The Crochet Side

I received an email yesterday from Interweave requesting a bio/byline from me. This is the first time I’ve ever had to write a bio for a publication; the first time I’ve had to be somewhat serious and tell the little girl in me to NOT put how I like to twirl toy guns.

I let the email sit for 24 hours before opening up  Notepad. I probably sat there for 10 minutes in silence, terrified of the blank screen. It’s the same feeling when I sit down to write short stories, poetry, sketch…frozen in time and stuck. Eventually I snapped out of it and came to the decision to freewrite–let it all flow organically out of me, from the heart, through the fingers, onto the keyboard.

What I had wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. I edited a bit, removed a sentence, added it back, removed it again, tweaked the beginning and fiddled with wording. Finally, I just had to say the hell with it. If it’s not what they’re looking for they’ll let me know, right?

So, in case it’s tweaked before the issue goes to print, here is what I sent them…

Brianna is the woman behind The Crochet Side (www.thecrochetside.com), a blog about her crochet ups and downs; and behind The Yarn Side (www.theyarnside.com), a small hand-painted/hand-dyed yarn line. She doesn’t claim to be a master of any one thing, but she’s pretty good at a few. Her first love was crochet; her second love was dyeing yarn. Now she tries her hardest to combine the two while staying cool in an all too hot Florida.

Playful, right? Not awful, not great…definitely not a piece of literature, but whose byline really is? That’s not really the job of a byline, I suppose. But telling a quick 3rd-person story, and attracting the reader into wanting to pay attention to that author/designer/et-cetera–that’s what we want. I hope what I’ve written is good enough to do that. Bring readers here; bring readers to The Yarn Side.

I can’t wait for the Winter ’09 Preview to go live. I can’t wait to share that with you all.  I can’t wait to see my name in print. Sounds sort of self-centered of me, doesn’t it? I always imagined myself to be published, but not like this; I wanted to write books, and here I am putting my stamp on crochet patterns? Well. The twisted paths we find ourselves on.

I wish my grandfather was alive to see all of this come to fruitionl, but I–well, let’s not get into a discussion about an afterlife. I know he’d be proud of me. I know he already was. I get to share it with my family that’s still with me, with my friends, with you.

September 18-20, the Florida Fiber-In will be held in Sarasota, Florida. Will you be attending? It’s a free event ($15 donation suggested to help offset costs), with shopping and free demos/classes. It’s about a 5 hour drive for me, but I’m looking forward to attending and meeting new friends!

I’m going to try and meet up with Julie, of 1,000 Petals Yarn, since she was a podcast listener and her yarn was the inspiration for the Jules pattern. She will be vending at the event, so maybe I’ll support her and purchase a couple of skeins I’ve had my eyes on for a while. I didn’t learn about the event soon enough so I wasn’t able to throw my hat in to be a vendor, for The Yarn Side, but there’s always next year! It’ll be nice to get to know the people first, and just enjoy the event as an attendee.

Here are some demos that I’m looking forward to:

Celena Crews, of “Rocket Yarn” – Two Sock Yarn Dyeing Methods
Rebecca Bowen, of Sunshine Knit Designs - Spinning with Silk Hankies
Ginger Clark, of Hanks Yarn and Fiber - Color Spinning
Ginger Clark, of Hanks Yarn and Fiber – Let’s take a test Drive

If you’re in the area, it’d be great to meet up! Let me know if you’re going to make it and we can put together some sort of signal or handshake.

The Beast, as I not-so-fondly referred to the Interweave Crochet project, was shipped this past week. The box was massive and, due to costs, is likely not going to arrive until today (Saturday) or this coming Monday.

From online tracking, I know the box of yarn leftovers already made it to the Interweave office in Loveland, CO. Now I’m just crossing my fingers that the actual project makes it there safely and that they don’t promptly e-mail to tell me that it arrived a big ol’ mess. Or, worse, that it’s hideous and they would never accept a submission from me again.

There’s a lot of fear in this world of crochet design, let me tell you. No hiding the fact that I’m terrified someone is going to call or e-mail and it will only be someone saying:

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

The rational part of me realizes this is unwarranted. The irrational part of me is looking for a dark corner.

