Knotted Friendship Bands

Dear Meredith,

Here's a snapshot of my early teens. It was a rare day you wouldn't find me with a safety pin attached to the knee of my jeans, long strands of brightly coloured embroidery floss streaming forth. I'd be hunched over, experimenting with different colour ways, seeing just how wide I could go, how I could push the technique to new places and challenge the pattern possibilities. Always imagining the next one to come before the one being worked on was complete. Most were given away in colours to match the friend. These I found stashed in a box of memories.



 Not much changes.

 xoxAnna

Live Streaming Hello Etsy

Dear Meredith,

This is my current view - I am watching the very engaging Nathalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin give her presentation on the trajectory of her strongly community based clothing business at the first Hello Etsy Conference in Berlin. I had really hoped to get to Berlin in person and was super disappointed to not make it, so the chance to watch keynote speeches live streamed is fab. The weekend is a 'Summit on Small Business and Sustainability' encouraging the building of human-scaled economies. Even though it is increasingly easy to achieve, it still feels very generous that they broadcast the whole thing online too.

I watched Charty Durrant earlier. After a dry start, she was spot-on; calling for a drastic altering of how the fashion industry works from both producers and consumers. Her article 'The Tyranny of Trends' on the same subject matter is now firmly on my reading list in the asap category. I always enjoy keeping up with Tom Hodgkinson, Idler extraordinaire. Today he discussed how unidle he actually has to be. While I'm on-board with the vast majority of what he says and still strongly recommend 'How to be Idle',  I'm increasingly aware he's rarely by inspired women. Other than mentioning his wife, everyone he quoted today, yet again, was a dude. 

And all those little balls of yarn? I was gifted the makings of a long abandoned project by a friend. She had wound her yarn in to small balls of 2 to 4 strands to make them a similar weight. I am laboriously separating them back out to a single strand. If there's a smarter way to do this, I'd love to know about it.  I'll use them at the V&A in a couple of weeks when my team of experts and I teach museum visitors how to finger knit as part of the 'Make' Friday Late on 30 September. There'll be a lot of ball winding before then!

xoxAnna

Clearing the Knitting Cache

Dear Anna,

Sorry about my infrequent blogging; it's been a little crazy here since I've been back in the States. We moved to a new place plus I have all these academic obligations. However, it's also a new school year and my current focus is to clear my knitting cache, starting with my two biggest projects:



I've been using this blanket as my background for various things but it's not actually finished! It's supposed to fully cover a queen sized bed (a gift for my mom) and I have a few inches to go. Remember that we got this yarn last summer when you were here? So yeah, it's been more than a year so I really should finish it off.

The second is red yarn that I originally bought to make this dress, which didn't fit correctly so I'm using it to make this hoodie. I was in the middle of it when I accidentally put too many decreases in (I was in Miami in February and was distracted by the wonderful weather!), so I took my needle out but haven't managed to put it back in. After the blanket!

Love,
Meredith