A Sure Sign of Spring...

In Other News
I've been working on some Top Secret spinning (it's a gift for someone) which I'll show you in a week or so. It's coming out very nicely.

My Lair is such a disaster area that I go down there and I'm overwhelmed with possibilities. I read an article a while back on various working styles. Some of us (frequently the ones accused of being messy) need the visual reminders of what needs doing, what we're working on, what's possible. So we leave our stuff out because if it's all put away, we don't see it and we forget that we're supposed to be doing anything. But I've been dragging so much stuff out lately that I've overwhelmed my brain with possibilities. Too much yarn. Too much fiber. Too much fabric. Alas, I think I need to spend a few weeks making things worse before they can get better. That is, I need to open up all the various boxes, purge, resort, relabel, and then put away. But that's such a daunting task that I just sit at my desk and make little swatches. If I start to seriously start organizing, usually Owen appears and demands attention when I'm about 15 minutes in, so I have learned helplessness about the whole thing. But maybe this week I can at least put away about half the distractions so I can focus on getting a few things done.

Knitting
I've also been working on some socks that go in and out of dormancy, depending on what else gets bumped to Priority One. One of these is the Charade Socks I started a few months back. I finished the first, cast on for the second, got about 2 inches in and stopped. Last night I got a couple more inches done, so maybe that'll get done before barefeet season is really and truly here. Also, I'm hoping to finish some socks that I'll send to my dad for his birthday later this month. The first one is done and the second over half done, so just the home stretch there.

Rant
I have a little rant about the time change to get out of my system, too. I always thought the time change was a minor inconvenience until I had kids. But ever since I became a parent, I've come to despise the time change. When I'm in charge of the universe, we will just have one time all year round. We'll split the difference between so-called Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time. I know there are nice, easy, flexible children out there somewhere. Children who fall asleep when put to bed, and wake up cheerful when it's time to get up, but not before it's time to get up. Well, those are not my kids. I am not exaggerating when I say that it takes my kids at least a week to really make the time change. The Little Emperor has been awake until 11 p.m. several times in the past week and we wake him about 7:30 on weekday mornings. Yeah, this is not a good sleep pattern. Honest-to-Maude, we start him moving toward bed at 7:30. This is a kid who had night and day reversed his first 4 months of life, so no real surprise that he's still bent that way.

So until someone appoints me Time Czar, I have a plan that could be put into place quickly and effectively and would improve school behavior and learning in every community that adopts it. Schedule Spring Break for the week following the time change! Is that just too darn logical for any modern bureaucracy? The kids would have a week to adjust. They would not have this week of rampant tardiness and tired, fidgety kids. The teachers might even enjoy it, too.

So, there you go, a rant and a solution! How often does that happen?

Enjoy the approach of spring.

Maybe it's the change in the weather...

I don't know.

I never knit Christmas presents. Well, sometimes someone gets a thing I knit for Christmas, but only if it happens to be ready and done about that time. But I'm not one of those knitters who sets out to make things for a long list of relatives and goes crazy in the process.

First, the whole mid-winter holiday makes me a bit conflicted, which is an essay and a half.

Then my relationship with my extended family (including the in-laws) is a bit laissez-faire, so that throws a little more confusion into things.

And then you have my essentially anti-consumerist mentality.

And I have a hard time knitting for anyone but myself because I always talk myself out of what I think might be a good idea. It'll be a bad choice of yarn or color or style. They'll think it's weird. It'll be too much. and yet, not enough.

But somehow, just now, with the cold air blowing in and snow showers knocking the remaining leaves from the trees, I got the idea of knitting a bunch of presents for folks this year. Not sure where that came from. Maybe I'll see where it leads me.

We've had an interesting time this week. On Wednesday both kids had some troubles related to school. Owen was on the receiving end of harassment on the bus ride home and the Little Emperor was dishing it out to an innocent kid at recess. Mr. SABLE caught the virus we've been passing around, featuring an annoyingly long-lasting sore throat accompanying a cold. And the LE came down with a GI thing yesterday morning. The LE was much perkier this morning but I kept him home today, because I thought it might be bad if the trouble moves south, so to speak, and he were to have a mishap at school. (You know, try to sneak out a little gas and get more than you bargain for... Or maybe you don't know.) So it's been a week of disruptions and grumbling and malaise in our house, even though it's also a week of great triumph and change in the national political scene. Now, we're just hoping for a bit of triumph in the national economic scene. Though that leaves me conflicted, too.

