Nature Writing and Journaling Workshops

I've had a little tab for "Nature Writing Workshops" over on my sidebar there for a while now, but up until recently it held only a generic description of the kinds of workshops I can offer to local nature centers and nonprofits. Now I've finally got some actual classes scheduled and listed on that page. They're either free or very inexpensive and if you're local it would be fun to see you at one of them.

The upcoming classes are:

Family Nature Journaling ~ November 8, 2015
Pettengill Farm, Freeport

Nature Writing ~ November 15, 2015
Hidden Valley Nature Center, Jefferson 

The Winter Nature Journal ~ December 6, 2015
Hidden Valley Nature Center, Jefferson 

Nature Journaling ~ January 10, 2016
Harlow Art Gallery, Hallowell

I will also be offering a six-week nature writing class at Viles Arboretum in Augusta this winter. I'll post details on the Nature Writing page when registration opens up.

Wild Wednesday ~ Aspen

Being from Colorado, I have a soft spot for aspen trees. Here they're derisively called "popple" and considered a trash tree, inferior in both wood and autumnal color, but they're actually quite beautiful when you give them a chance. We have two species on our land: bigtooth and quaking.

Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) is the same species we have in Colorado, but it has a different appearance and growth habit here. There it grows in dense, single-species stands on the edges of evergreen forests, but on our land it mingles with other trees (birch, cherry, beech, apple, alder, etc.). The trunks out west also appear a bright, waxy white, with big black eye spots and some black streaking. Here they're often grey (all of the trees in this picture are aspen), and when they are white, they have a lot of grey scarring.

The leaf stems, or petioles, are flattened perpendicular to the plane of the leaf, which makes them very flexible and allows them to "quake" or "tremble." Nothing is quite as lovely as an aspen tree covered in gold leaves that shimmer like a belly dancer's coins in the slightest breeze.

Bigtooth aspen leaves (Populus grandidentata), as you can see, have big teeth. They also have a silvery appearance in the early spring.

The leaves are also generally larger than quaking aspen's leaves, though there is a lot of variation among the leaves of both.

The bark is a pretty blah grey on younger individuals.

But bigtooth aspen grow larger than quaking and can tolerate shade better, and in our deeper woods, we have a few big ol' specimens with bark that has a beautiful, braided look to it.

The bigtooth leaves can have a more egg-like shape to them, though they also come in the traditional aspen shape.

They also sometimes turn red as well as gold.

Stands of both types of aspen grow near the end of our driveway and right now the ground is littered with their leaves, as if someone spilled a bag of gold coins.

And looking back, toward the house, most of the trees have lost their leaves, but those bright patches of gold rimming the canopy--those are aspen trees.

Stash

Most of my knits from the last year have come from my stash (all but my January hat, which I made from yarn I bought because I hadn't purchased enough for whole hats when I was in Ireland, and half of the yarn for E's replacement mitten). Otherwise, I haven't bought any new yarn in a long while! Yet I haven't quite made as much of a dent in my stash as I would like. It takes up the top shelf of my craft cabinet, and had gotten all jubled and tangley after a year of rummaging around for what I was looking for.

So this weekend, I pulled it all out to tidy it up, take stock, and make sure there was no sign of wool moth activity (there wasn't). There's a lot of uninspiring yarn in that pile--single skeins and leftover odds and ends and things I inherited from ex-knitters.

 I decided to choose my next projects based on the yarn I most want to play with and came down to a skein of grey angora I bought at the Fiber Frolic a few years ago, a skein of grey lace-weight cashmere that I got on really good sale somewhere a long time ago (I remember my sister was with me, but I don't remember where we were!), and a skein of Noro Silk Garden. I then had to patterns that use single skeins, are something a little different from the usual, and are a little bit challenging (but still TV-compatible). I settled on a pair of leg warmers with a little lace along the top edge for the angora, a slouchy hat for the cashmere, and a crocheted flower scarf for the Noro. Now I can't wait to get started!

October Knit ~ M's Mitts

Well, it looks like I'm back on the one-knit-a-month train (touch wood).

