Granny Squares Everywhere

Not to be out-done by Joseph and his new found crocheting skills, I found a resource in my friend Michelle and began making Granny Squares in mass!

My first were a little loose, but they soon tightened up nicely. 

Frankly, I Do Give A Damn ... About my name.

While looking over the latest trends in baby names (Vampires, Werewolves, and the gals who love them seem to be the emerging themes) I stumbled across this little tidbit from Parentingweekly.com:

"Like Hank, [the name] Frank has a dated feel to it. He is either an honest, upstanding hero of a musty old novel, or a guy in a tank top cooking hot dogs at the backyard barbecue."

            Somehow this statement seemed racist, but I have to accept that people named Frank do not make up a race, so I had to drop that thread.  I have never barbecued a hot dog.  (They made me sick as a kid, so I have never liked them.  Sorry, America.)  And the only time I ever wore a tank top was back in the ‘90’s when the whole bowling shirt and cargo pant craze was happening.  It occurred to me that this statement was made by somebody who didn’t know a Frank so had only the Hardy Boys and The Sopranos to supplement his understanding of people named Frank.  So, I may help the Frank cause by giving a little information on a few famous Franks. 

            Now, there are a great many athletes named Frank, but the stereotype surrounding the sports world might lead us right back to Barbeque Frank, so I will omit these Franks, though I am proud that some of us don’t throw like sissies. 

           We had a couple of Franks win the Nobel Peace Prize.  In 1929, Frank Billings Kellogg won it for peace for his work on a treaty that proposed countries take up "the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy."  In 1960, Frank MacFarlane Burnet won it for his work in Medicine.  And in 2004, Frank Wilczek won it for his work as a physicist in the field of Asymptotic Freedom. (I don’t even know what this means, but it sounded super impressive, so I included him.) 

We had a couple of Franks for President: Franklin Pierce and Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Pierce was famous for being one of the worst presidents in history.  (Of course he predated other administrations …) But it was okay, because the other Franklin, Mr. FDR gave this country a New Deal. 

I’ve always been drawn to the arts and literature as a whole, and it thrills me to say that some of the best Franks come to us from creative fields:



Frank Sinatra was crooning to mothers, grandmothers, and probably great grandmothers in ways that had them all sighing for “Old Blue Eyes.”  And if it weren’t for Frank Zappa’s music, we might all have eaten the yellow snow. 

Frank Lloyd Write was an architect who used his amazing vision to shape the world around us. 

And this might not have even happened …

 … had L. Frank Baum never took us down his Yellow Brick Road with a Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, a little black dog, and a brave little girl.  Of course,  L. Frank Baum wasn’t the only writer who took us to far off and exotic worlds.  Frank Herbert gave us “Dune” and has set the bar for the Science Fiction genre ever since. 

Frank Herbert's works even inspired George Lucas when he created his Star Wars Trilogy.  You didn’t think it was a coincidence that Luke was from a Desert Planet, did you?  And one of my favorite Star Wars Characters might never have made it to the Big Screen had it not been for another famous Frank: Frank Oz. 

And I owe one of the greatest loves of my life to Frank Oz as well:



So you see, the world has been and will forever be greatly enhanced by the Franks who populate it.  I struggle to do my part and keep up with all these guys.  But who knows, maybe someday some little unheard of blogger will record my name down with these other guys as the Frank who took a stand against blatant Name Discrimination. 

Owls, Owls Everywhere!

My Aunt Marsha used to wear over-large glasses that were popular in the late seventies and early eighties.  She had shoulder length brown hair, and a mouth that was sometimes drawn into a terse line.  In short, she looked a little like an owl.  And it made sense to everyone in my family that Aunt Marsha loved owls.  People gave her owl sculptures and owl mugs.  On her window sill she had owls made from shells and owls made from ceramics.  On her walls she had owls woven into hook rugs and owls made of wood.  Whenever we saw an owl we could afford (and there were lots of them coming out of the seventies) we would get it for Aunt Marsha. 

One day, my Aunt Marsha, who was moving into a new house and starting a new chapter in her life, made an announcement.  She looked at us all solemnly in her smaller, updated glasses and proclaimed, “I hate owls.” 

You could have heard a mouse scuttle across the forest floor in that room on that day.  Everything we had believed of this woman, Aunt Marsha, had been an illusion.  Her first owl, she said, had come from her first husband’s family as a sort of gift to her, which she had to display or offend the givers of the gift.  And when my family saw the owl in her house, it suddenly had become Aunt Marsha’s totem to us.  We perpetuated our own myth about Aunt Marsha the Patron Saint of Owls.  She had had to put up with our owl enthusiasm for so many years before she finally put the tokens of owl-esteem into boxes and got rid of them.  She started a new, bird-free life.  She liberated herself from our expectations and moved forward. 

