Well, this weekend sure did fly by, darnit! (Hi!)
It’s actually raining this morning (36F). So much for all of our gorgeous snow, which is rapidly turning slushy now. I’m so glad we took the kids sledding yesterday!
(Sledding is one of my very favorite things about living somewhere that gets fairly regular deep-ish snows in winter. We all slept really well last night!)
My youngest kiddo’s eleventh birthday is this week. How does the time go by so fast?? I found a video of the same kid at not-quite-two years old the other day and I can remember everything about the day I took it. Don’t blink!
(Kids get more interesting as they get older though. We have great conversations — at bedtime tonight, topics included CPR, embroidery, magic, animals, hereditary traits, and more.)
Speaking of embroidery, I finished a project that took nearly all of my spare time for a week! I’m hooked (that’s a fiber arts joke, though no hooks were involved with embroidering). I’d also like to learn tatting at some point.
I love that textile arts are roaring back in a big way, and I think there are many reasons for that. People are looking to preserve “lost” arts, certainly (I feel that pull too), but I think with all of the craziness in the political landscape — and life in general — people want something they can really escape into and focus on that’s outside of all of that. Textile arts tend to be pretty fiddly and really require your concentration, and it’s almost a form of meditation for me sometimes, whether I’m knitting (which is on the lesser end of requiring concentration, I think) or embroidering a particularly tricky area of a figure that needs to come out just so.
Art is like that. It’s expressive, certainly. But it’s so much more. It’s by turns an offering to the world and a radical act of self-care. It’s a prayer and a rebellion, sometimes in the same breath. It’s freedom and it’s connection, a birth and a falling away and everything in between.
In other random news, I’ve added Welsh to the languages I’m slowly (very slowly) attempting to learn. Esperanto is going pretty well; I’ve picked up a book of short stories in that language to try to read at some point soon. I’m sure I’ll stumble and there’ll be vocabulary that escapes me or a phrasing I’m not certain about here and there, but a year ago I would never have thought I’d be at this point now.
Who knows where the rest of this year will carry me?
What are you up to, dear ones?
melstery.com 