Preparing to Have a Flare

I've had a backache for a few days. I've set up for the Chattanooga Market twice this month, and gone to a smaller farmer's market once. I figured the pain was from hauling stuff and bending, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, etc. This morning I woke myself up singing the pain song. What I mean is that I was whimpering in my sleep because my body hurt, and the noise woke me. I could see right away that I was in trouble. I got up and began walking and my thighs were stiff. It felt like I was expending major energy to make my legs move. There were annoying little shooting pains in my lower legs even when I sat. This is a flare until proven otherwise.

Obviously I can't prepare for something that begins so precipitously, but I've got some moves for when I recognize the inevitability of the flare. First, I put in a call to my rheumatologist. It's Thursday and I don't want to get caught out on the weekend trying to reach someone. Might as well get some instructions now. Second, I look at my schedule. For the next few weeks I need to determine what is absolutely essential, and cancel everything else. I will need the extra rest and I'm probably going to lack the energy or good will to do more. Third, I rally my moral support. Telling one or two sisters, my daughter, and a few good friends alerts everyone that I may need a bit of help, if only an ear for my complaining. It also lets them know that I'm not turning down activities with them because I've suddenly developed an aversion to their company. Fourth, I start recording my food intake. If I'm going on a higher dose of prednisone it is going to drastically increase my appetite. I need to monitor what I eat and make sure I stay on program. It will be especially difficult with the low carbohydrate plan my new internist wants me to try, as prednisone makes me crave baked goods and other carbs in a remarkable way.
Since my usual day is built around my crafting, specifically knitting and crochet, I don't have to change my basic purpose. I still want to get up in the morning, see what I can learn (reading or on the Internet), do maintenance on my stores, and then work on projects. The flare will put a kink in my ability and energy for photography, so I try and do it in short sessions at the times when my energy is best.
I sat down to record this plan so that I would stop obsessing with what this flare might mean. Yes, it might be a three-month disaster, but it also might respond to steroids right away and be a non-issue in three weeks. Yes, it is going to bring more pain, but my pain tolerance is high and my distraction skills have stood me well. Yes, there's going to be some disappointment in having to give up some activities and adjust my thinking to active illness mode, but that's happened dozens-hell, in 20 years, maybe hundreds-of times and it eventually passes.
Damn. My wrists hurt.
Peace.

Preparing to Go to Market

Top photo is box of labels and a set of baby headbands that I've just labeled. I have to be careful to label adult and home items with http://essiewb.etsy.com and child/baby items with http://turtletots.etsy.com.
Second and third photos show scarves hanging on the new clothing rack. I hope this will show them off and allow shoppers to easily access them. I love people to touch my products and try them on.

Fourth photo shows the ends of the spiral scarf, loose yarn ready to be sewn into place.

I've been going to market events to sell my products for several years. Each time there's a process I go through to prepare. Because I am always knitting and crocheting I usually have a pile of new products that need to be labelled before I can pack them. I have printed tags on which I write the price, fiber content and care instructions. These are tied to each product with a length of yarn. I've learned that most people like tags. Some are too shy to ask, some check out tags to decide if they can afford to shop with you. Others, however, never glance at a tag, asking me for the price of each thing they examine. Go figure.

Next, I go through the products already in my rolling dufflebag and remove any that are out of season or that I don't want to display at the coming market. I replace these with the pile of new things. During this process I am also checking the condition of the items to see if anything needs refolding or a pass with the iron. If there are prices that need adjusting, I put on new tags. The few items that don't fit in my duffle (like felted rugs) are fetched and laid out with the bag so I don't forget them. I never feel compelled to take everything with me. I always have way more stuff than I have space to handle, and I'm constantly looking for ways to display them better. I'm toying with the idea of only taking one class of products at a time (housewares day, baby items only, etc.), but folks who are familiar with my store come up looking for their favorites when I finally show up to market. It's difficult when I don't have hats that day, or they've come for a newborn gift and I don't have them.

Getting my car ready is as important as preparing the products. My car is a large sedan with a decent-size trunk, but it wasn't made for hauling equipment. I must clear the way to put in a folding garment rack (new for this year!), two long folding tables, two portable chairs, a dolly, and totes filled with wrapping materials, a couple of knitting projects to work on during the market day, a money container, some snacks, my Turtlefat Collection sign, and extras like duct tape and a screwdriver and scissors, just for good measure. Oh yeah. I have to pack my tent-unwieldy and heavy, but with wheels on one end, thank goodness.