So I have always harbored this fear that I would be painted with other people’s expectations of what I might like and I kept my affinity for owls a secret for many years of my life.  It seems as though the last five years or so saw a rise in owl popularity.  Everyone had something with an owl in it, on it, or around it.  This trend kept me even more tightly lipped about my love of Strigiformes. 

There is some debate about where and when the apparently sudden love of owls come from.  You can find owl merchandise in all the trendiest shops.  Many cutting-edge people are standing up in life or on the internet to say they ushered in this age of the owl.  But I know better.  Athena, the goddess of Ancient Athens brought in the owl craze and it has been going strong since before 500 BCE.  I loved owls, why was I hiding this love to avoid having people think differently of me for it?  My love for owls is a part of who I am.  

So this Christmas, I proclaimed my owl love loudly and proudly. 

And people listened. 

My super cool Secret Pal at work (Jody!) gave to me a small stuffed owl, an owl hat, and an owl Christmas tree ornament among other wonderful things.  Another couple of work friends gave me a furry owl with a rainbow pin attached to his plumes.  And my Joseph even got in on the act.  He gave to me a stuffed owl with jazzy pink and purple patterns and an apron with an owl print and dangly balls on the bottom so I can entertain in my own owl attire now. 

I feel my owl collection is off to a good start.  And I don’t think it will go south the way it did with my Aunt Marsha.  For one thing, I truly do love owls.  And for another thing, I have many more loves I am more than happy to share.  For instance, did you know, I also love peacocks and garden gnomes? 

I had a wonderful haul this year for Christmas.  Thank you, everybody. 

Martha Stewart or Charlie Brown? I'm somewhere in between

So …

Every year for Christmas I like to do something a little different.  One year I did a theme which was “Holiday at Hogwarts,” and featured things such as ornaments made from empty boxes of Bertie Botts’ Every Flavor Beans.  One year I did a “traditional theme” and used wrapping paper to wrap the wall behind my tree to make it pop.  One year I made ornaments from shells we found on the beach and covered them with glitter to make a very Island sort of tree the first year we spent on this island. 

Joseph is pretty easy going when it comes to my themes and ideas and inspirations.  At times this can be infuriating, especially when I want an opinion.  But mostly I find this good for my creativity when Mr. Logical isn’t criticizing my every move.  Joseph’s one request is that we never kill a tree to make our Christmas.  I grew up in the Rocky Mountains of northern Idaho where we cut down our own tree every year.  I loved the smell of white fir and cold coming into the house.  But Joseph (who drives a beast of a pickup truck) thinks that cutting trees isn’t very environmentally-minded.  He bought me a Martha Stewart pre-lit tree that stands four-and-a-half feet tall.  It has white lights and has graced my house many a year regardless of the theme and has always looked great.  This year, however, I wanted something more natural and less symmetrical. 

I had an idea in my head, and when I found this tree on my dog walk one day, I couldn’t resist:

I knew it had potential.  I knew I could make this tree shine.  In my head I saw this tree in all its glory, thanks to my best friend Martha Stewart:

Awesome, right? 

So I set to work.  And soon I discovered a little known secret to the success of evergreens when it comes to the domination of Christmas décor: evergreens are conical and taper towards the top which is infinitely easier to wrap lights around than a tree that gets wider towards the top.  I had to string the lights twice, and I almost poked out an eye five or six times.  I used half a cinder block to prop the tree up and stuffed it with news paper to keep the tree in place, but every time I tried to adjust lights, it slid around a little.  I finally had to enlist Joseph and have him prop it up with a little hemp twine at the bottom. 

And here’s the other little secret about the success of evergreens when it comes to the domination of Christmas décor: they don’t look like skeletons!  My tree looked like I painted Kate Moss brown and tied her up in a corner.  I found myself thinking that a good cheese burger would do my tree some good, but I hung the ornaments from it just the same.  I didn’t have the money this year to buy all new tree jewelry, so I had to make do with the ornaments I had.  I strung my ornaments up with a little purple ribbon to give the ornaments the range to fall into some of the open spaces the branches made, but it still looked bare and sad. 

Okay, I thought, what this tree needs is a little snow. 

