Spinning a Yarn...

I am a knit-aholic. And crochet-aholic. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. In work trucks, in front of the television, at the doctor's office. I knit to clear my head in tough times. I steal time to knit to make myself feel treated to something special. It's a meditative practice, it's a balm, it's productive, it's creative. It's an art, a science, and an alchemy. And I'm just getting started :).

I have become a collector of free patterns. I surf the web like one posessed, running through page after page of patterns of potential interest, amassing .pdf files and online bookmarks for things I'd love to make or that I want to learn to make. I always, always bite off more than I can chew. Just as I revel in reading too many books at once (my current count is five--and that's just what's in the hotel room with me tonight!), I delight in working on three or five knitted projects at once. Keeps me interested and entertained. Keeps me sane. Mostly.

A few things happened to make me feel ready to knit a sellable project (see my shop for current items). Back around Christmas, I was working on a prayer shawl and my poor husband brought it to me in tatters--my little girl had gotten into it and, while the overall fabric was largely intact, a twenty-stitch block in the middle had pulled off the needles and unraveled at least fifteen rows back. With a few deep breaths, a bright light, and a little time, I was able to fix it so that the finished product is as smooth and even as if it had never happened. Not a stitch missed. I was rather pleased with myself.

I have found myself knitting things that friends have hankered after--handwarmers, scarves, hats that my friends and co-workers have wanted to own, to wear. That's a big step in the right direction. As with most warm-blooded human beings, a little encouragement goes a long way for me.

Over Easter I finished two very satisfying projects: a sweater for my daughter to wear over her Easter dress, and an amigurumi bunny to go with her Easter basket.

The sweater:



The doll:



These were two firsts: my first fitted piece of clothing and my first crocheted toy. I was so proud! The sweater was actually fairly complicated. I won't be winning any competitions for the amigurumi doll, but I felt so very successful. I've finally reached a point where I can really diversify--I understand stitches, I can see how a fabric or a pattern is put together, and I can carry a basic pattern in my head. That means I can create a finished, professional-quality product and multitask... two very important qualities when stocking a shop for sale.

But the final step was a big one. I looked and looked online for a particular pattern that would fit the specifications I needed. I wanted to make the perfect vegetable bag/market bag. None of the patterns I could find online satisfied me. I needed something simple, effective, sturdy, and classic. After a couple unfinished attempts, I decided to design my own pattern. And it worked! With a knitted net body and a crocheted rim and straps, my design is just what I was looking for. I've finished the "pilot project"--a slightly wonky version with too-long straps and a too-short body--and made some simple adjustments. Tomorrow I'll place the crocheted finishing touches on my first sale-quality bag and unveil them as a staple on my Etsy site. I'm very excited about the whole prospect.

My desire to "peddle my wares" online is very much tied to my family's desires to homestead and live sustainable lives. Making something with my own hands has an undeniable beauty to it. Living off the products of my own hands has an unmatchable appeal. There's a sense of self-sufficiency and capability to the idea that draws me in. Whether it's raising a truck patch for sale at the local farmer's market or turning out market bags for sale online, supplementing our "Day Job" incomes with the work of our own hands lends a stability, appeal, and sense of meaning to our lives.

We are just beginning. It's an exciting time to be out on the Farm. There is *plenty* to keep us busy on the land and *plenty* to keep my fingers flying over the keyboard. In the works: two or four new chickens this summer, guineas to be raised from keets (babies) scheduled to arrive in June, and a Tennessee Black Hog boar coming in the next week or two. The Black Hog will need a buddy... probably a cheap feeder pig to become "dinner" sometime this fall. The boar himself is going to become half of a breeding pair within the next three years. There are very few operations left in the US that raise Black Hogs, and registered babies can sell for $350 a piece. As one of my five books this week is "Raising Pigs" by Kelly Klober, expect an in-depth hog blog post in the next week or two.

It's official!

I am up and running on Etsy! My shop is named Sophia!, for the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and the Gnostic Divine Feminine. She connotes a neverending creative force, and the desire to be connected to something larger and more sacred than our own day-to-day selves. She is the Wise One who brings balance and a larger view to her decisions, seeing further than the moment of decision making.

Sophia! is designed to be a line of handmade items based on a sustainable, eco-friendly model that the modern consumer can feel confident in purchasing and owning. Many of my items will be recycled or "upcycled"... others will be made from sustainable-resource fibers like bamboo.

