Sallyjo suggested this great meme, and I was excited to participate: post a photo of a bookshelf that is revealing about your self. Well, really, this is pretty darn easy for me.  I apologize for the flash-induced greasiness.  But there are the opening shelves of our library, and the beginning of my Celtic Studies collection.  […]

I love snow.  Kayo loves snow.  Scott loves snow.  And we never get enough of it in these parts.  Finally, we got a few inches on Thursday. I boogied out of the city just in time to miss the truly torturous aspect of snow in the DC area–the terrible traffic–and settled in to some great […]

Birch, from Indo-European bherja, or “bright.”  Shining, blazing, burning, shimmering.  The Lady of the Forest.  Cousin to Beech and Oak–the three trees I need most in my landscape.  Oak galls for ink,  beech and birch for paper, two for mast, and all three for inspiration.  The trio was seen as a family in Ireland: Father […]

A is for antler. Antler knife handles, and knitting needles, and spindles, and buttons, and baskets.  Most made by friends who have similar antler fixations.  I particularly love finding shed antlers in the woods, often obscured in the leaf litter.  The marks left by bucks scraping the fuzz off their growing antlers are surely the […]

So I’ve been having a good time making bags, like I do, but also being very frustrated by the difficulty of finding natural light to take pictures in.  So I broke down and bought a pop-up light tent.  Now I have to figure out how best to use it.  I started playing with it this […]

We have a wonderful regular visitor these days.  I took this photo through our living room window.  Our friend here has been spending a lot of time in a snag in our back yard. I wish I could put out a hawk feeder, but I don’t think it works that way. The small linen quilt […]

On the way home from work today, the woman sitting next to me on Metro asked me about the needles I was using to knit my kilt hose (wooden Options), and we struck up quite a conversation about knitting, Britain, knitting in Britain, kilts, and the like.  And, as if that weren’t good enough, the […]

Last New Year, I decided to take a long break from buying books.   And, not so coincidentally, during the last year I bought an iPod with a lot of memory using my unspent book money, and then developed an obsessive audiobook habit, supported entirely by my local library.  My perennial dilemma–knit or read on the […]