To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C.S. Lewis

Feeling inexplicably sad and a bit bruised today. It will pass.

Am happy about one thing: Last night I cast on for one of the scarves from Victorian Lace Today. Love that book! And I got through the first three pattern repeats on the first border before quitting. I haven't been knitting at all, so it feels really good. Plus, I love this wool! It's the laceweight Swedish yarn from my Dye-No-Mite swap partner in lovely greens/burgundy. I'll post pix of the scarf in progress later, but for now, here's the yarn (and all the other goodies she sent).



In the meantime, I've started Round Two of the Textiles Postcard Swap on Swap-Bot. The system won't let me create a graphic for it, so for now this will have to do as the link. The first swap was great fun, although I admit to stressing myself silly about how to make my postcards. They turned out fine in the end. I heard a few others felt the same way, so the only new rule in Round 2 is No Stressing!

Here are the postcards I made.



They turned out stiff as a board: I used diluted white glue to adhere the fabric to the cardstock, then hand stitched through all of that. (Ouch! Couldn't find my thimble.) Then I pasted a spare blank postcard on the back for the address. I think that besides being heavy, they're probably almost "nuke certified," as G. would say. I know one of my cards has made it through the post; so far so good.

One of the best things about the swap is that I've learned a lot from the other participants about fabric PC construction. I'm not a sewing or quilting person, so I didn't know about Timtex and hadn't thought about using a foam core for the cards.

If you're interested in seeing some of the postcards, go to FlickR and do a search for "swapbot textiles postcards" or "swapbot fabric postcards," and then make sure you're set to view most recent first.

The thing weighing heaviest on my mind right now is whether or not to go to Girdwood for the Forest Fair. It's a gargantuan three-day outdoor music and art festival that draws crowds from all over Alaska, and I've had a booth there for the past three years. It's actually a lot of fun, and I'm guaranteed to make a lot of money: about a quarter of my entire yearly sales, to be exact.

But it is a daunting amount of work, especially for one person. Thinking about the 7-hour drive in an unreliable pick-up truck, and then having to unload everything and set up the EasyUp all by myself (again) is just... almost too much. I don't mind sleeping in a tent and using PortAPotties, or feeling grungy and bug-bitten for most of a week. And I love seeing customers face-to-face: Direct sales is the best, and this is one of the few opportunities I have for that anymore.

But I'm just so tired. G. says I felt the same way last year, and I probably did, but I don't think it was quite this dire. I haven't got a single piece of stock made for it, either, and if I go, I'll have to leave next Wednesday. Guess I've got to figure it out today, huh?

Anybody want to come help me set up and tear down?