Here's the link:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/FiveJars

I'm also now up on Facebook as Sophia! (http://tinyurl.com/yz3o5aq) and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/FiveJars.

Since I'm away for Day Job Travel, I'll have to wait 'til this weekend to get better pictures of my items up online and to expand my selection. The three projects that I have posted are a start, and I hope that they find their way to good homes--good people of good conscience who will enjoy them, love them, and either wear them out or pass them on to another who will love them.

My second project under the heading of Sophia! will be handmade meditation cushions or zafus (to be further detailed in their own later post). These are traditional round cushions made for meditative sitting. I have made both plain, single-colored varieties and those with quilted tops using fabrics of some meaning to the owner (mostly old T-shirts), all using recycled or sustainable materials. I'll post pictures of some of my finished products this weekend. All are filled with roasted buckwheat hulls (a sustainable resource) and come with a velcro opening so the hulls can be removed for washing.

If you're interested in any of my products or simply have questions, you can always email me at FiveJarsBlog@gmail.com. I hope you will become part of my story as my journey continues, bringing some small part of my work into your home and your world. May all my projects make the lives of those they touch somehow richer!

Spring!

I've been neglecting my blog. Planting season will do that to you.

Spring is bustin' out all over in the Mid-south. It's a magnificent time to be alive. The generations-old rose by the driveway is greening up again, the yard is carpeted with magical, heirloom variations on the daffodil that I've never seen before, and all the plants that we added to the landscape last fall have survived their slumber and are waking up to a sunny new home. The trees are leafing out--the old saucer magnolia and crabapples, the cherry trees my husband sent to his family before we moved back here, the oak we planted last fall in honor of our daughter.

Our little girl had her first Easter Egg Hunt this past Sunday, amid flowers her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother (and father) planted on this rich landscape. She laughed and ran and rejoiced with the kind of unbridled zest that only a one-and-a-half-year-old can show you. She's even rubbing off on me. I'm proud of the life we're building for her here.

The garden has been disced, plowed, disced again, limed (thanks to the results of our soil tests), organically fertilized, tilled, hoed, and about half planted. The delicate weeding process has begun... plucking established, pushy grasses out of the way of delicate, hesitant seedlings just peeking up into sunlight for the first time. We're using old hay bales from the farm's dairy farm days as mulch between the rows to keep some of the grass down, but we can't cover the rows themselves until the veggies are better established--and that means regular weeding to keep our new garden from returning to its old identity as a hayfield.

We've found a kind of improvised rhythm. My endlessly tough husband has been doing most of the heavy lifting when he can find the time--tilling, mowing, preparing the soil. I weed when I can steal a few minutes from my day job--sometimes one row at a time while keeping an eye on the Little Bit.

And in the evening, after the Bit goes to bed, we work. Sometimes it's recording receipts for new expenses into my freeware accounting software program (GnuCash). Sometimes it's working on sellable items for my new online Etsy shop, Sophia!. Sometimes it's researching the livestock we want to bring on board or navigating the details for selling preserves. Mostly, we plant. Potatoes, onions, lettuces, arugula, peas, broccoli, carrots, spinach, corn... and that's just so far. The process will continue until the spring is just a happy memory. We're becoming quite the well-oiled machine, if I do say so myself.

Our newest success are our seedlings. We started two trays of seeds in our breakfast nook, surrounded by windows, back in January. We now have beautiful little plants putting on their second sets of leaves and elbowing each other for space in the sun. We began the process of potting them up into peat pots last Sunday, before I left for my next round of Day Job Travel. Before I left, we had 150 very contented little tomato varieties sitting on a makeshift table in the backyard--and that only accounted for half of one tray. By this weekend, we'll have hundreds of little plants soaking up sunlight in our backyard, safely above the potential ravages of the dogs and Little Bit hands, out in the open for the first time. In another month, we'll have a garden bursting at the seams and more starts than we can give away. Barring some farm-world catastrophe we haven't yet fathomed.

The garden and the farm are work. Lots and lots of work. But the whole process makes me and my family far richer in the best sense of the word. The time in the sun, spent caring for all these indescribably delicate little beginning-beings, provides new lessons every time I get my hands dirty. Our little girl is a farm girl, with windblown hair and sunny eyes and no concept of "inside voice" (that'll have to change at some point). Even when things go wrong in our lives, the warmth we get from living in our springtime world sustains us. And when things go right... well, that feeling is indescribably priceless.

