My eyes would dart back and forth from the microwave to whatever book I was trying to read, willing the time to move faster (ultimately leaving me confused & without any real meaning or joy gleaned from the book). I would sit on a chair in the living room, and my dad would put a 15min timer on the microwave, and time would just i n c h by. Some of my earliest memories of reading involve assignments for class in elementary school, when we were tasked with reading for 15 minutes a night.
I’ve always struggled to sit still long enough to get engulfed in a book. I feel like a millennial trope who just can’t with longform, but if I’m being really honest, reading books has never come easily to me.
Y’all, I’m actually reading - like full, hardcover, printed & bound books. They remind me of things I wore as a Kindergartner, the texture makes my chest and stomach feel held in all the right ways, and there’s something extra tender about being fastened up with buttons my grandmother touched. And I’m really glad I did - the colors together just feel really really right to me. But it felt like something inside me was speaking, so I just listened. I couldn’t explain the color choices - the nearly cobalt blue, for one, being way outside my usual comfort zone. I put together this palette which Josh rightly called “earthy primaries”. I set aside my intention of making it from “waste” yarn, and instead I followed my instincts to Avenue Yarns one Saturday. The colors I had on hand for the contrast ribbing slowly but surely made clear they were not right - too little yarn, not the right contrast. The vest revealed itself to me as I knit it. I cast on right away with Snoqualmie Valley yarn I bought in 2016 and dyed with foraged oak galls in 2019, held together with an undyed skein of alpaca/silk from Black Squirrel for softness and loft. Lo and behold, these little coral-orange ones made clear they were meant to become the fasteners for this vest (also see pics below).
She mentioned that she had pulled the mismatched buttons from her grandmother’s stash, which reminded me to check my own grandmother’s sewing table for buttons. I started working on various random projects and getting excited about knitting.Ī couple days later, I happened to see an adorable little vest that my friend Meg made, that she posted in a Facebook story that I ferociously screenshot (see pics below). When I got home that afternoon, I was abuzz. The class was so wonderful and my students were so kind with my fumbling around, getting back into the teaching rhythm. On October 24th, I taught a beginner’s drop spinning class, an invitation for me to reacquaint myself with creative practice, and a little nudge towards accountability. This vest was born out of the last few weeks of this flurry-feeling. After a long hiatus from making things with my hands, or even thinking about making things with my hands, I feel drawn into a flurry of creative practice. I’m starting to notice a seasonal pattern I experience around late fall each year.
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