Hibernation season

In the quiet of winter, I have a tendency to revisit past decisions. This year it’s been helpful to see just how far I’ve come.

Winter in San Francisco is green—impossibly, beautifully green. We have a Mediterranean climate here which means we have a dry season and a rainy season.

Summers are dry, and the sun turns our hills into a beautiful gold (which was my inspiration for the golden color I created and dyed on the yarn in this picture). Winters bring rain, and this winter has brought us so much rain.

Since December, we’ve received 18 inches of rain, which is 92 percent of our total expected rainfall for a full year. It’s wet, which means that grass is growing, everything is green, and winter is here. After more than 20 years in San Francisco, I finally feel like this rainy, indoor, green season—when so much of the northern hemisphere is otherwise blanketed in snow—this, right now, feels like hibernation season.

What distinguishes your season of hibernation, and how do you sink into the season?

For me, I enjoy our fireplace, or light candles when it’s too mild for a fire. I snuggle under blankets and wear my favorite hand-knit sweaters. Molly the beagle snuggles close (for all her faults, she is a champion snuggler), and I knit.

I also ponder, and the meanderings of my thoughts often lead me to revisit older decisions I’ve made and other versions of myself. It’s a contemplative season for me, in the dark and quiet and rain, and this year, this fourth pandemic winter, I feel less shook by the outer world and more grounded by my inner world. It’s been a long, hard, and hard-won season for me.

I’ve talked before about how I downsized my business amid the grief and isolation of the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and how I shifted gears because I needed to take closer care of myself and my family. A lot of this care has been to help myself adjust, mentally, to a rapidly changed world. It’s been about a year since I shared that choice with you (and longer since I admitted the need for it to myself).

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

~Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

I’m not sure if this year, 2023, is a year that will give answers, but, right now, I know myself more deeply and this feels good.

I have been through too many seasons of grief in my life to ever ever give credence to that hackneyed and dismissive phrase of hard things being a gift. Grief, loss, difficulty is always hard and it’s always unfair.

During this year’s hibernation, though, I’m feeling the grief, and also letting in a bit of motherly pride for myself in how I still can love deeply, and how the things I do, from my knitting to my knitting business, reflect my core desire for all of us to be okay.

The last number of years have been ones that have asked questions, as I imagine they have for you, too.

Just last night, while watching a television commercial for Obamacare open enrollment, I remembered how, during the Trump years, the enrollment period was shortened and the publicity budget was slashed. I wondered aloud how cruel it is to want fewer people to have health care, and part of me wondered how those years could have happened. But they did, and that truth is becoming more integrated for me. The spirit of community care that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about in Democracy in America is as American as our history of racism, as is its continued deadly impact as is our collective denial of this impact.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” Zora Neale Hurston.

As I think about questions, and answers, I thank all of you (over 1000 now!) who have taken my Big Survey of Knitters. I’m reading and pondering all of your comments and responses. You are confirming some of what my intuition told me about the community that’s gathered here on Substack, who follow me on Instagram, and who have bought yarn, kits or patterns from my shop. While our ages vary, a lot of us are older—and more than half of us are over 50 years old. We each have a lot of yarn—lots of us are knitting from stash, rather than stashing up. And, some of your responses are surprising me—more than half of us have mental health challenges or brain stuff to manage.

If you haven’t yet taken the survey, there’s still time, and I would love to know more about you. The survey will be open till January 22, and after you complete it, you can enter a drawing for some of my hand-dyed yarn.

My newly-finished Spur Hat (links to Ravelry) by Hiromi Nagasawa. I made it from my Cashmere Blend base, and the colorway is one of my Anne of Green Gables-inspired colors, A World of Octobers.

One of the nicest parts of feeling better is having the capacity to write this newsletter (I’ve been sending a new letter every Sunday for the last five months!). I’m also able to do more outward-facing work, whether that’s expanding my yarn subscription, doing my Big Survey of Knitters, or offering kits and yarn.

I know, first-hand, that wanting to predominantly knit from stash, doesn’t mean that you never buy yarn, and I want my yarn to be the one that you always have an exception for because it’s the yarn, or kit, that jumps from your mailbox to your knitting needles.

If you are curious to peruse what I’m offering right now, there are three things going on:

1. My yarn subscription club, Kindred Spirits, is open for new subscribers through today only. (I’ll close it on Monday morning, and then order up the yarn base that I need for dyeing in February.) The opening/closing window happens every two months.

2. My signature all sizes-one price kits are in the shop for Aimee Sher’s new drop-shoulder sweater. Kits will be available for preorder through Wednesday.

3. The three colorways at the top of this email (Moonlight, Foxtail and Meet Me On the Hill) are available for preorder right now on my favorite sweater yarn, Targhee Sweater, which now has 280 yards per 115g skein (my mill started offering 115g skeins rather than the 100g skeins I previously made). It’s a non-superwash Targhee wool and is absolutely, scrumptiously sproingy and soft. (Yes, I invented the words sproingy.)

Meanwhile, in between rainstorms, I’m dyeing yarn for the Bookmarked Everything kits and yarn preorders. If you are waiting for the little book kits to be restocked, hang on! I’ll list them as soon as I’m finished dyeing the first round.

Wherever the road takes me, it feels good to work and dye yarn right now.

Remember to be gentle with yourself

A core tenet of my life is to do the work to see racism and bias and the subtle ways it shows up, and to do the work to unwind it, internally and in all the spaces I’m in. Part of that is talking about it. Part of that is quiet contemplation. As we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Monday, I’m reminded it’s important work and it’s life-long. If you are here, I hold faith that you’re here because you’re also doing the work.

As you do, remember to be gentle with others, and gentle with yourself.

PS: I enjoy the full heartedness of designer Aimee Sher’s knitwear designs and her advocacy for greater inclusion and equity in the knitting world. She has kindly given you, my dear newsletter subscriber, a 20 percent discount on her new sweater design, the Building Blocks Drop, with the code TARGHEE. (The code works both on Ravelry and Payhip.) I encourage you to use this code, buy the pattern, and show her work some love!