The Great Experiment

In the midst of my family-time binge we took some time out to finish the seed order for the spring. The truck patch was disc-ed last fall and has been lying in wait all these months, teasing us every time we walk by. It's within sight of the chicken yard, within access of the compost bin (read: pile) and adjacent to the garden patch planted by my in-laws, G. and J. It's going to be an interesting experiment.

G. and J. have the garden spread “traditionally” favored by American kitchen gardeners over the past 60 years or so—neat rows of individual plants with bare ground between, all weeds and pests kept at bay with the usual array of pesticides and the desired plants encouraged with the usual array of fertilizers. T. and I favor an approach more along the lines of the movement towards “permaculture” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture). Though we won't be certifiably organic due to the boundaries we share with Big Ag-type fields and the presence of pesticides and fertilizers in the adjacent beds, we want to grow organically.

In permaculture, the goal is not to create an artificial vacuum around your desired plants but rather to encourage a beneficial ecosystem. This can include strategies from the introduction of benign insects to the interspersing of different vegetables in mutually beneficial arrangements (more to come in MANY future posts). The idea is to create a living, breathing environment in which your vegetables can thrive, minimizing the chances that undesired pests can throw that ecosystem out of balance. Rather than fighting natural processes, you're encouraging them.

In addition to differences in procedure, there will be differences among the varieties of vegetables we grow. The majority of veggies in my in-laws' plot will be F-1 hybrids—modern, hybridized varieties of older strains, designed for size, disease-resistance, and other traits desired by industrial-strength farmers. Our truck patch, on the other hand, is far more geared to rare and heirloom varieties—strains that have been around for generations and preserve the diversity of traits that can be threatened by modern-day monocropping.

It should be fascinating to watch these two plots grow side by side. We'll be able to see differences in the size and productivity of each vegetable, and be able to taste-test several similar varieties—for example, tomatoes and butterbeans out of both patches. It's an exciting prospect—I'll keep you filled in on the details as things progress.

The Ecotists

T. and I are members of that breed of individual to which the new Seventh Generation commercials are geared. Seventh Generation is a brand of household cleaner that is eco-friendly and sustainable, and their commercials are geared toward people who want to live Green lifestyles (http://www.seventhgeneration.com/). We care passionately about where our food comes from and what goes into our little girl's body. We study human society, and what we see frightens us. We believe that the current overburdened system of oil- and credit-fueled, bottom-line-oriented, push-it-'til-it-breaks mass production is utterly unsustainable. Though we differ in opinion as to what course the next twenty years will take, we are certain that things are going to change.

The current economic situation is a symptom of the dis-ease felt throughout the national and international systems of production and exchange. Our society has been locked in a kind of stasis... I grew up in a peaceful era, thinking that the way things were was the way things would always be—that technology had brought us a stable and easy lifestyle which would continue to my childrens' and my childrens' childrens' generations. As I grew older, I began to see the underlying, unintentional egotism inherent in that view. We thought that we were safe because things were good. We thought that, as Americans, the hardships of the world were not ours, but other peoples', and that if other people followed our model we could bring ease to the world.

As the economic situation has deteriorated, the Green movement has gained momentum. As it becomes obvious that the current system is unstable and needs to be reworked, individuals have begun, in small ways, to rework their own small pieces of the system. Many of us grew up in that egotistical mindset, the peaceful years when we felt untouchable. We have grown up learning a hard lesson. No longer able to afford the luxury of complacency, we have become, not egotists, but ecotists.

Footnote: Though I would love to claim the term “ecotist”, many others coined the term before it popped into my brain. For example, see http://ecotist.wikia.com/wiki/Ecotist_Wiki. Ecotism also carries a somewhat negative connotation in some circles, referring to those who see the dangers of being ecologically unsustainable but are unable or unwilling to change their habits (see http://www.danielbenami.com/2006/11/new-concept-ecotism.html). T. and I walk a fine line—we strive to live sustainably, but we know we have a long way to go.