I whipped up these mitts/wristers/wrist-warmers/fingerless gloves/whathaveyous for M, who's been complaining that his hands are cold all the time. There is the school of thought that says mitts are pointless, because your fingers are still exposed to the cold, and there is the school of thought that says they are fabulous, because they keep your hand warm while allowing you the use of your fingers. I belong to the latter school, natch. The idea is that the blood flowing to your fingers is warmer when it gets there by passing though your insulated wrist and palm. I don't know if that really works, but I do know that if you're not wearing anything on your hands, your fingers are a lot colder, and if you need your fingers to do stuff (type, fill the bird feeder, draw, open doors, write), you'll just take your mittens/gloves all the way off and then what?

Anyway, fingerless philosophy and science aside, I love wearing fingerless gloves. I love knitting them. And I would love to keep my boy's hands warm. He says he can't wear them while playing guitar, but they should help when he's doing homework and computer-related things. They probably would work for playing the drums and piano, too.

Pattern info on my Ravelry page.

Weekend Things ~ Recharge

I went away to a writing conference in Vermont over the weekend.

I was wishy-washy about signing up--it's very difficult for me to justify spending more money on writing when I'm not earning any.

But when I found out one of my dearest MFA friends would be able to join me there, I did not hesitate and performed some logistical acrobatics to get my family where they needed to be all weekend (thanks to fabulous friends).

I spent the weekend listening to presentations by really interesting people who do amazing things and then write about them, attending workshops that inspired and reinvigorated my own desire to write, meeting new people, reconnecting with a good friend, and having meaningful conversations about things that I care about.

I needed that, really bad.

On the way home, I went hiking in New Hampshire with a friend I didn't even know would be at the conference. We saw lots of fall color and the first snow of the year!!

It's easy for me to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget to feed my soul. And it's hard to find a community of people who share one's passions--probably everywhere, but especially in a rural area. I'm so glad I went and I'm going forward keeping the lessons I learned, which are the lessons I always relearn at this kind of event, in the front of my mind: write, keep writing, don't give up, live a good life, spend time with good friends and smart people, and write some more. Onward!

Wild Wednesday ~ Red Oak

I was away over the weekend and did not have time to photograph and prepare a Wild post, so I thought I'd share these leaves from northern red oak (Quercus rubra) that I photographed the previous weekend.

Usually it seems that oak leaves just go straight to brown, but this tree was on fire. Maybe it's just that I don't notice the oak leaves until all of the other leaves have fallen. Oak, like American beech, are often marcescent, their brittle brown leaves rattling in the winter wind.

What's wild in your neck of the woods?

September Knit ~ Dovetail Cowl

This actually qualifies as my May, June, July, and August knit as well (so much for one knit per month), and it was technically October when I finally finished it, but I'm already halfway through my next project, so it shouldn't have to cover this month as well. I had great hopes of knitting most of it during baseball season, but the pattern is a little fussy, with every row different, thus requiring too much attention for the sidelines. I did get a lot done on the way to Colorado, but on the way home it was too hot to go anywhere near wool, and, as always in summer, my knitting mojo fizzled to near-zero. But, a few recent car trips and some autumnal weather, and extra TV-watching gave me the push to finally get it done--just in time for the cold.

I bought this yarn many, many years ago, when I suddenly discovered I loved orange. It started life as a scarf, which was maybe my third or fourth knit (I worked on it as we drove to Quebec City when I was pregnant with M--15 years ago!!), but I never finished. I had picked a tedious seed stitch (that is knit, purl, knit, purl) and the back-and-forth of the scarf just didn't inspire me to finish.

I never start a knitting project without finishing the last one, except this one unfinished object that had been hanging over me for all those years. I'm so happy to be done with it! I still love the orange, and this pattern is so much more pleasing--both to knit and to look at--than a boring seed-stitch scarf. Things got a little nerve-wracking near the end--I came close to running out of yarn (I had used a bit of one skein to make a gnome's hat many years ago), but managed to finish with a yard or two to spare.

Pattern info on my Ravelry page.