, I went back to one of the very first activities I remember doing. It was also one of the things I used to get in trouble for at school!  Doodling is probably the most Universal form of drawing or making marks that exists.  I have lost track of how many people tell me they cannot draw at all only to turn into the most amazing doodlers during boring meetings or phone calls!  Doodling has no rules, it can happen on almost any surface from beach sand and snow to odd bits of paper found lying within reach.  So today’s topic celebrates the doodler in all of us...

INHALE: The best thing about doodling is that your hands are kept busy making patterns while your brain gets to move into a more detached form of awareness.  Doodling can nurture many different personalities from precise to playful.  There is a childlike sense of play when we make random marks on a surface that evolve into patterns, textures or even pictures.  We should also treasure the fact that it is while we are doodling that many people experience those “Aha!” moments of creative intuition, solving problems or getting great ideas.  Those who think they can’t draw often produce the best doodles because they aren’t trying to turn every mark into something recognizable or worry if each shape is perfect.  Only machines can repeat shapes or letters exactly all the time... and where would be the fun in that?

EXHALE:  Take a blank page in your book and a big marker (preferably one that won’t bleed through onto the next page).  Write your name, a word or a statement in bigger, bolder letters that you will then doodle around.  Think about what colours to use, what thickness of pens or markers you could explore with and then just begin.  It wasn’t until I went to scan or photograph this page in my book that I discovered metallic gel pens for some of the patterns, especially the pale silver, might not have been the best choices, but I found them in a drawer and wanted to use them before they dried up completely.  Don’t obsess about pattern placement or exactness of shape.  In fact, if you find yourself getting too caught up in making things “perfect”, turn on some music or the television so that your brain has some interference.  Have fun playing with different patterns, letters or shapes until the page is full. Then stand way back and marvel how something cool came out of chaos!

If you can’t think of any patterns to start with, here are a few ideas.

This is the first pattern a teacher showed me how to do on a drawing of a basket in art class to make it look woven.  To this day, it tends to be the first doodle pattern that springs forth from my hands.

Spirals can be a magical shape.  They seem to be popping up a lot in my life right now, so I am trying to remain open to what that could mean.  Think of them as overachieving 6s or 9s...

A last little mishmash of ideas to try... now DOODLE!