Mother's day picnic with Greg's parents at the Fraser River, followed by much exploring of boardwalk, beach and grass.

1, 2, 3, swing!

Spotted at a yard sale as we drove by. Circled around the block and bought it for $10.

Got the boy a helmet, and he went for his first trike ride (push)!

Played with neighbours for a while, till a peanut butter & jelly sandwich an hour before dinner was an absolute necessity.

On a Sunny Spring Day is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Opname van een hoorspel / Recording a radio play, by Nationaal Archief on Flickr (no known copyright restrictions)

A couple years ago, I followed the inception of Longshot magazine (then called 48 Hours), which was a full print magazine issue some very smart magazine people put together from submissions to print-ready in just two days. I didn’t know that some very smart radio people had started occasionally doing the same thing in radio, too.

Until last week, when I stumbled onto an announcement that Longshot Radio, in conjunction with Radiolab and the 99% Conference, were going to do their thing again, this time on the topic of creativity, revision and failure.

As it happens, I’ve had the topic of creativity and failure at the front of my mind this month, even more than usual, and my reaction to that news was, “Ooh, that’ll be interesting. No wait, I’ll pitch a story!” Once I started my email to them, I forced myself not to apologize for not actually knowing much about making radio. I just introduced Mighty Ugly and plugged myself. I’m kind of uncomfortable rereading that plugging-myself part of the email, but it wasn’t, like, ego-maniacal, and, well, no going back.

And you know? I heard back from them an hour later, asking me to write a short piece and pairing me up with a producer named Pat Walters. The rest was a whirlwind of some seriously intense discussion of creativity and failure, some hyperactive writing, some feverish looking for my microphone, some fitful sleep, and some recording.

And then it was done. And a lot of people made some awesome radio. I especially love the Q & A stuff they did through the Radiolab blog, and the woman who told about making mud pies in her mother’s kitchen. That the producers included my piece in the final cut of the show makes me feel all tingly. What a thrill, man!

It was the most fun I’ve had online since that Joss Whedon thing.

Have a listen, eh? What do you think?

[Edited to add photo, and to point out, in case it's not obvious, that the moral of this story is that it can't hurt to ask, and asking is way more fun than sitting around thinking about what it would be like to ask.]

Longshot Radio on Creativity and Failure (I’m on It!) is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I used to be in a local book club, and I even ran it for a while. I fell out of sync with it when I found I wanted to read whatever I wanted to read, and was feeling stressed about reading book-club books.

Unrelated to that, I fairly recently reconnected with an old friend on Facebook¹. We met when we were teenagers, as members of a Jewish youth group. It does not cease to delight me that I love Robin as much now as I did then, even as we haven’t laid eyes on each other in almost twenty years. Also, Robin writes two of my favourite blogs – one about parenting her three kids, and one about her new-found sewing hobby.

When I saw that Robin participates in this book club, I thought, Robin’s one of the most thoughtful people I know, I bet that’s a great group. I’d like to read as part of a group again. Maybe I’ll join. And I did. And this is my first post about a book we’ve read.

I often think about my high-school days as my Jewish days. The youth group was a good outlet for me. I hated school and didn’t have many friends there, and the youth group was where I got to really learn and grow socially. I was quite active in the governing of my local chapter, and also in the greater Upstate New York region. Because it was a religious organization, there were expectations surrounding how the youth leaders were to behave. We were, in essence, to walk the walk of our religious sect – to keep kosher (at least outside the home, where people could see us), to observe the Sabbath and holidays, to regularly attend religious services, etc.

Things began to fall apart for me when I was sixteen, though, when I finally realized I’d just never believed in god, and beyond that, that the organization’s insistence that I behave in ways that were different from my family’s implied that my family was doing something wrong. We didn’t keep kosher at home, for example. Did that mean I wasn’t being raised right? Fuck that, was pretty much my adolescent response (it remains my adult response).

I distanced myself from the youth group my senior year in high school, and continued to struggle with my religious and cultural identity, and wasn’t really comfortable outing myself as an atheist until I was in my mid-twenties.