Home Sweet Homestead

I've been away from home a lot lately. Twenty out of the last twenty-four days, to be exact. But the four days I got to spend at the house with my husband and my little girl were heaven. I had nothing to do but focus on the family and the farm. In the midst of a hectic schedule, it was a mini-vacation. T. left EV in the safety of the in-laws' warm house and came to pick me up in the four-wheel-drive farm truck, in the middle of one of the many snowfalls to blanket the country this topsy-turvy winter. It was an adventurous drive home on un-plowed back roads... and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

I spent a great deal of my time at home—as much as I could, in fact—soaking up T. and EV... T. and I actually went out on a date night for the first time since we moved to Oak Hill! And playing with EV never gets old. She is seventeen months old today (Happy sort-of Birthday, baby!) and is a little fireball. She's incredibly communicative even with her very (very, very) limited vocabulary, and understands just about everything you say to her. She got to experience her first post-infancy snow while I was home. We replaced the Little Red Wagon with the sled and pulled her around the farm every chance we got. We bundled her up and, as usual, took her chicken checkin' with us every morning and down to the in-laws for hot chocolate and Wii entertainment. (Yes, even the back-to-the-land, homestead-crazy eco-farmers have a weakness for the Wii. T. and J. are both wicked at bowling. I'm passable at golf.)

Our night out involved a Japanese steak house and (finally) a chance to see the movie Avatar, followed by desert at Chili's (not our first choice, but it was the only place open at 10:00. We are nothing if not middle-path ecotists. To date, my favorite descriptions of the movie are “Ferngully on Acid” and “Dances With Wolves meets Smurfs”. There are some anthropological issues with the film, to be sure. But overall, in my personal opinion, it's a masterpiece. Avatar fuses some very forward-thinking pop-cultural ideals with the pinnacle of cutting-edge entertainment technology. In the midst of an era of war movies and comic-book-to-screen crazes, there's a revolutionary undercurrent to the film. The Green movement is fighting back. With a Grade-A budget.

The Beginning

Tonight I'm setting aside my newest foray into the world of crochet to start up my very own blog. I'm falling into a niche only the 21st century could produce--the intersection of internet connectivity and "back-to-the-land" homesteader's ideals.

My husband and I have moved with our one-year-old daughter to a family farm in the Mid-South. We're now living in and caretaking for a classic farmhouse built by my husband's family in the early 1800s. The house is updated with bathrooms and a kitchen, rich with history, and truly beautiful... but it's still large, creaky, rather drafty, and in need of some serious love. The surrounding land was a dairy farm until the 1980s, and the outbuildings are all still extant, though in various states of disrepair/destruction.

When we first moved it was the height of canning season. My husband's grandmother planted fig trees around what is now the henhouse, my in-laws' garden was in full swing, and my husband's closest friends from high school/college had orchard connections. For me, this whole thing began with a canning fascination. In short order I had put up three shelves worth of peach jelly, fig jelly, fig preserves, apple cider jelly, and (my personal favorite) jalapeno jelly. I now have a shelf in my fridge that holds a jar each of my five successful first attempts. Five Jars--it seemed like a fitting name for another experiment. This time I'm jumping feet-first into blogging... I'll learn as I go. It's how I operate best. Which is good, because right now I have alot to learn.

My husband and I both live at the cusp of academic and applied social sciences. My husband is still in graduate school and I recently graduated with a master's degree. We came to our new home with the lofty dream of creating a sustainable system on this farm that will bring us the income and sustenance we need to live comfortably without falling into the traps of Big Ag on the one hand or poverty on the other. I'm now trying to balance a 40-hour-a-week day job with keeping chickens, being a hands-on-mother, and trying to break into the mix of homemade and cutting-edge media that are the worlds of Etsy and Artfire. And I'm happier than I've ever been.

It is incredibly important to me to be anonymous, so that the life we lead here will be protected. You won't find pictures of my kids or my family on my blog. You may see photos of the farm, of our animals, of schematics on how to build a henhouse... but my family and our location are our business. It's a delicate balance that this generation is the first to strike. The new level of interconnectedness we face is both a blessing and a curse. I want to balance being a contributor to the blogosphere with protecting our personal privacy. Call it an experiment. Help me make it a successful one.

When you break it all down, we're a couple learning how to be married and how to be parents, as we go about trying to live in the world in a way that is acceptable to our consciences, our responsibilites, and our spirits. We are entering the next phase of our lives. I invite you to join us on the journey.