For The Birds

Piggybacking onto the momentum of having finished Catkins (did I mention that I finished Catkins?), I finished the second sleeve of the Knot Garden.  Just a couple of weeks short of a YEAR since starting it, for the record.  Smug dance of completion to follow, as soon as they dry and get sewn into the body...

So smug am I (and un-anxious to return to the swatchapalooza that is my other concern this week) that I went completely batshit and conceived a cunning backdrop for the Knot Garden. 

I seem to have remembered that in a previous life I used to sew things sometimes.  I have no memory of consciously stopping all sewing activity, but I think it must have been around the same time I stopped a bunch of other stuff I like, in the hopes of getting a book written on time.  Not that I'm complaining, you understand -  it's good to rest some muscles in favor of others from time to time.

Now that I'm gainfully unemployed, all sorts of stuff I used to like doing is popping back into my conciousness.  Stuff like hearing music, and digging in the dirt (garden dirt, not kitchen floor dirt), reading books.  And my old friend, sewing.

And sewing, you may know, is just like falling off a bicycle - once you've learned how to properly screw up a sewing project, you never forget.

It actually started with a conversation I had with my friend Jill (non-knitter, for the record, but still completely lovable).  She asked me what kind of bird I was, and I didn't know.  I know for sure that she's a Great Blue Heron - (leggy, graceful, eats a fair amount of fish) but I was unable to locate my own inner bird.  Jill thinks I might be a robin, which notion I sort of like. 

So the bird thing has been with me, and I got it in my head that I must need a dress with birds on it to go with my finally-finished Knot Garden.  I waltzed into the fabric store, and there it was:  Exactly what I would have made if I had set out to design fabric with birds on it:  

I cut out the dress last night, and I sewed it today.  And in a turn of fate which is nothing like knitting (and nothing like sewing, for that matter), it fits just right and I completely love it.  Too weird.  That is just not the way it works - no drama, no odyssey, no falling out of hair clumps.  Just found it, made it, love it.  Interesting how easy it is when there's nothing at stake.  Wonder where that magic goes when someone inserts a deadline?

And now there must be shoes.  We're not savages here, after all.