To keep myself from going down that path, let me tell you two lessons I learned during this imposed absence of mine:

1. Never promise to crochet something 10 times larger than the sample you sent in. (Also note the promised 10 times will probably equal 11 times because of 2 below.)

2. Measure, calculate, math, math, math, 4,013 times before you begin. I screwed up my math twice.

The first time I was halfway through the first half of the first side. The second time I was already done with both sides and beginning to seam the blasted thing together. Due to each section of the sides taking 5-6 hours per, there was no way I was going to be able to re-crochet the whole thing in time. So, I told my lip to stop quivering, pulled up my Big Girl Pants, and wrote down where I screwed up. I then padded the pillow to use up the extra space I had to work with.

Here’s a third thing I learned:

3. I dislike large projects. If I can’t finish it within a day or two, I want nothing to do with it.

That could always change in the future, and this may have more to do with having a bunch of merino on my lap in the middle of a Florida summer, but still, lesson learned for the time being.

Having said that, I’m proud of the work I did do. I really hope it arrives safe and sound, and that they’re able to photograph it, highlighting how lovely the finished product can be.

I realize that I’m crochet-crochet-crochet, but I’ve been taking a break since shipping off The Beast. I’ve picked up some circular knitting needles and am just knitting away. I’m not even knitting anything in particular. The freedom is lovely and rewarding, but I can already feel the itch to play with these bad boys…

I wanted to be published, and that’s going to happen, but now is the stressful time. Now is made up of the moments after the box of yarn arrives and I have to actually crochet this thing.

This thing is huge.

See that? I’m crocheting something for that giant 36″ monster. That’s a lot of crocheting considering I’m not just crocheting a giant circle. You’ll see what I mean when you purchase my issue of Interweave Crochet after it comes out.

I can’t believe I get to say that. MY ISSUE. The issue in which I am PUBLISHED. Yes! *fist pump*

So there’s this box full of yarn, with colors and bags and I have to use it, keep track of it, make sure dog hair doesn’t make its way into it, and I’m still in shock.

I need to snap out of this, though, because while I have this big project, I also have to work 8-10 hours five days a week, part-time University every day of the week (practically), and The Yarn Side to try and keep up with. I don’t even have time to podcast, really, and there have been thoughts entering my head that I should put that on hiatus. Then I worry about how people would feel about my doing that.

What to do, what to do.

Right now my only decision is to just try and keep moving forward. Try to work a little of everything everday, not allow myself to become so involved with any one thing for too long, or I focus too much on it and become drained.

How do you best handle a large number of To-Do’s and the stress that comes with it?

Here we are, after a lengthy absence, and I have some news to share.

My absence began with my grandfather becoming ill, which weeks later turned into an absence because my grandfather passed away. My family has been dealing with all the things families deal with when a loved one is no longer around. We’re all slowly readjusting to life without him, which is hard, but harder when I think about how something so exciting that just happened is the first thing I’m not able to share with him.

That exciting news is that I received word that I’ll have a design published in Interweave Crochet, Winter ’09! I sent two swatches, and received an email from the editor that they want one of the two, and that they would like the finished pieced to be much larger than my initial plans. It’s super exciting, and I can’t wait to get started, but we still need to finalize the contract and discuss yarns.

So what have you been up to while I’ve been gone?

In the last week or so I’ve spent time away from the computer. Not self-imposed time away, but Family Emergency away. Without going into too much detail, my maternal grandfather was put in the Hospital due to Pneumonia. Unfortunately the Pneumonia was due to his weakened immune system from his Leukemia. There was a severe dive in his health, and we all feared the worst. He’s slowly getting better, but is not yet at a point where my family and I can take that sigh of relief. Because of this, however, I’ve been away from the computer.

It’s only been the last few days where I was able to make it into work, and now I’m trying to slowly catch up with you all. While I do that, have a crappy iPhone photo of a scarf I started…

This scarf is made up of samples from the February Phat Fiber sampler box. A couple of the samples are actually ones that I spun from small batts. I have a couple more fiber samples that I need to finish spinning before I can call this scarf done. I’m letting all the ends hang for the meantime. Not sure if they’re visually appealing enough to leave them dangling or if I should take the time to weave them in.