The Land of Counterpane

The Land of Counterpane 

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
 Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

It was a great weekend, filled with friends, games, Broadway musicals, tangerine cake, and too many miles of pavement. In fact, it may have been too much fun. For roughly the last 24 hours, Andy has been relegated to the land of counterpane with a nasty stomach bug, while I serve as his questionably competent nursemaid, dispensing freely of Jell-O, Nalagenes full of water, and Robert Louis Stevenson quotes. (Is there anything more soothingly than Jell-O and Robert Louis Stevenson?) In the end, not really the start to the work week we'd imagined, but keep calm and carry on, eh?

 

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(Water)Crafting Weekend

When people ask why I knit or "craft", I feel the same way as when people ask me why I write. I really have no idea why I do any of it. Part of it is that I can barely remember a time when I wasn't churning out words or knit items from the tips of my fingers. But mainly, it just feels good to take something relatively ordinary like a pile of words or ball of yarn and transform them into something extraordinary.  

The weather was too gorgeous this past crafting weekend to devote too much time to actual crafting. We diligently pulled out our projects on Tuesday afternoon when the group of five girls arrived and moved (temporarily) into the old, unused lodge building down the road. But when Wednesday dawned just as gorgeous as the day before, we shoved the projects in the corner and spent the entire day out on the dock.

Despite our sunbathing tendencies this crafting weekend, we still managed to do a fair bit of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. 

Just take floating in the lake, for example. Pretty awesome just the way it is, but when I mention our need for floating noodles, Katie's eyes lit up. She turned to Emily: "You have your air mattress with, don't you?"

Some people might be deterred by the air mattress's very clear labeling that it was not meant for use as personal floatation device. This group was not. "Bullsh!t!" declared Betsy.

It took some doing, but we managed to turn the mattress into a multi-person floatation device.

The canoeists in the background of the picture below pretended to be amused by our antics. But given their marked avoidance of us the rest of crafting weekend, they were obviously afraid . . . very afraid.

After we'd proven that the raft could indeed hold five grown women, four of us took the air mattress for a spin out to the island at the mouth of bay. Yep the island, in the blog header above.

Of course some things require no transformation. The double rainbow that appeared on the last evening of crafting weekend was pretty extraordinary just the way it was.

It's been one busy, beautiful week at Of Woods and Words. Stayed tuned to hear about the "miracle" that happened Saturday evening.

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How I Spent New Year's Eve

I am not known for having epic New Year's celebrations. Sure I spent New Year's 2007 in Rome. And yes, New Year's 2008 I watched fireworks go off by Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. But oh, how quickly the glamor of it all fades away . . . .

However, I ushered in the new millennium snug in my sleeping bag on my grandmother's couch. Last New Year's Eve I drank half a glass of (bad) champagne and was in bed by 11. Some years I make it to midnight, more often than not I don't,and in general I find the way I herald the new year has little effect on the year as a whole.

But Mama Kat, who hosts a weekly writing workshop on Thursday, asked as one of her writing prompts today: If the way you spent your New Year's Eve is any indication of how the rest of the year will go, how would you say your future is looking right about now? 

Well, here's how I spent New Year's Eve 2011.

Yep, knitting.(I know, hold onto your hats, right?)

This New Year's Eve weekend marked the third crafting weekend: an assembly of eight college friends who share a love of crafting and knitting.We spend three days basically looking like this.

This is the same group that spent the last year creating a wedding afghan for newlywed Katie. We each knit 4-5 squares from the Great American Afghan Pattern and coordinated the afghan's assemble through Facebook, snail mail, and special deliveries. All of us live extremely different lives and crafting weekends are the single, rare moments when we're all in the same room at the same time. Creating this afghan over all the miles was not only a feat in and of itself, but also a great way to stay in touch. By the by, if you caught me knitting trees at the restaurant bar last winter while I was waiting to see if I'd need to waitress, this is where those trees ended up.

For the most part, crafting weekend involves a ton of knitting and scrapbooking, all while some Jane Austen or Will Ferrel flick plays in the background. Betsy's project for the weekend was creating a bonnet for her historical reenactments. The bonnet is all finished now and you can read about it over at Betsy's blog: In the Past Lane.

However, the crafting project everyone got the most fun out of this go-around were the vintage Christmas craft kits Ali brought with. The tri-bead tantalizer kits were an especial hit, mostly because the name of craft sounded slightly suggestive.

Ali was the first to finish her tantalizer and here she is proudly displaying her handiwork:

Let's zoom in for a closer look, shall we? 

As awful as you imagined? It's constructed from a Styrofoam ball and then speared several times over with beads pins. Hullo 1970 . . .

Oh the horror. The horror!

By the time midnight rolled around on New Year's Eve, we set the crafts aside for a round or two of bubbly. We ushered in the new year a group singing of Auld Lang Syne which somehow morphed into singing along with the entire Glee soundtrack . . .?

So if the way I spent New Year's Eve is any indication of how the rest of the year will go, how is the future looking?

Epic. In a really calm, nerdy  way.

How did you spend your New Year's Eve?

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Wordless Wednesday: A Bird on the Head

And they wonder what we do all winter . . .

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The Grasshopper and the Ants

We all know the fable about the grasshopper and the ants. Lately at the cabin, it’s been feeling like we’re both the grasshopper and the ants. We’re trying to bring home the bacon and still have lazy long mornings to eat the bacon (with toast and hash browns and eggs, of course).

All week, the bay has been filled with the sounds of summer vacationers and visitors. Motor boats buzz in and out of the bay, vehicles are always passing by on the windy gravel road behind the cabin, and there are plenty of shrieks and splashes come from the neighbors’ docks as people of all ages jump into the warm lake water. It looked like so much fun. Even with full time jobs and various other commitments, we figured if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. With a week straight of warm sunny days, why not pretend we were on summer vacation, just like everyone else.

So we went fishing in the evenings. (That’s unadulterated excitement in Andy’s eyes.)

I took touristy shots of moose on my way home.

We had picnics and toasted ginormous marshmallows.

Now the weather is clouding over and I’m starting to feel like a guilty little grasshopper. I wonder if I could have spent my time in a slightly wiser manner. After all, yesterday evening was devoted to the pursuit of making a blueberry pie. After supper Andy and I went out in the woods to gather the six cups of blueberries we needed for pie filling and returned home to throw together a pie: I made the crust, Andy did the filling. (Easy as pie?) There are no pictures of aforementioned pie because it was inhaled (with the help of 10 people) about fifteen minutes after it came out of the oven. Maybe I should have spent my time doing something more lasting . . . .

But then, if there isn’t time for fishing, or wildlife gazing, or ginormous marshmallows or eating warm, fresh blueberry pie, what is there time for? Happiness springs in many things, most of them little and few of them stem solely from the grand culmination of hard work and dreams come true. Hard work buys us contentment and security, which in turn probably makes us more susceptible to happiness, but we have to be on the lookout for happiness all the while we’re heading down the road to “dreams come true.” If we never acknowledge happiness, how will we know it when we see it?

Remember in Wicked when Glinda sings: 'Cause getting your dreams, it's strange, but it seems a little - well – complicated. There's a kind of a sort of : cost. There's a couple of things get: lost. Despite the virtue of being a little worker ant, sometimes we overlook what the grasshopper had to teach us too. The grasshopper might not have been great at keeping food on the table, but he sure knew how to keep his heart full.

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