I try not to play up snow in my Christmas decorating.  I grew up in snow up to my armpits and there is nothing sadder to me than a snowman lawn ornament in a climate that shuts its cities down when it even thinks about snowing.  If you don’t have snow, don’t promote it.  But snow was the only thing I could think of to give this tree a little weight and fullness. 

If I had my way (and a lot more money) I would have bought a few white feather boas, cut them up, and used their fluffy fabulousness to fill in my scrawny tree.  (I have always thought that Christmas trees were a lot like drag queens anyway.)  So, because I didn’t have any of my own feather boas … that were white … I had to improvise and I found a bag of poly-fill to use for snow.  I pulled out puffs of polyester and stuck it at the end of branches.  The overall look was very sad and I am almost too ashamed to show you this:

What the crap is this?  When Joseph saw it he said it looked like I was trying to make a cotton bush.  That kind of made it worse and please remind me to tell you all about how Joseph almost got shot picking cotton in Louisiana when we went there to visit his family.  (No it wasn’t 1860, it was 2003.)  Needless to say, I furiously ripped every single one of these puffs off of my tree and sat down to rethink my life. 

Deep breath.

So the next thing I tried was an old reliable Christmas treatment: paper snowflakes.  Paper snowflakes got me through many a tough Christmas in apartments that were none too jolly.  What I got was a tree that had these papery, snowflake versions of leaves on it.  Fine. 

Yes, fine enough.  It was time to quit while I was ahead. 

I liked how the white paper snowflakes caught the colors of the Christmas lights.

The tree is continuing to grow on me.  It isn’t perfect, but it’s just fine for me.  But I will probably resort to the Martha Stewart pre-lit 4.5 footer next year.  Much less hassle, and much prettier effect. 

Joseph's New Found Skill

As promised I will share with you what Joseph's new crafting skill is.  He bought a book and taught himself to crochet from it, and has been shredding fabric and making rugs ever since.
Here are a few he made for his coworkers for Christmas:

This one was a sort of camp cottage rug.  It had burgundy and navy together with a few greens.  The green plaid really pops in the combination.

I told Joseph he should give these titles and consider them "art pieces."  He named this one "Ripple," as it evokes a forest pond. 

"Ripple" boasted a shiny thread that Joseph crocheted along with some of the jade green material to catch the light and shimmer. 

This one is for his boss, who is one of those Purple People.  I love purple, too, but I love all the other colors too much to become a Purple Person myself. 

This rug is made from all navy material interspersed with blue-printed white fabric.  It reminds me of those wonderful Currier and Ives dishes my Gram has, which I ate off of almost every day of my childhood. 

This one was my absolute favorite.  Joseph made it for a coworker who loves the color orange, and who couldn't love it when it makes such a fabulous hearth side rug?  It reminds me of a sun wheel, or a large, circular bale of hay.  The middle and edge is done in a very dark maroon that really pops with the orange.  Wish I was a better photographer. 

All of the earlier rugs were round rugs like this favorite orange one here, but Joseph found a way to make oblong rugs as well and now uses the oblong shape almost exclusively:

Whichever rug is your favorite, I can tell you from experience that they make your home feel a little cozier than a run-of-the-mill store bought rug.  I have two in my former dining room (current Christmas Tree Room), and I love them. 

Rustic Charm

When I was twenty-five, I knew what I wanted my life to be.  I had just received an Associate’s Degree of Art in ceramic design for lumpy little clay pots I made that were never centered on the wheel, because (I can face it) I was never very good at ceramics.  Oh, I could teach you how to do it, and if you don’t believe me, ask my friend, Lydia from High School.  I taught her how to center her pots and by the end of the year, Lydia was one of the most accomplished ceramic artists in school.  My art teacher even said so.  I was able to pour my wisdom out for Lydia, but I could not teach it to my own hands.  But that never stopped me from loving it. 

            So when I moved to Seattle at the age of twenty-one, going on twenty-two, I moved for two reasons.  First, I was going to go for the boys (being gay in northern Idaho is not recommended to anyone who wants to have a decent date with a decent guy); and second, to get my art degree.  I wanted to be a graphic artist so I could illustrate my own children’s stories.  I even had a binder of stories I had written from high school onward that I was going to use to get myself started.  My friend, Carrie, needed a roommate and I needed a life outside of my home town. 