Many of the things that I take (and leave at home) are the result of many sessions at market, the trial and error of having too much of this or none of that, learning what makes it easier, what makes me function better during those long hours with my limited endurance and tendency toward swelling and pain.

Obviously, after I empty the car, I have to load all my gear. Sigh. On the other end I will have to unload it in the parking lot and haul it into the pavilion. Sometimes that affects the order of packing, other times I just go for random placement and hope for the best. We used to be able to drive into the pavilion and unload at our booth site, but that's no longer allowed.

There's always something waiting to be finished that I want to complete and take to the market. Today it was a spiral scarf that needed about 30 rows and then finishing work in order to be ready. It doesn't need blocking, so I knew it was a realistic goal. When I began this scarf I hated the short rows and turning it every few stitches. To avoid all the turning I taught myself to knit backwards. I hold my yarn in my left hand and knit continental (forward, that is), so I just leave the yarn in my left hand and throw it around the needle when I'm knitting backwards. Anyway, I finished the spiral scarf and showed it above, needle ready for weaving ends.

I haven't mentioned that I am excited the whole week before market. No matter how tiring, the preparation boosts my anticipation. Can't wait for Sunday's Strawberry Fest at the Chattanooga Market!

Peace.

Something significant happened today: I decided to make a slipper-sock. I chose two yarns-a skinny, self-striping sock yarn (Felicity by KnitPicks) and a light worsted merino (Luxury Merino by elann.com). After one false start I got the number of stitches right to do a ribbed low ankle cuff. I added a cable on each side just for good measure. When I pulled into heel territory, I decided without much deliberation that I wanted a short-row heel and that I would make one tiny, center short row and then run my short-rows from cable to cable.

The perfect thing was that knowing the construction allowed me to pull this off without big calculations or consultations or any kind of pattern. I knit four pairs of socks two years ago, but I could hardly call myself a sock knitter, so this was a revelation. I could see the three-dimensional shape I wanted to achieve in my head, and I knew how to use the short-rows to make that cupping. This signals my arrival at a level of expertise that I have only reached before in medicine. I have lived with this knitting thing long enough that my understanding has a depth beyond the ability to follow a pattern. It's been integrated with my other knowledge of geometry and engineering, the fiber finding its place and making use of what's already in my head.

As usual, I haven't photographed the thing I'm talking about, but I do have photos of the lace scarf I mentioned last post. It now hangs with the rest of my summer scarves, ready for the Chattanooga Market to open next Sunday. I also have things that I never offered before-linen/cotton hand towels with tiny ruffled borders, organic cotton face cloths, mug cozies. I'm experimenting. We'll see how it is received.

Peace.

Black Women Do Knit; If I Wasn't Depressed I'd Put it in Caps

Wow, I haven't posted in a while and I forgot that I changed my format. I was excited when I saw the orange swirly background. I came because I learned something today. I was fooling around on Ravelry and found Ebony Elite Sistah Friends group - a large group of primarily African-American women knitters. Yes, we do exist! More than 600 members strong, 26 pages of members, overwhelmingly sistahs, pages of tan, brown, beige, light, bright, almost-white, ebony, near-ebony women who know the joy of craft. Hallelujah. Locations include most of the states, many in the UK, a few in the Caribbean, and at least one in Ireland. Black women knit. Amen.
I looked at every photo/icon, feeling irrationally that if a woman was brown and lived in my time and knitted, I must know her. It probably seems crazy, with all the knitters I know and have as close friends, that race is anywhere in this equation. It's just that I was afraid we were not feeling the joy of this fabulous past-time/obsession/preoccupation. I didn't want it to be some elite, separate activity like tennis or golf, with just a trickle of exposure for Black women.

I am doin' more than just talking about knitting. I'm proud of the lace scarves that I've created lately. I promise photos when they finish blocking. I'm also happy with my "little" things: mostly wash cloths and makeup remover squares knit in organic, undyed cotton. They are sweet little luxuries that make me feel pampered while also saving a lot of waste (disposable makeup pads), and I hope others will feel the same. I hated the super-thin synthetic wash cloths they sold for babies when I was a new mom, and I'm going to encourage them as baby gifts, too.

