This week I'm on vacation on the lovely shore of Emerald Isle. But because I love my work, the Boutique is still open with new yarns everyday and I'm still talking to customers via email. So I'm away but still checking in. Each day I'll be posting a few pictures from the vacation, especially the yarny inspiration.
Today was a beach all-day sort of day. Lounging, soaking, and strolling.
This week I'm on vacation on the lovely shore of Emerald Isle. But because I love my work, the Boutique is still open with new yarns everyday and I'm still talking to customers via email. So I'm away but still checking in. Each day I'll be posting a few pictures from the vacation, especially the yarny inspiration.
Today (Saturday) we got up early and drove the 8 hours to the coast of North Carolina. We stopped at a…colorful fruit stand, unpacked in our gorgeous beach house and hit the beach
View from the living room
Beach
house at sunset
In our family, jam is more than just a sweet topping for your toast. It's a little jar of spring sunshine – preserved for the whole year. It's memory and taste and love.
Jay's Grandma Mary made jars and jars of jam every year – strawberry, raspberry, boysenberry (after her trips to Oregon). You always knew to take a few jars from the freezer when you ran out.
Knowing how my husband loved Grandma's jam, I asked her to teach me and she scoffed – “It's just the Sure-Jell recipe that comes in the box, read it yourself!”
Grandma was straight like that and that's why we loved her.
When she passed away last October, I knew that this would be the year that I got serious about jam. I bought a few boxes of Sure-Jell and waited for the first strawberries.
They appeared last weekend and I got to work.
Washing
Topping
Mashing
Adding the sugar (4 cups)
And pouring.
I'm particularly smitten with the jewel-y pink in the quilted jars – so beautiful!
The jam turned out perfectly, just like Grandma's!
PS. Really, if you want to make it, get a box of Sure-Jell and read it yourself (it's the freezer recipe)!
I've tried to write this post for weeks.
I can't figure out how to say it in a way that conveys the big-ness for me and for Blonde Chicken Boutique. This is a huge, scary, exciting step, but it's just so hard to express.
So, how about I just say it:
June 30th is my last day working in an office, for an employer.
July 1st, I wake up to…Blonde Chicken Boutique!
I'll be a full-time fiber artist, yarnie, fiberista, spinster – whatever we're calling it that week – it'll be my full-time job!
Even though I handed in my resignation a month ago, it still feels crazy and new and exciting!
This will allow me to do SO many new things with BCB, things you've asked me to do and things I've been waiting to do. More craft shows, more in-person lessons, more yarn!
As I transition into this new role, I'll be sharing more and more about the business-side of BCB: what systems I use, how I decided to go full-time, all sorts of stuff! I know only some of you might be interested in that, so instead of bore the blog readers, I'll be writing about it in a little newsletter-y thing. Sign up here if you want to learn more biz-stuff.
Thanks for helping me make all of this possible!
I love the changing season and I love to celebrate each of them with their own fresh, local food, flora and yarn-y inspirations. Each season I make a little list of the pleasures I want to soak in. I call them manifestos, but they're really just love letters to the season.
Reading Havi's list of things-to-do-before-she-dies, I realized that these seasonal lists are my own little things-to-do-before-the-moment-passes. And goodness! Spring is nearly gone without a proper love letter.
I hope to keep listing these, every Thursday, as a reminder to soak it in over the weekend (and as a mid-week cheer-up).
This week, Spring is feeling like a great time for:
I did a few of these things last weekend, I'll be sharing them with you soon!
What do you like to do to celebrate Spring?
Happy Earth Day!
Sometimes I think Earth Day (or Month or Hour) is silly…shouldn't we be working on these things everyday? But I'm starting to think that setting aside one day draws more attention to the issue and gives a reason to reflect or research on changes we may already know we need to make!
I write about these things pretty much all the time, so in celebration of Earth Day, let's go over a few way to make your crafting decisions a bit more green:
1. Be a locavore! (I know it's not technically crafty, but I think of cooking and baking as crafting!)
3. Use organic cotton. Why? Here's your answer!
4. Work with local, small-farm materials!
I might be a bit obsessive.
I wish I wasn't.
I wish I was smooth and casual and je ne sais quoi.
