bring it on!

And by ‘it,’ I mean Color!

That’s what I noticed when I sat down at my desk. There’s so much color in my making and reading this week.

Which is kind of funny, because when I look at my closet, there’s lots of neutral. Natural neutrals are my favorite to wear. But this winter…this way gray winter…I’ve dabbled in color. (It all started with that Mountain Throw, and now I’m hooked! Quite literally.)

With thanks to Kat + Friends for the link-up, let’s get started:

part i {making}

I’ve traced and cut and bought my cardstock…these sweet little birds just await small square frames.

And while I was buying the cardstock, a fat cake of color (below) caught my eye. It seemed like a good ‘practice purchase,’ and for pennies, practically.

Practice for…? Socks. ‘Sleeping socks,’ because I sleep in thick handknit socks I bought from a Swedish nonagenarian named Ragna at a Scandi festival some years ago. (I’m down to my last pair and she’s…no longer knitting.)

Here’s the thing. Socks have always put me off — thanks to a person, not the knitting. Briefly: The owner of our LYS was kind of a snot who fostered an exclusive vibe in her knitting circle. When I went to the Sunday drop-in for help with the DPNs I’d purchased from her…the first time I’d ever used double pointeds!…I let her make me feel small. So small, in fact, it was the last time I went in her store — until the Going Out of Business sale(!).

Anyway. It’s time for socks. To start, I figure a good sized yarn on good sized needles might keep me calmer than fingering weight. I bring low expectations and just one hope: get comfortable enough to take the project on our spring break road trip in a couple of weeks. We’ll see!

The last colorful bit is my temperature project. I cleaned up the mess from my water bottle spill, finished February, and caught up to the present. I threw January and February into the wash, and —

what a difference!

You can’t see all the greens in this cropped photo. But trust me. It’s a lot of green.

I’d been feeling a little less enamored with this project lately: Doubting my color palette. (All the green.) Trying to picture the finished blanket. (Will it line up?) General malaise, you could say.

Until the wash + dry! With the marker washed out, the stitches snugged up, it feels like a reset. Now I’m loving the majority green with punctuated browns and blues — and it’ll be fun to see which colors dominate, which punctuate as we move into spring.

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part ii {reading}

Ross Gay stands with Maggie Smith and Billy Collins as ‘accessible poets you’ll love even if you think you’re not into poetry.’ If you ask me!

When my purchase request came in (thank you, Patterson Library!), I dropped everything and read this in two sittings — a brisk, sun-soaked hour, bundled up in the garden and the next morning, with coffee.

If I wrote a blurb for the back of his book, it'd be this: Though some writers hold the raw vulnerability of humans with hands as capable as Ross Gay, I'll argue no one does so with hands more capable. 

In his book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, he speaks of those figs and the fruit trees he loves; of his mother, in life, and his father, in death; of a beloved friend who was murdered one Christmastime; of eating with — sharing with! — ants; lost loves, near loves, and Tina with a Levittown accent; the missteps and follies of his youth, with glimpses at the ’90’s that made me laugh and say out loud, I remember that!

And after I finished Catalog…, I went straight YouTube for the best of both worlds: you get to hear and see Ross Gay read his book-length poem, Be Holding. In its entirety. (Troy listened with me for a while, then paused my laptop when he saw me crying…and he couldn’t help laughing. Because he was, rightly, surprised that a poem about the 1980 NBA finals would make me cry-cry. And it really wasn’t so much that as…well? I don’t know. There’s this poet-thing Ross Gay does with his hand when he reads. And he’s wearing a man-scarf. (I’m a fan of the man-scarf.) And I guess, as I listen, I imagine him reaching people through language about a topic that isn’t usually turned into poetry. And he just…holds. Holds people. Not just his readers and listeners, but Ross Gay holds people so tenderly, with the gentlest of voices but strongest of everything else that…GAH! I can hardly stand it.

(Or maybe I was just having a moment.)

Regardless — do what you will with this:

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And on that note, I’m off to see what everyone else is up to today! What are you making? Reading? Doing this week?