It’s a great coincidence that the first book I’ve read as part of this book club, then, is I Am Forbidden, by Anouk Markovits. It’s a new novel, about two girls growing up in a Hasidic family. Hasidism is one of the most fundamentalist sects of Judaism, and this is very much a book about the rigidity and isolation of fundamentalist religious practice.

Reading this book left me in a tailspin, thinking about all those confusing religious-identity things again. In my thoroughly secular life, I’ve wondered more and more about my Jewish identity – which is very strong in a cultural sense – since Owen came along. I want Owen to grow up in a Jewish home, because that’s our culture. And that means I need to resurrect some practices I’d long ago abandoned. Like we lit Hanukkah candles last winter, for the first time in over a decade.

But, wait. This is not what I was going to write about.

I’ve been thinking almost non-stop about what I’d write about my experience of this book, because it was such a rich read for me. I related to it, even though I’ve never come close personally to experiencing fundamentalism in my religion.

So I’ve decided to write about this:

The book focuses, as I said, on two girls. One is Atara, eldest daughter of Zalman Stern, a very pious Jew. The other is Mila, who was adopted into the family as a young child after her parents were killed during the Second World War. Mila’s life was saved by a boy whose parents had also been killed. He had been taken in by the family’s housekeeper and hidden in her Christian home, as a Christian boy.

The boy had lived for seven years as a Christian when he saved Mila’s life and helped her to find the Sterns. By then the war was over, and Zalman Stern went to get the boy so that he could live amongst Jews, his people. Florina, the boy’s adoptive mother, had known (I think) that the day might come. And the boy had loved her, his second mother. Still, he went to live with the Sterns until it was time for him to go to America to study with the Rebbe, who had fled Europe during the war.

Atara and Mila were the best of friends, and were raised as sisters. As adolescents, though, Atara became skeptical. She wanted to read secular books and question religious interpretations. Mila was devout. She wanted to live a Jewish life in all the ways of her family.

One of the ways this book made my head spin was its treatment of children being raised by adoptive families. About how the boy was taken from his second mother and it was expected that he couldn’t have properly loved her, because she wasn’t Jewish. As he tried to live the most pious of lives, he still struggled to have her in his heart.

Mila, the adopted daughter, also struggled to live the most pious of pious lives.

Atara, the biological daughter, eventually left, because the pious life was suffocating her, and her family mourned her as if she had died.

The double standard of Jewish second mothers being mothers, but goyishe second mothers not counting rekindled the anger I feel toward organized Judaism of any sect.

We have not converted Owen, even though most synagogues would have us do so for him to be considered a proper Jew. The way I see it, I’m either his mother or I’m not (Judaism is a maternalistic [oops; corrected] matriarchal religion – if your mother’s Jewish, you’re Jewish, as far as Jews are concerned). If the synagogue doesn’t fully recognize me as his mother, it’s not something I want to be a part of, ever.

This is a very rambling post. More rambling than usual, even. My head still spins from this book, and I think that’s part of why I came out of my rut – it feels good to be so confused about something I want to figure out.

I recommend the book regardless of your religious experience. It’s a tale of love as much as it’s a tale of religion, of skepticism, of devotion.

This Book Made My Head Spin: I Am Forbidden is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Because in addition to saying some very grounded and awesome things about creativity and the creative process and hip hop, she said this about failure:

I make mistakes and I learn from them. Failure is everything. One of the most valuable things I learned recently is that being an artist is not about being comfortable. What it really is about is gaining more awareness of what’s out there and what’s possible. As soon as you have enough of a foundation of what you know, you stand on that and reach for the next phase. So if you’re a totally uncomfortable, miserable artist, that’s great.

Indeed. Personally, I find the discomfort and misery to be a source of, how do I say this, tremendous joy and satisfaction. Funny how that happens. Pretty much all the creative successes I have happen when I’m reaching for the next phase, even after I’ve fallen over a few times. And when I’m not reaching, that’s when the bad kind of misery sets in.