I've struggled with depression this spring. Nothing seems right-the unsettled weather, the absence of my father, the illness that kept my daughter from finishing her semester, the chaos in some of my relationships...I go from painful, stiff mornings when I wonder if I can keep this up to more active afternoons when I am giddily grateful that my meds have glued me together for one more day. I automatically work to boost my mood, but that constant striving takes lots of energy and concentration. I also try to maintain a stable schedule, which means I've got to stop rambling and go to bed. Rest is a good thing.

Peace.

Curiosity and Knitting Innovation

Two weeks ago Jumbleberryjam asked if my survey on the knitting experiences of black women had yielded results. The answer is "yes", but nothing usable. Unfortunately, it wasn't circulated to enough women to get out of the circle of women whom I know are knitters or crafters, whose contacts would more likely be knitters. I have tried to pursue the question on Ravelry (an on-line community for knitters and crocheters which is wildly popular). I did so by searching for groups that would-by name/subject of interest-suggest predominantly minority involvement. Most of them I confirmed by examining more closely individual member names and icons. It appeared that more of those groups were crocheters than knitters.

You might wonder why this question makes any difference to me at all. Well, some of it is curiosity. I just like to know who's doing what and why. Some of that curiosity can be easily satisfied by publicly available statistics; that wasn't the case with knitter demographics. The other reason I am interested is that I have enormous fun with my knitting. It also relaxes me, helps discipline my mind, and produces beautiful items for personal use and for sale. I want to share this with people and encourage others who may not have found their crafting niche to try it.

Aside from the above noted research, there are several things in my personal experience that lead me to think black women are underrepresented among U.S. knitters. First, when I am out at the market knitting and selling my stuff, people often stop to comment on their own experiences with knitting (their personal knitting or that of family members). These people are never African-American. Second, among my own acquaintances I only know a few black knitters, while I know many black crocheters. Third, only rarely has a black woman asked about joining the group of knitters that are my weekly companions knitting in a very public place. This experience has been echoed by some of the other black women I know who knit.

Lately I have been obsessed with nontraditional designs for scarves. I want to show a few of them and describe how they came into being. The top scarf was knit with self-striping yarn, a Noro that is primarily silk and cotton. I wanted to create some three-dimensional pieces extending from random parts of the scarf. To do so, I knit down a row to the spot I wanted to use, cast on 15-30 stitches to my right-hand needle, then used both needles to cast off those same stitches. That produced a two-row, coiling piece that could be pushed to the front or back of the piece before I continued to knit and complete the row. On the second photo you can see the triangular holes. I knit the posts in between the holes without a real plan, just knowing that I had to either start wide and decrease to a point or start with one stitch and increase gradually. I tried to keep the same number of rows in each triangle so the segment wouldn't make the scarf crooked. I cast on stitches in between their ends, picked up the end stitches of each triangle at the appropriate spot, and eventually had a new row to proceed from. This scarf has a variety of stitch patterns along its length, including a segment of cables and some rows of drop-stitch.

The experiment with the second scarf is knots. I wanted to create three-dimensional segments by making strips of scarf that would form knots or with other strips. I chose a place to start a strip, knitting and turning for a three- or four-stitch piece until I had several inches to work with. Then I finished the original row, keeping the piece in its place to form a loop. In some later row I would come close to the width that the first loop arose from and start another strip. When the strip was long enough to reach through the first one and back to it's home row, I would thread it through and then finish it's home row. I did this with vertical and horizontal loops, as you can see in the photos. By the way, that yarn is two lengths worked together, a bamboo from Southwest Trading Company.

Hope this is clearer than mud.
Peace.

