celli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
celli) wrote2025-06-13 06:20 pm
celli) wrote2025-06-13 06:20 pm
Yarn Harlot (![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
yarn_harlot_feed) wrote2025-06-13 05:38 pm
yarn_harlot_feed) wrote2025-06-13 05:38 pmDear Finn
Sometimes when I talk to people about these blankets they ask me if I ever get tired of thinking them up, if it’s tricky to come up with a different blanket for each baby in this family and Finn, let me tell you this – it is never. You are so unique and special to me that your blanket ideas came as quickly as they ever do- even if your blanket didn’t. (Sorry about that, your birthday bunched up with another baby blanket that needed knitting, then you were early, and your blanket was late and then Canada Post/PostNord Denmark both have some answering to do.) When I thought about you and your parents and family, it was so easy to dream up a blanket as special as you all are.
You, sweet wee Finn, are the baby in this family I am the farthest from, have ever been the farthest from. I am here in Canada and you are in Denmark, and the stitch pattern I chose for the centre of your blanket is my attempt to reconcile that. Some people see a flower, others a bee, and I bet a few years from now you’ll have your own ideas – but I see (and knit) Polaris, the great North Star, a symbol of what the places we live in have in common. I was just going to type “did you know Finn…” and then I remembered you are new here and certainly do not know, so I’ll just tell you.
The North Star sits over the celestial North Pole (and Santa’s house, we’ll get to that later this year) and because of this, the way it sits at the top of the world, it appears mostly stationary in the sky – all other stars appear to rotate around it and it makes it easy to navigate by if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. Find that star, and straight down from it is true north.
This made me think of you because that’s the way it goes in families, for a time now while you are little, you are the star around which we all rotate, and then for the rest of their lives, you will be the most important point your parents navigate by. From the day you were born everything changed for your mum and dad, and from that moment forward they need only look at you to know the way. Further to that my sweet guy, though you are far away you are a child of the North like the rest of us and somehow that makes you feel closer.
Around that is the ring stitch – and this little Finn, is the only stitch that has appeared on every blanket that I have ever knit. It is a circle of tiny perfect rings that goes around the whole blanket, meant to be a symbol of your family and their love around you. If you need help any day of your whole life, look no farther than your amazing grandparents, great aunties and great uncles, your aunties and uncles and your cousins and everyone else in this family by birth, or because they belong and we chose them. They are a team that is always here for you. (Btw I’m great at unusual solutions to problems, and your great uncle Joe is absolutely who you want to call if you’re in jail. Don’t worry about the Denmark thing, he’ll figure it out.)
Around those little rings is a border you share with your cousin Maeve – the last baby in this family who felt far, far away to me. (By the time Sasha came along, I was a bit more used to them being all the way across Canada.) It’s suns and moons, a little nod to the idea that no matter how great the distance is between you and the rest of us, it’s still the same moon we look up at, still the same sun we play under. That you share a border with Maeve also turns out to be a bit of kismet, since it looks as though she may love you more than almost anybody, something I hope is a hint of a fabulous bond down the line.
Past that (your blanket is as big as any of them ever have been, despite my attempts to restrain myself) a border that means something to me, though I have as much trouble articulating it now as I did when I sketched it. There are large motifs with nupp centres and larger circles, giving way with each generation to something less complex, until the last round has just an encircling of little nupps. My idea here was to stretch and try to represent the unique moment your larger families are in… so many generations. Your maternal Great-grandmother counted her progeny for me one day before I knit this, noting that you would be the 28th person in her family because she and Old Joe got married and I tried to visualize all those people, and I know that your dads family brings so much more complexity to this – all these people who you come after because of dates and dreams and accidents and effort. You are the icing on an almost 60 year old cake, and you and your cousins are that newest cute little generation of nupps at the last. It’s a snapshot of who your family is right now and how remarkable that is.