Esperanza Spalding - Estate fiesolana 2009, by Andrea Mancini on Flick (CC-A licensed)

Esperanza Spalding: “Failure is everything.” is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Rae is turning out to be a delightfully mindless knit, especially since I finally figured out how to tell if I’m about to start an increase row (there’s one every fourth row of garter stitch and the thought of moving a marker every four rows gives me hives). Here’s how to spot the kfb on the wrong side of the fabric if you, too, want Rae to be as simple as possible: It looks kinda like a V. If there’s a plain-old garter ridge above one of those Vs, the next row is an increase row.

I've circled the increase. Can you spot one on every second garter ridge?

As for Land & Sea, look at all that land!

Industriousness: WIP Wednesday is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Anyway, I have a point.

Which is that a few weeks ago I was quite surprised to be invited to the media preview of the spanking new IKEA in Richmond, the suburb just to the south of Vancouver. There’s been an IKEA there since 1976, but they’ve built a new one across the street that’s about 130,000 square feet bigger. I’d known about the plan, but it wasn’t something I gave much thought to.

I admit that I went last night mostly because we’d decided it’s time to get Owen a wee table and chair, and IKEA seems the place to get such things. And we needed a couple new pillows. I had a headache but I went anyway. And good gods am I glad I did. The place is going to be packed when it opens tomorrow, and given that the old store was so crowded as to be annoying on any given rainy weekend, I anticipate the new store is going to be similarly packed for weeks to come. Because it. is. awesome. So shopping with only a couple hundred people in the store? A damn delight.

Now, it’s IKEA. We all know it, so I won’t go into it. I’ll just say this:

No mere ball pit for child-minding here. I wish I could have gone into this woodland wonderland to check it out more closely. When Owen’s 37″ tall, I may shop at IKEA just because of this.

But also because of this:

Peppered throughout the store are these wicked play stations short enough for toddlers and tall enough for bigger kids. This one is in the fabric area, which, brilliant.

And which brings me to:

Fabric. Last night I stood (practically by myself. Seriously, if you ever have a chance to shop at a nearly empty IKEA store, take it) in the kids’ area looking at curtains, and I thought once again about how IKEA curtains are made to fit the tallest windows in the land. And about how we live in our basement with smaller windows than even the bigger windows on the main floor that are still too short for IKEA curtains. And I continued to think about how I end up using IKEA curtains as just plain-old fabric, and then I looked down and there was fabric. Just, fabric. No seams to undo or other curtainy things to cut around. Fabric with spiders and owls and hedgehogs and squirrels and all the things my kid loves and I bought some immediately of course I did duh.

And during my meanderings I finally met for the very first time Jan from Poppytalk, who lives not very far away and whom I’ve exchanged some emails with but whom I’d never managed to see with my own two eyes. And I met Annemarie from Yoyomama, who has a lovely and contagious smile. (I met these two women because – take note – my Twitter avatar looks like me. Jan stopped me and asked if I’m @kpwerker, and of course I am! What a delight! And Annemarie stopped me, too, not because she knows me, but because I’d tweeted about the media event and she recognized me. So, face instead of logo, people, face instead of logo.) And I saw other local bloggers like Raul and Ariane and it was just a lovely time.

And this morning there was this:

Pleasantly Surprised: The New IKEA in Richmond, BC is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

But last weekend Greg took Owen and Cleo to Whistler with his parents, and I stayed home. In my quiet, quiet house, alone for the first time in a year and a half. So I decided to host what I like to call a poor man’s retreat – a sleepover at my house.

Now you might expect, since I’m blogging about this and all, that I’ll tell you about the cute cupcakes I made with icing shaped like yarn, and the napkins I folded to look like crochet hooks, and the bunting I sewed to hang from the chairs set around the table I’d stocked with delectable confections of every sort.

Alas, no. I don’t live one of those beautiful blog lives. Although I did bake muffins, I baked them from a mix. And though I didn’t decorate, I did clean the toilets and put clean sheets on the beds.