This is What Better Feels Like

I think I've described what it's like when I am sick or in a lupus flare. I was treated twice in the past two weeks with a very specific therapy that targets B cells from my immune system. (Those are cells that contribute to lupus, which comes from an overactive immune system.) I tried to pay special attention to what is better now that I've been treated.
Within three days of the first dose, my joint pain improved and my energy increased. At the end of that week I was able to take my first decrease in prednisone dosage. By ten days post-treatment, I was using approximately half the pain medicine as before. In the past week I've done house cleaning and grocery shopping much more easily. I walk faster and I can go to more than one store when necessary. This week I decreased my prednisone again, and with no rebound of symptoms. When I woke this morning I realized that-once again-I can start my day with no pain.
There are a few foundations that help patients like me pay for this treatment. Without their help, my out-of-pocket expense would be more than $8000 per year, impossible for me and my post-recession economitis. Medicare only covers a fraction of the cost. It's a frustrating situation, as my being free of flares means less other medication has to be subsidized by Medicare, my need for expensive physical therapy is reduced, I can care for myself independently in my home, and I have less possibility of side effects from prednisone, which can cause expensive chronic diseases like diabetes and osteoporosis and cardiac disease.
People think of preventive medicine as being about physical exams, vaccines, cholesterol screening, mammograms, Pap smears...For me, prevention is about minimizing the debilitating effects of lupus and of the treatments for lupus. Both kinds of prevention are good for the country's annual health care expenditures.
On the knitting front: Lately I have been consumed with ideas about nontraditional design. I'm trying to throw away some conventions and produce pieces that are more sculptural and texture-driven. I'll get some photos this week and post them.
Peace! All power to the Wisconsin workers!

Back to School on Etsy

Last Tuesday I went to school. I turned on my computer and accessed the Etsy site, where I was directed to a seminar on improving your Etsy business. I heard Lorrie Veasey, Vanessa Bertozzi, Nancy Soriano, Noah Scalin, April Bowles and Michelle Ward, a wonderful array of speakers with impressive credentials inside and outside of Etsy. I was in school all day long, running for snacks and meds on the breaks, taking notes and participating in creative challenges.

This is an aspect of Etsy that most people don't see. When you go to http://Etsy.com, you see a beautiful opening page of premiere products, all either handmade or vintage. If you are there to shop, you put the item, store or seller you seek into the search engine, and proceed from there. But if you are an Etsy seller, one of the thousands who has an active store at the site, you can get a lot more from that front page. Under the heading of "Community" there is a wealth of information. It contains blog entries on every topic related to selling on Etsy: marketing, photography, competition, pricing, rules and regulations, successful seller biographies, pertinent law - those are the ones that immediately come to mind, and there are many more topics that are presented and updated for the use of the community. There is a virtual roadmap for anyone opening or considering an Etsy store.

People ask how I got the nerve to open my store, and how difficult was it. I got the nerve because I had shopped there and seen that sellers were people like me. They had products that they thought were desirable and wanted to put them out there with less overhead or in smaller quantities than a brick-and-mortar store would require. They wanted to work independently. They didn't necessarily have any business or sales experience. And the difficulty-well, on a scale of 1 to 10, getting the store open was a 3. I had to follow instructions, step by step, filling in the blanks as they were presented. I didn't have to know anything about building a web site or writing code or setting up a shopping cart. Moreover, the only charge was the $.20 (yes, that's 20 cents!) fee to list each item for three months, and a 3.5% fee on anything I sell.

Maintaining my shop is the biggie. Yes, I have to make new products, but I also have to come up with accurate and hopefully catchy descriptions. I have to photograph them to best advantage. I must relist my products frequently so that they show up early in the long list of things presented in a search. Each re-listing is another 20 cents, adding up to a considerable advertising budget. Periodically I read my introduction to the shop and my policies, and see if they are a good representation of what I do today. I update the photo for my shop banner as my artistic vision changes. And I am constantly developing new designs and patterns, updating my products, making them appropriate for the season and for my clientele. That means I have to constantly learn new techniques, refine my knitting and crochet skills, and understand what trends are current.

Anyway, enough with the how-to stuff. One of the creative exercises presented last Tuesday was as follows. Noah asked us to think of an object, then use the materials around us to create 10 likenesses or representations of that object in 10 minutes. My object was a ball of yarn. I scrambled around my house gathering materials and twisting them into "balls" and the photo shows what I came up with: from upper right corner, moving clockwise, it's a pair of pants, a hairdryer, a tape measure, a knit headband, dog leash, plastic bags, paper towels, decorative flowers with bendable stems, a hand-knit scarf, and in the center a bra and a cloth belt. That doesn't include the drawing of a ball of yarn that was my first piece. Yes, 12 items. And yes, I was having fun.

Peace.