After that (I told you it was big, we’re almost done.) A little chain of daisies – because like your dad Adam you are Danish, and that’s Denmark’s national flower. Also partly for the synergy between your mum and your aunt Savannah and all their Canadian summers trying to make daisy chains. One way or another the two of them will have you in a field with these flowers in your hair sooner or later, and when they do you and your dad can beam with nationalistic pride.
Finally darling Finn, the last border. Like so many of these blankets… it is a wave. First for the wave of love that welcomes you, for the waves of strength that encircle you, for the wave of luck that brought your parents together, but mostly for the wave of strength in your mum, my niece Kamilah, and the wave of water she brought you forth on, sweet and strong and rather obviously no longer the little girl that skips in my heart when I think of her. Your border is knit in garter stitch, and not to geek out in the knitting department too much, but the symbolism in that is safety, strength, comfort, resilience, endurance and shelter. You’ll find a lot of garter stitch in your blanket if you look for it Finn – and it’s there for a reason. I hope the magic of knitting acres of it brings all those charms to your life and more.
Although we haven’t met, my little darling… I hope that every time you are wrapped in your blanket or it is laid over you on a cool day, every time it is spread beneath you so you can watch the leaves flutter or see the birds swoop by – I hope you can feel so much love in all the stitches.
Welcome wee Finn. You are a most wanted, hoped for and dreamed of child. You are perfect.
Love always,
Great-Auntie Stephie
(PS. Please thank your talented grandmother Kelly for taking the beautiful pictures of you enjoying your blanket. You lucked out in the grammy department.)
![[desperately] Maybe this is from some country where they use commas as decimal points, and also as digit separators after the decimal, and also use random other characters for decoration???](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/reading_a_big_number.png "[desperately] Maybe this is from some country where they use commas as decimal points, and also as digit separators after the decimal, and also use random other characters for decoration???")
altamira16 (altamira16) wrote2025-06-05 09:55 am
altamira16) wrote2025-06-05 09:55 amEntry tags:
Coming Home by Britney Griner with Michelle Burford
Britney Griner is 6'9". At the beginning of this book, she is rushing with her bags out the door to catch a plane to Russia to play basketball. She forgot some nearly empty vapes in her bag, and that leads to being incarcerated in Russia for nine months. Her passport is confiscated at the airport. She is moved to pretrial detention, and she has to return to court over and over until trial and sentencing.
Because she is such a tall person, nothing fits. Her legs hang off the end of the bed until they make a bed that is the correct size for her. The gulag uniforms don't fit until she has a seamstress who makes her a new one.
After reading this and To Build a Castle by Vladimir Bukovsky, I am pretty sure that to survive your time in a Russian gulag, you are just supposed to take up chain smoking. It is mandatory.
She lost nearly thirty pounds while in the gulag.
Her wife Cherelle, the WNBA, and others advocated for her release, and it was great to see the love of the community shine through. But in Russia, lesbianism seems to be treated like a mental disorder so everyone is incredulous that she has a wife.
Her wife was finishing law school and attempting to pass the bar exam while advocating for Griner's release.
I thought that this book was really well done, and the warmth of Griner and her community balanced out the part about being in a Russian gulag.
Because she is such a tall person, nothing fits. Her legs hang off the end of the bed until they make a bed that is the correct size for her. The gulag uniforms don't fit until she has a seamstress who makes her a new one.
After reading this and To Build a Castle by Vladimir Bukovsky, I am pretty sure that to survive your time in a Russian gulag, you are just supposed to take up chain smoking. It is mandatory.
She lost nearly thirty pounds while in the gulag.
Her wife Cherelle, the WNBA, and others advocated for her release, and it was great to see the love of the community shine through. But in Russia, lesbianism seems to be treated like a mental disorder so everyone is incredulous that she has a wife.
Her wife was finishing law school and attempting to pass the bar exam while advocating for Griner's release.
I thought that this book was really well done, and the warmth of Griner and her community balanced out the part about being in a Russian gulag.
WIL WHEATON dot NET (wwdn_feed) wrote2025-06-03 06:13 pm
wwdn_feed) wrote2025-06-03 06:13 pmbehind his eyes he says ‘i still exist’
This thing has been happening to me since I built my first blog about 25 years ago, and you’d think that by now it would have stopped, but here we are.