The whole point was to spend time with crafty friends and to relax.

By 5PM on Saturday, the six of us were gathered in my living room, knitting and crocheting. We ate chips from a bowl and dropped muffin crumbs on the rug. We looked up celebrity photos on an iPad, laughed with abandon, and talked yarn and projects. Ravelry was consulted more than once. We drank a bottle of elderflower water, most of a bottle of wine and half a beer. We feasted on sushi from the restaurant a couple blocks away, and then on cupcakes and ice cream.

By midnight, two women had gone home and four of us prepared to go to sleep. Two shared the bed in the guest room and two of us shared my bed. We left the dishes dirty.

By 9:30 Sunday morning the four of us were again in the living room with needles and hook in hand. At 10 one of the women who’d gone home to sleep the night before returned for brunch. I made banana chocolate chip pancakes and Emily made scrambled eggs. Marianela had brought fruit and Alexa took out the ice cream. It was, again, a feast.

By 1PM my house was empty. And it was surprisingly clean, for these women are amazing. And I had no decorations to take down. No leftovers to wish I didn’t have to eat.

I took a long shower, stripped the bed in the guest room, and spent the rest of the day crocheting, knitting and sewing.

I felt so relaxed. I’d knitted several inches on my Rae scarf and several inches on my Land & Sea blanket. But mostly, I’d spent comfortable time with crafty friends without a care in the world beyond what to eat next and whether I was on an increase row. No expensive trip or intense preparations required.

Here’s how you, too, can throw a poor-man’s knitting and crochet retreat:

1. Choose a night.
2. Invite people. Perhaps point out that a sleepover at your house is free. Let people know how many beds and sofas you can offer for sleeping, and how much floorspace you have. Let attendees know if they need to bring sleeping bags, pillows, towels, etc. Decide amongst yourselves whether to approach food potluck-style, cook-together-style, or by ordering in.
3. Make sure your house is in a state you’re comfortable with. Nobody cares if it’s immaculate. Nobody needs you to decorate. Just have enough clean dishes and glasses and toilet paper.
4. Enjoy.

How To Host a Poor-Man’s Knitting & Crochet Retreat is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I’ve been in a rut and this post is part of a series I’m writing to chronicle my efforts to get out of it. Are you in a rut, too? Or maybe you just want to spiff things up a little for yourself? Join in. I’m calling it the Rut Race.

Earlier this week, when the baby was sleeping and I had the rest of the house to myself and I planned to crochet and watch television, I found myself writing to a few colleagues for advice about an idea I’d barely spent any time thinking about. I hit send before I could reconsider, and then I went and did my crocheting.

I woke up the next morning wondering what on earth I’d been thinking. I was tempted to write again to take it back. It was way too early. I wasn’t ready.

But by the time I got to my email, one of those colleagues had already responded, and with oodles of support. And then, as they say, shit got real.

I may not have felt ready, but that didn’t matter anymore. It was time to go big or go home.

So I stole moments to put in the thought I hadn’t put in before opening my big fat mouth. I talked to Greg about it. I slept on it.

And today I had a choice: I could hedge my way out of it, or I could commit.

The rut said to back off. But I’m no friend of my rut. So I put my game face on, people. I forced myself not to apologize for jumping the gun. I forced myself to say all the things I wanted to say, to think big, and to say it all.

Maybe it’ll all work out how I want it to and maybe it won’t. But I’m so much more excited about this idea than I was before. And I know the idea so much better. So even if it doesn’t all turn out the way I want it to, I’ll have that. And that’s a lot.

And just as important, I’ll have the kickass feeling that comes with not holding back. It’s a good feeling. I suggest you try it.

This may have been the best Rut Race exercise yet. I have a feeling I wouldn’t have done these things, though, if I hadn’t committed to this week-long exercise. Today’s the first day I’ve really felt like I can get out of this rut sooner than later.