            The boys came first.  I met Joseph only a little over three months after I moved to the big city.  He had a boyfriend at the time, so it forced us to be friends first, then family, and then when the inevitable happened and his boyfriend left him, partners.  In fact, today is our eleventh anniversary of our first “date.”  It was Joseph who helped me to get into school.  I was accepted both to Cornish College of the Arts and Seattle Art Institute.  Cornish I dropped as soon as I saw the tuition costs.  But the Art Institute was accepted.  Joseph then got me going on a “adjustment” quarter of school in Seattle Central Community College.  It was there in “real college” that I decided I wanted to get a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art … I know what you’re thinking, the pay checks would be large and plentiful.  So I moved my studies to North Seattle Community College and “majored” in ceramics. 

            My old ceramics professor looked like an owl.  He was short, dumpy, with a little ear hair and a huge set of old army-issue glasses perched on the end of his small, pointed nose.  I had even taken a sculpture class from him and I often heard him say to me, in his sticky, honey voice, “You’ve got to mold it a little pit, and shape it” as he pinched the air in front of him with short, well callused fingers.  My final in my last ceramics class was to make a set of twelve matching dishes.  So I set to work, carefully measuring my cups and trying my best to make them the same.  I also had to produce three jars with lids that fit, and three large plates. 

            My final results were a group of fourteen coffee mugs that had varying sizes, wobbles, and dips in their lines.  Their handles were rather similar if you didn’t look directly at them.  The lids all fit my jars, and I had fun producing them, but if you looked at the jar bottoms and my hacking trim jobs.  My plates were great!  I had one large and two small and I was hoping beyond hope that my professor wouldn’t remember they were all supposed to be large and that the middles of my small plates were bowed.  But after my instructor carefully looked my lumpy little pots over with their multi-colored glazes with embellishments of Alphonse Mucha-esque goddess faces painted into some, he kind of smirked and said, “These pieces have a certain … um … rustic charm about them.” 

Yes, I understood what he meant.  They were no beauties, and they weren’t going to win any prizes, but my pieces could hold water and had had my best effort put into them.  I think my old professor with his owl-glasses and his obsession with me molding and shaping my pieces cut me some slack that day.  But I also took “rustic charm” as one of the highest complements I’ve ever received.  I worked hard for that “rustic charm.” 

            So I got my associate’s degree of Art, which is really just a piece of paper telling me to go back to school if I really want to make something of myself.  But that was the year I was going to turn twenty-six and on that birthday Joseph surprised me.  I received a bunch of little presents from him to throw me off the trail, including a learn-how-to-knit kit.  But the big surprise was this: my own potter’s wheel and a kiln to fire my pieces in. 

But where do you set up these things in an urban apartment in Seattle?  Joseph set to work looking for a larger place for us to live and our search took us to Vashon Island, a little island off the coast of West Seattle.  It just so happens that most of my clay came from Vashon Island, as Vashon Buff is the clay preferred by my old instructors.  On his weekends, Joseph scouted many places, and finally came home one day not long after my birthday announcing he had found the perfect place for us to rent: a five acre farm with a couple of old out buildings.  After much convincing of the property managers to let two people, new to the rigors of island commuting and island life, move so deeply into the island off of the main ferry traffic ways. 

            We set up our life here.  I was going to be a local artist and Joseph would join the ranks of commuting back and forth to a job he didn’t care much for, but we were happy.  I took a job at an island deli, and worked on my ceramics.  But slowly those ceramics fell by the wayside as that learn-how-to-knit kit filled up my days and I began knitting bigger and better things.  That first Christmas we opted to stay home in our own house and I surprised Joseph with a hat and scarf I had knit all on my own.  And he surprised me with a chair he made from twigs and scrap wood for our new life. 

            The farms on Vashon Island have names such as Fox Farm, Fairy Hill Farm, Jesus Barn Farm, etc.  Joseph decided we should name our “own” little rented farm, and he came up with the perfect name.  We’re Rustic Charms Farm, where lumpy little pots are made.  We knit hats and scarves and craft boxes and kitchen islands from scrap wood and twigs.  Our wine and our jelly is made from our own fruit trees and berry bushes, and our stew pots are often filled with vegetables from our own little garden.  And this was the life I had wanted, we had made it for ourselves.  But the farm was never ours.  We’ll be moving out soon when our last lease is up.  I had gone back to school in the mean time to work on another dream of mine and that dream started becoming more and more tangible until I was commuting just as much as Joseph was.  Our life here has begun to wane, but it has been a good life and I will be sad to see it go. 

I love Rustic Charms Farm for what it meant to us when we found it and what it means to us now.  It is home. 