And why should that be? Well, I have this really strong anti-consumerist attitude. And yet, our economy's health is largely judged on the quantity of consumer spending. I know that for our planet's health, it would be much better if everyone tried to stop buying stuff, just for stuff's sake. But as people have done that, because they are living with economic insecurity, then it causes more economic trouble. I'm glad I'm not in charge of solving these problems. They are big and complicated. And the experts are predicting that things will get worse before they get better.

So maybe I'll go cast on a few nice cozy projects that I can give away in December. It seems like a good thing to do on a cold dreary November day, a week before I turn 47.

Material Culture

Regular readers know I'm a great fan of thrift shops. One particular store in my area holds a singular fascination for me: The Diggers Outlet, run by St. Vincent de Paul Society. Diggers Outlet is the last-chance store for merchandise that has run through the other thrift shops. Most goods are sold by the pound with only the most cursory sorting: clothes in giant boxes, household items of every type in another section, etc. Diggers Outlet is where you see first-hand the cast off material culture of modern American society: the clothing fads, the electronics that were cutting edge and now are obsolete, the particle board furniture that self-destructs after 5-10 years of regular use, the must-have kitchen gadgets of yesterday, and so on. A trip to Diggers Outlet jars me into thinking about how short our collective attention span really is.

I'm a textile nut. If you read this blog, you probably already know that. For most of human history, textile production has been slow and labor-intensive. Spinning was done on drop spindles and later, by hand on spinning wheels. The Industrial Revolution started the change that continues rippling today: toward higher efficiency in production, cheaper goods, viewing laborers as part of the machinery, toward ever-changing cycles of fashion and the disposable culture they foster. I'm not a rosy romantic about life in the years before the mid-18th century. I know that life was often nasty, brutish, and short, to borrow a phrase. But it was, by and large, more sustainable than the life we now live.

Textile production used to be so labor intensive that textiles had to be preserved and used up. Only the very wealthy could afford to have several sets of clothes. If you have ever made a garment, from fiber to fabric to finished object, either with knitting or weaving, you know how you feel about the resulting item: it's a treasure! If one use doesn't work out, you find a way to reuse it in another that does: unravel the sweater and reknit the yarn into something new or give it to a person it will fit, or something. Handmade fabric from handmade yarn is not something you want to discard easily.

Mass-produced fabric is so cheap that we generate tons (TONS!) of excess textiles in our society. Unbelievable excess. We shop for and replace clothes with little thought. Some items find their way into the landfills, though they are perfectly usable. Many get donated to charities for resale or distribution to the needy. While searching for images of baled clothing, I found this article.

In particular, I was struck by this quote:

The need to minimise all waste is more apparent when you consider that :

More than 80% of materials are consumed and waste generated by less than 20% of the world's population.

The growth in the world's population and the spread of wealth is rapidly exacerbating the problem.

In order to sustain human life under the present system, global environmental efficiency will have to increase by as much as 50 times.

The whole concept of product life cycle, design, fashion and the responsibility for re-use have to be reassessed. A culture built on the idea of wastage needs to be dismantled and a new way introduced.

Further search led me to another eye-opening article.

What if we all tried to stop thinking like Consumers and redefined ourselves in other terms? What if all our textiles were produced in ways that did not exploit the laborers or the planet? And what if we all recognized that the cost of a basic outfit would be higher, but our expectations about our clothes would be different? We would spend more, but spend more wisely. We would seek quality. We would reuse and re-purpose our textiles. We would choose clothes that wouldn't look dated next year at this time; clothes constructed with future alterations in mind; clothes from quality fabrics that stand up to hard use.

I wonder what our society will look like in 10 years. Or 30. Will we be buried in the excesses of the Industrial Age? Or will we learn to live as though our resources matter?

Note: image found on Buffalo Export website.