But I'm not. I'm excitable. And squeal-y. And a bit obsessive.
When I learned the new Yarn Forward was available in the States (it's UK-based), one that I had been interviewed for, I began stalking Barnes & Noble.
I've been 4 times in the last month, scouring the magazine racks, looking behind every title.
Yesterday, my mom and I had a bit of free time and we decided to pop into the bookstore for a cup of coffee and magazine perusal. I did my normal magazine-rack-hunting. The girl next to me set down one she had been flipping through and
Wow!
There it was, the April issue.
I called my mom over as I flipped through, and was shaking before I even landed on this page:
That's me, in the upper left corner!
The article is a discussion with several “ecological experts” (squee!) about what “green” means to them, in terms of yarn and fiber choices. It's a fabulous article with input from Lorna's Laces, a Rowan rep and other experts on the subject!
You can find buy Yarn Forward online, at your yarn store or at a bookstore!
Oh, and the geeking out doesn't end there. My mom and I both squealed, jumped around, hugged and celebrated! This little excitement-party happened again when I told my husband (who, for the record, does not squeal)
This winter, I promise to snuggle in with fiber.
Through knitting:
Leyburn socks (am now about to turn the heel in the first)
Twist & Shout (nearly done – working on 1st sleeve)
spinning:
And admiring fleeces:
(Jacob fleece – dyed)
(see the first part of my Winter Manifesto here)
Inspired by Amanda's beautiful Winter manifesto, I've started writing my own. I'll be adding to it for the next few Fridays.
February can be a cold, hard month: full of ice and short days and a deep longing for spring.
I find there's no better way to combat the cold than to embrace the light where I find it and to look for the small moments of joy. To remind myself that there is really just one more month of winter (spring comes early in East Tennessee!), I'll dedicate myself to this manifesto.
1. Enjoy and relax with my loved ones;
with coffee,
with chocolates,
while baking,
while playing.
“Begin as you mean to go on”
I heard this phrase at the beginning of 2008, on Breda Dayne’s Cast On. I was struck by it then – such a clever phrase – but never explored it. It's really lovely, so much more poetic than the idea of New Year's Resolutions and with so many more implications. Every new project that can be started with the notion of “Begin as you mean to go on”.
At the beginning of this year, as I started work on my new website, it came to me again.
How do I want to go on in 2009? How do I want the new website to go on?
I don’t “do” resolutions. I love lists and I love setting intentions. But the concept of “resolutions” doesn't resonate for me. I'd rather remind myself on a regular to basis to learn, improve and grow.
And that, the growing, is what appealed to me in Chris Brogan’s post about picking a word as a goal for the year. At about the same time, Lisa Call wrote about choosing a word to set her intention. These two posts stirred something, stirred that phrase “Begin as you mean to go on” and I began to think about my intentions for this new site and the new year.
I set intentions for nearly every day, could I expand that to a year? The intention would need to be simple; just a few, memorable words that would guide my business decisions this year. I can look at every decision and say, will this be in alignment with my intention?
So what did I come up with?
Kill it. Share it.
When it came to me I knew that's it! But, ugh, I hate the violent connotations of the phrase “kill it” or it's similar “crush it”. What I mean when I say I want to “kill it” is that I want to achieve excellence, I want to become as fabulous as I can, to learn as much as possible. But the phrase “learn it” just doesn’t have that same push, that same insistence. Is there another word that invokes this sort of insistent drive towards excellence?
As I was thinking over this excellence, I read about succulence – the state of being juicy. That’s what I want! I want to infuse my work with juiciness – full of richness of texture and color.
It somehow goes along with “kill it”. I want to bring succulence to it, to enjoy it, to delve into it thoroughly.
I’m still unsure of the right word, something to align the ‘Kill' with the ‘Succulence'…is there anything in between?
There we go, that’s my expanded Intention for 2009: Kill it (make it juicy), Share it.
And what is the “it”?
The “it” is whatever it needs to be. The “it” is yet to come, the “it” can change. For the next few weeks, the “it” is designing the Month of Love Series, learning about video editing, launching a new video project, organizing a mill-spun line of yarns.
So this is how I'm beginning. I'm learning, infusing and sharing.