Joseph's a Better Crafter than Me

Christmas of 2005 was the year that my knitting flourished and I made hats for everybody in my family.  Everybody.  And I don’t really have a small family, especially on Christmas when the lines everybody drew for themselves dissolve and open up to reveal that they still need those people who can aggravate them like no other people can.  So I had hats with cables knitted into them, hats with ear flaps knitted on them, hats with stripes, hats with checks, and even hats with sparkly, ruby red yarn.  I wrapped each had in wrapping paper I made from collected paper grocery bags and hand stamped and colored for each individual.  And I tied each one with a different bow I made from yarn, hemp twine, and other crafty things. 

Christmas of 2005 was the year that I drew a line in the sand and said enough with commercialism; Joseph and I would only give what we could make.  And this meant for another year or two that Joseph and I would only give what could be made by me.  Joseph just had to sit back and occasionally drive me to get yarn or other supplies for our festivities. 

It was a nice little set up until I started to feel like I had taken on a chore, not something fun to do in my spare time, and then used my self-inflicted punishment (creating Christmas gifts) to complain to Joseph that he “never does anything for Christmas, and shares in the glory.”  This complaint was lodged the year I had begun my pre-required classes for nursing school and was feeling a little put out studying to really get into knitting or canning for long periods of precious free time.  And like most of my complaints about my role in the relationship, this one back-fired. 

First of all, I am going to tell you a little about my role in the relationship and Joseph’s role in the relationship.  And it is going to sound very much like sexism and a little like feminism in places, but please hear me out because whether or not you believe in anything I am about to say, it works for me and has kept me and Joseph together for eleven years now. 

So, I believe that a successful marriage must have a husband and a wife.  This does not mean that every successful marriage has a man and a woman, please read my words, I said every successful marriage has a HUSBAND and a WIFE.  In the “good old days” the words husband and wife were synonymous with man and woman, because society left little room for any other genders to fill either roles.  But after World War II, especially in the 1950’s when those ideals were getting shoved down our throats, the roles were never quite the same.  So for me, a Husband is the person in the relationship that has that steady energy.  He or she is a little more logical, a little more practical, and a little more in tune with the outside world.  The Wife for me is a little more emotional, a little more idealistic, and a little more in tune with the world inside the home.  Neither one of these is better or worse, and yes, I think the bits of these roles can be shuffled to produce a Wife who is practical and a Husband who is more emotional, but there remain spaces that need to be filled and the successful Husband and Wife will compensate for each other and fill them. 

I am the wife.  Joseph is the husband.  I expect Joseph to watch the news, tell me what’s going on in the outside world, and to generally ignore things like cooking and cleaning even though I hate cleaning and think Joseph’s cooking is amazing.  We have been successful because I do not rebel at being the wife.  In many gay relationships, men rebel at the notion that there could be a wife, as they are two men.  And in many straight relationships, women balk at the idea that household work is a woman’s prerogative.  But I think that the negative connotation that comes with being a wife is just a flavor of the day peppered with liberal and feminist thinking.  I think wives are a vital part of every culture.  The world would collapse upon itself if everyone decided that they were husbands and nobody wanted to be wives.  A case could be made that either role has its benefits and its downside.  Joseph has to balance our check book.  Joseph has to worry about paying bills.  But Joseph also has his lunches packed for him and in his truck when he drives to work each morning with a to-go mug of coffee made lovingly by me in his hands. 

But I digress.  Suffice to say that we have come to identify ourselves with roles in our relationship that correspond to Husband and Wife and we are both very comfortable with those roles. 

So you could imagine that I was not only a little surprised but also a little threatened when Joseph taught himself to use a knitting loom to pick up my knitting slack.  Not only that but his precise, even stitches (Joseph is nothing if not precise) put my homespun knitting to shame.  I started telling people who saw his work that he “cheated” because he uses a knitting loom and not knitting needles.  And you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, either.  Joseph has been the primary knitter for all subsequent Christmases, and it pains me to say that he has taught himself a new craft this year and has begun making gifts which I will blog about in the post Christmas blogs so as not to spoil surprises.  I am beside myself.  As the wife of this relationship, the crafting and the Christmasing should come more naturally to me than to him, but that is not the case.  Somehow every time I complain, the Universe fills Joseph with the very skill I complain about and makes the case that “anyone” can fill my role and my duties.  It’s gotten so a guy can’t complain around here. 

(Yes, I said “Christmasing.”) 

So now I have to find a way to elbow myself back into the Christmas preparations this year, because I will not be upstaged by a know-it-all, Johnnie-Come-Easy like my Husband!   I’m bound and determined to pull something even better than his new craft out of my sleeve!  Just you wait.  Joseph not only crossed the line of Husband work into Wife work, he has threatened my very theory on what makes a marriage successful!  He’s going down!