The longer I go between posts, the more SUPER IMPORTANT the next post becomes. This is especially gross after I’ve been promoting something. I feel like I’ve bombarded the world with my promotional stuff, so I ought to give the world something to offset that.
…only when I sit down to do that, the part of me that creates those things is like, “Oh hell no. I’m on vacation.”
So I come in here, day after day, get to about this point in a post just like this one, and then I get frustrated, delete it, and go play video games.
I have to break that cycle, so here’s a little bit of a roundup to put something new here.
Yesterday, I finished building the LEGO Batmobile, which I started months ago. It has some adorable little details that were a lot of fun to discover, but holy shit was it tedious most of the time. It turns out that building vehicles, even one that I have been obsessed with since I was a little kid, is not something I enjoy.
I think I’m doing the Haunted House next.
If you’d told me a year ago that the Stanley Cup final in 2025 would be the same teams from 2024, I never would have believed you, and once again I am cheering for Florida because Edmonton is literally the only Canadian team I just can’t abide. Sorry, Oilers Nation, but fuck Corey Perry.1
Remember Trek Side of the Moon? It’s back, in T-shirt form.
I loved the movie, but am very late to the What We Do In The Shadows series party, so I’m only now getting into its third season. A couple nights ago, I watched an episode that takes them to Atlantic City. Nandor gets completely hooked on a Big Bang Theory slot machine, and is delighted to discover that there is a television series that is “faithful to the slot machine.”2
The thing is … because The Big Bang Theory canonically exists inside the What We Do In The Shadowsverse, that means I exist inside that universe. This feels like an achievement that should come with a badge, and it makes me stupidly happy.3
Late last week,I saw that Loretta Swit passed away. We worked together when I was a kid, and I remembered some things about her.
A friend of mine observed that we are slowly becoming the Elders, and that’s just really weird. I have been thinking about that, and it turns out there is a lot about that I’m not really ready to embrace, like accepting that people I love, who mean so much to me, are getting older (and elderly) with all that implies. It’s just … it’s really weird. At the same time, it feels really good and … gentle? … to embrace a position in life that allows me to be a kind, patient, supportive, and encouraging person in the world for anyone who needs it.
I’m thinking a lot about how I can talk about things from a place of experience, in a way that younger me would have been able to hear and internalize. I want to be a Helper so much, y’all.
I had a meeting with my team to discuss next steps on It’s Storytime. The audience is small but passionate, and growing steadily. I think we’ve found a way to make it break even, or slightly better, while the audience continues to grow. Thank you to everyone who is supporting the show on Patreon, to everyone who has liked and subscribed and whatnot. It looks like the audience is right around 20,000 listeners which seems like a lot to me, and something I feel really good about! But you know what’s crazy? In the podcast world, it’s tiny. Isn’t that nuts?
When I was walking Marlowe, I came across this weirdly bent spoon in the street, so I posted it in my Instagram stories with the caption “If anyone sees Uri Gellar, tell him I found his spoon.”4
I think this is a pretty good joke.
I watched a fantastic film a couple nights ago, about the post-punk scene in West Berlin from 1979-1989, called B-Movie: Lust & Sound. It’s streaming all over the place, and if you like the same kind of music and aesthetics that I do, it’s probably worth your time.
I think that’s all for now. Have a good day, friends.
- Also, Florida sent 9 players to Four Nations, and Four Nations was the most exciting and satisfying hockey tournament I have ever seen. So there’s that.
︎ - I love how this show keeps surprising me like this. The first time, it was throwing the bone off the roof in the werewolf fight. I never saw it coming, and it just killed me. ︎
- I also exist inside Tommy Westphal’s snow globe, but that doesn’t feel as exclusive. They’ll let anybody into that thing. They let me in there! ︎
- If you get this reference, that means it’s time to schedule a colonoscopy, if you haven’t already. And make sure you’re getting enough vitamin D, because our aging bodies need it. ︎
