Back to the main purpose of the blog--greening it up, Baby!

Do It Yourself--you'll be glad you did.

 It's been a while since I have posted here. I have been busy with other things, and working on things to post about. :)

I've been crocheting a bunch lately. My family likes to have "couch blankets." When we were still in Bloomington I made almost all the hats and scarves we wore during the cold months, and I gladly crochet dishcloths and washcloths for our daily use.

Why would I do these things, when I could save time and maybe even money (good yarn is not cheap, but SO worth it) by running across the street to Target or Kmart or where ever and just buying a blanket for $20 or 5 washcloths for a dollar? Why? I have good reasons. Very good reasons.

1) So these precious skills are not lost to time. If I HAD to, I want to know that I can have nice things because I can make them, grow them, raise them, etc. People used to make nearly everything for themselves and their neighbors, now we make almost nothing for ourselves.

2) Every stitch is like a directed meditation on the person you care for enough to make the item. Will they like it? Will it be warm enough? Will it be too warm? Every single stitch is an expression of love and care.

3) I like to imagine that the recipient will feel loved, honored and comforted by these labors of love. Even if they don't, though, I have still gained knowledge. I have created something beautiful and nurturing. I have accomplished something worthwhile, and I have enjoyed myself while doing so.

4) The labor involved is also like a directed meditation on material possessions. For instance, I have two throw blankets in my home I bought on sale at the grocery store for $11 each. They are good, cozy blankets. But they are made of synthetic fibers, on the other side of the planet from where I purchased them. Do you know why we can get so many things made of plastic so cheaply? Because, according to most economists, the TRUE cost of production is not captured in the cost that we pay.

We don't pay to clean the environment of the toxic by-products created in manufacturing because of relaxed environmental standards in developing nations. We don't pay for the damage done to the local ecology during the process of extracting the raw materials. We don't pay for the changing weather patterns (yet), we don't pay for the lost human capital (yet), we don't pay for the true cost of discarded waste when that color goes out of fashion and 250,000 consumers redecorate their homes with a "new look for Spring" they saw on the DIY network or HGTV.

Material possessions. We over-value them and under-value them simultaneously. I guarantee you, though, if we all made our own blankets and washcloths and hats and scarves, we'd feel differently about discarding them when the next home fashion trend rolled through town. 

Those crocheted dishcloths are amazing, by the way! They work like a charm, hold up to rough use and go straight in with the laundry. No hassle, no fuss, no chemicals dyes, no sponges to get torn up and thrown away (and that's not even taking into account the germs on those former invertebrate members of the shallow sea life community.) I felt like the last person on Earth to hear about them, but there are literally thousands of free patterns available online.

I have also been crocheting blankets as I said. I have here a few images of the finished products (fair warning--this apartment came furnished and the "color choices" it was decorated with are NOT my usual subdued style--sunglasses may be called for):

This is the first blanket I crocheted, and I made it for myself to use while reading in my recliner. That explains the shape, right? I used Caron Simply Soft yarn, if I recall correctly, and I think the color was "rose garden." It was a joy to make, and I used the same pattern on this one I did for the one I later made for my son...because every time I turned around he was snuggling with "my" blanket and I wanted it back.

I tried to get a good shot of the stitches close up, but my photography skills are truly lacking. You can kind of see the pattern, though.

This one I made for my son, whose favorite color is green. He picked out the yarn in Bloomington and I started it on the long flight over.  I didn't use a pattern, I just had a general shape in mind, and stopped when it was "big enough." I used a very large hook size, and made a very simple double crochet net. (eHow has a tutorial on double crochet and to create the netting effect just skip one chain between dc stitches. On the next pass, dc in the chain1 spaces of the previous row. When  you reach the desired length, finish with a triple crochet edging. Leave a comment if you want more instructions!)  This blanket's been done for weeks now.