And this concludes my commitment to write every day about this. I’m proud of myself for following through with it. I feel better than I did at the start. I’m not out of my rut yet, but I’ll get there. And I may write more about it as I go, even if not daily.

So how are you doing? Are your efforts paying off? Are you feeling unchanged? Worse?

Rut Race, Day 7: Put My Game Face On is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I’ve been in a rut and this post is part of a series I’m writing to chronicle my efforts to get out of it. Are you in a rut, too? Or maybe you just want to spiff things up a little for yourself? Join in. I’m calling it the Rut Race.

Most of the things I’ve been doing to get out of my rut have been new things, new approaches to old things, or things I haven’t done in a long time. But I’ve also been trying to make sure I keep doing things I’ve been doing that I know make me feel good.

Namely, I’ve been crocheting or knitting every night. Not out of obligation to my projects or to the people I’m making them for, but out of the simple satisfaction I take from the activity.

Mostly, I’ve been steadily progressing on my Land & Sea blanket. I didn’t have time at all to work on it during our trip back east, which saddened me. But I’ve been stitching a few rows a night since we got back, and I’m especially enjoying it because there’s more and more land in with the sea now.

And I’ve started knitting the Rae scarf by Jane Richmond for the knit-along my Friday-night Urban Yarns stitch group is doing. It’s so simple and lovely and I’m making it from a skein of stunning SweetGeorgia yarn I’ve had for a couple years.

I’ve been crafting throughout this rut, which makes this one different from others I’ve experienced. But I’m not taking that for granted. I’m making sure I attend to my crafting needs, for what good is getting out of a rut if I’m just going to fall into another one straight away?

Rut Race, Day 6: Keep on Keeping On is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I’ve been in a rut and this post is part of a series I’m writing to chronicle my efforts to get out of it. Are you in a rut, too? Or maybe you just want to spiff things up a little for yourself? Join in. I’m calling it the Rut Race.

A month ago I saw Rachael Ashe at a Vancouver Mini Maker Faire event and she suggested we make a coffee date. She’s recently started working on her art full time and she’s been initiating coffee dates with lots of people. It’s something I used to do a lot, but haven’t done at all since the baby arrived. Since we started needing to pay for childcare, I’ve had a hard time not “working” when we’re paying the babysitter.

FAIL.

The thing about creative work, of course, is that it just doesn’t get done at all if you’re burnt out. And when I’m burnt out, I’m paying the babysitter so I can stare at Pinterest and wish I were sleeping. It’s way more worthwhile to pay the babysitter so I can recharge and get tons more work done.

Note to Self: Keeping up connections to people in my community is an integral part of my solo creative business. An integral part. Do not neglect it!

So. This morning I woke up tired and freaked out about my lengthy to-do list and tempted to hide under the covers and/or cancel my plan with Rachael. But this is the Rut Race and I did no such things. Which is good because Rachael and I got to know each other better and we talked about challenges we’re experiencing and we talked about our goals and we talked about people we know who might help the other in some way or another. It was fun and the place where we met was lovely and I’m so very glad we met up.

Then, since I’d already spent 45 minutes on the bus getting to Gastown, I had lunch with Emily, coordinator of Vancouver Maker Faire. We talked about how I can help more and we talked about the meaning of making and we talked about projects we want to do together. I always love talking to Emily, and it was a treat to have her all to myself for a time.

And now I’m writing this on my bus ride home. I’m exhausted because the baby didn’t sleep well last night and so I didn’t sleep well last night. And I’m feeling  stressed because I still have that pile of work waiting for me and I’ll only have an hour to work on it before the babysitter leaves. But I’m so glad I spent the bulk of my day with creative people I admire.

I have a list of items to follow up on. I feel connected to other creative people. I feel a part of something special and important.

Assuming I catch up on sleep tonight, I’m confident I’ll wake up tomorrow feeling even more glad about what I did today.

Have you been keeping yourself chained to your desk out of obligation or fear? (Stop doing that.)

Rut Race, Day 5: Get Out and Converse! is a post from Kim Werker's blog.