This was the next blanket I made. This one was for my husband and I used a red heart free pattern for it. Scott wanted a different yarn for it, and he chose red heart super saver urban camo. I thought the colors looked nice, but it was a hard yarn to find, and frankly, hard to work with. This will be the last time I start a project without at least getting an in-person impression of the yarn. The finished product came our fine, but I would have preferred it to be a little softer. Scott seems happy with it, but I would like to make him something cozier at some point down the line.

 

The next project I worked on was this for my brother. I used a different pattern for his, also a free pattern from red heart, and he DID like the look of the yarn. I am a "tight" crocheter, and always wind up using less yarn than patterns call for. The upside of that is that I can make blankets and things bigger then specified with the same amount of yarn. (I'm just guessing, actually, I'm sure why it happens, but it does. I consistently make the same project using about 3/4 of the yarn called for in the pattern.)

I have fallen in love with Bernat Mosiac yarn, and the next couple of crochet projects I will be working on are Bumble Berry Pie Afghans. I will be making one out of the color "Fantasy" for Ami and one out of "Waterfall" for myself. :) I SO can't wait. Here is the next project in the making:

This charming pink/purple/lavender square is the very first square for Ami's Afghan. It's going to be beyond lovely.

I will be sure to post more pics when I get further along with Ami's, but I might wait until I finish it. I love this yarn so much (it's GORGEOUS) I might be a little bit obsessive about working on it until it gets done.

My next post will be about bread making. I will be posting my recipe for white bread, corn bread and a recipe for very low fat banana bread. I have lots of pics already taken for both, so it shouldn't take too long to for me to get it all typed. Unless, of course, I am obsessively working on something else. After that, I will post tutorials for 2 basic crochet dishcloths.

Take care, and go make something for yourself!

Wonderful science website to check soon and often--ChronoZoom!

I am an "idea person." I get ideas all the time, big ideas, small ideas--everything from massive, interconnected visions of the best possible future for our planet and ourselves complete with road maps for how to bring it all about to ideas for inventions that make everyday living a tiny bit better.

One idea that has been close to my heart for 15 years or so is an educational website that has a globe on the front page. The globe is interactive. You can go anywhere in the world, and any WHEN in the world, and zoom in on particular points in time and what was going on then and there. Sort of an endless history lesson. You can spread it out flat, too, so that you can compare, for example, civilizations across the globe as they alternately flower and fade throughout the eons.  You could also set it on "auto-play" so that you can watch the history of the world as it unfolds from primordial ooze to space travel.

Balance is a powerful thing. Having the kind of interactive tool I just described would be wonderfully fun and illuminating to play with, and it would offer a less ethnocentric historical framework with which to understand our existence. The Mayans, for instance, had thriving metropolitan centers before the oldest known city in France was even founded, about 3000 years ago, and the Chinese had entire, record-keeping dynasties about 1000 years before that. Wouldn't it be wonderful to watch our planet's history bloom in this way? And also to be able to stop it, to zoom in, on any and every point that captures your attention?

To my mind, the best benefit from the tool would not only be a deeper, more fluid understanding of how our world got to the point it is at today, from a historical perspective,  but more importantly it would give individuals a better concept of the ebb and flow--the balance--of the rise and fall of civilizations on our small blue planet.

Over the years, a number of tools have been developed out in the wide world that offer a close approximation of what I had always longed for. One of them has recently come to my attention (because my husband is a fascinating and intellectually curious man who has a knack for finding such gems) and it is called Chronozoom. Wikipedia explains the purpose of ChronoZoom as this:

"The primary goal of ChronoZoom is to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a "master timeline" tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past.^[6]. ChronoZoom is planned as an educational tool as well as a research tool, by allowing researchers to plot various time series data next to each other for comparison."

Talk about Big History! It is still in the early phases of the project, from what I can tell, but there is enough there now, in the form of short video tours spread along the timeline, that everyone should be able to find something fascinating and entertaining to zoom in on, in chronological order, no less.

Please go check it out. It's grand in a way that we don't get to experience personally in life very often, and I have no doubt we will all be enriched by interacting with it.