Where the Trees’ Eyes Came From is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

The very first tweet I saw when I woke up was about the sudden, heartbreaking death of Kathreen Ricketson, founder and nurturer of Whip Up, one of the most thoughtful, well curated crafts blogs.

Over the years though infrequently, I had the pleasure of being in touch with Kathreen, and though I really didn’t know her well at all, I always admired her openness and warmth, and Whip Up has been amongst my favourite blogs since she started it oh so many years ago.

Along with, I imagine, most of her readers, I was in awe of her well-planned adventure, taking a year off with her family to travel and write about it. That she died during this trip, with her kids on the shore calling for help, breaks my heart more thoroughly than I can express.

The Whip Up team is working to set up an education fund for the kids. I’ll update this post with a link when more information is available.

And then.

An hour after trying to swallow this news and adjust my world accordingly, we got a call from my brother-in-law that our shiny new niece was born this morning. All health and happiness and smiles we could hear across the continent via the miracle of telephonics.

And so I find myself in the very still, quite alarming state of feeling simultaneously mournful and jubilant.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what to do with myself today.

Claudio.Ar via Compfight

When the Circle of Life Kicks You in the Nuts, then Hands You a Margarita is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

The title of my talk is Sometimes It Ain’t Pretty: How the Painful Parts of Creativity Can Be Our Strongest Assets. Join us from 6:30-8pm next Tuesday, May 21st.

The gist: No amount of you-can-do-it cheerleading can prepare us for the inevitable pitfalls inherent to creative exploration. We’re going to struggle, we’re going to stumble, we’re going to fall flat on our face. The thing is, everyone does. So rather than avoiding failure at all costs, I say we allow – or even force – ourselves to dig deep into it for a while. From an intimate understanding of our relationship with failure we can become stronger, more flexible, less afraid, and more adventurous.

Will I see you there? Show of hands!

Event: Hot Art Wet City Show & Tell is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

RSS has been around for a very long time, but it’s never been widely described in a way that non-technical people understand well, which has kind of held it back despite it being such a fabulous thing. Most website platforms automatically publish an RSS feed, and the feeds are used in loads of ways we barely notice, but enjoy.

Over the years, various apps have been around to aggregate feeds, so a person (say, me) can collect the blogs and other media they want to keep up with and read it all in one place. That’s why Abby likens an RSS reader to a magazine. It’s like your very own custom magazine. I subscribe to a blog’s feed using my feed reader, then I go to the reader to read all the blogs (and news sites and whatever) I’ve subscribed to.

For the last few years, Google Reader has been a wildly popular feed reader (as much as something can be wildly popular in a context of being misunderstood and under-utilized). But several weeks ago, Google announced that it will be shuttering Reader in July. *sadface*

I’m not ready to give up reading blogs by RSS despite all the talk of RSS being dead, so I followed the flow of outrage and proposed solutions that came in the wake of Google’s announcement, and within minutes I signed up for a Feedly account. Feedly is also an RSS reader, but it’s far prettier than Google Reader, and it plays very nicely with one of my other favourite apps, Buffer. Plus, Feedly connects with Google Reader now, and promises to seamlessly transition from that service once Google cuts the wires. It has a very handy browser plugin that makes it ridiculously simple to add feeds, and its iPhone app is amazeballs.

Naturally, Feedly isn’t the only option. I’ve seen lots of love amongst crafts bloggers for Bloglovin’, too. I added a Bloglovin’ button to my sidebar if you’re using that app and you want to add my blog to your very awesome custom magazine. No pressure.

* RSS = really simple syndication. It’s the code that creates a constantly updated feed for blogs and most other media and social-media sites. RSS reader apps track those feeds and collect new posts for you in one central location.

A Note About Feed Readers and RSS is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

The two central ideas we planned around we learned from my friend Angie, whose daughter is in O’s preschool class. 1) Keep the party very small, and 2) Have booze.

We invited four of O’s friends from school, and consider it to be about the luckiest thing ever that we love all their parents. The only other people we invited were my mom (see bit above about her being in town), Greg’s parents, and a beloved preschool teacher. This meant that Owen was very, very comfortable with every person who was there, so he could have a great time without feeling shy or overwhelmed, or more threatened than usual about sharing his toys.

Greg made a killer bourbon punch, which he offered around starting at the beginning of the party, which made Saturday the day I was drinkin’ at ten in the morning.

The rest of the plan was to keep things fun, simple and inexpensive. Though we’ve put in a pretty big vegetable garden in the past, we recently paved it to park the new camper trailer. Our plan this summer was to put in a container garden in the front yard, that O would tend with me all summer, more for the experience than for any goal of serious vegetable harvesting. Which led to the party idea, which was to put the little hands to work.

Fun. Dirt, and lots of it. First thing we did was have the kids each plant a seed in their own flower pot, which they filled, planted then watered. I labeled each one with their name and set them aside for the end of the party. Then we got to work. Though we had about a dozen containers to plant, we only put out the two long planter boxes, which gave all the kids lots of room to work. We opened a huge bag of potting soil at both ends of the boxes, and the kids shoveled away. As they got bored, they moved on to play around the backyard, and a relaxed time was had by all (including some increasingly tipsy parents).

I bought seedlings and seeds based more on how much I think the kids will enjoy watching them grow than on my own desire for food. I’ll post a photo of the finished garden soon, but here’s what we planted: snap peas, pole beans, a cherry tomato plant, two plum tomato plants, a Roma tomato plant, a zucchini, dwarf sunflowers, poppies and marigolds.

Simple. One specific activity, one general theme, two hours of party. That’s it. Keeping it this simple meant there was very little room for disappointment about plans not working out, since as we all know, herding preschoolers is like herding cats. Who can talk. And scream louder than cats. Not one child complained during the ten-minute planting activity, and since they could just roam around on their own for the rest of the time, there was almost no herding necessary. The only decorations we had were balloons. Greg made finger sandwiches for lunch, and cupcakes for cake.

Inexpensive. We were going to put in the container garden anyway, so that expense wasn’t really related specifically to the party. Still, soil was the most expensive thing we bought. Then the balloons. I picked up shovels and flower pots at the dollar store, and that was that.

At the end of the party, each child took their flower pot, and we reminded everyone they had an open invitation to visit the container garden all summer. After Owen’s nap that afternoon, we moved those planter boxes to the front yard along with the other ceramic containers we had lying around, and we spent the rest of the afternoon putting in the garden. There are lots of kids on our block, and O’s preschool friends all live in the neighbourhood. I’m hoping this little project ends up being an exciting introduction to gardening for Owen, and hopefully results in a gathering place for lots of summer fun times over the next few months.

A Wee Gardening Birthday Party is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Here’s an utterly crappy photo of my new favourite shawl. Oh, how I love simple, simple knitting. It’s the closest I get to self-directed calm.

I used one skein of SweetGeorgia Yarns Tough Love Sock in the colourway Felicia custom-dyed for Knit City last October. Here are all the project details, on Ravelry.

Speaking of Knit City, I’ll be teaching there! “Funny,” you must be thinking, “Kim never mentions teaching.”

That’s because I never teach! Not my favourite thing to do! But after I spoke at last year’s Knit City – about crochet, to a roomful of mostly knitters – I was inspired. I was also encouraged by people who came up to me that whole weekend to tell me my talk led them to think about crochet in a whole new way. By the end of the weekend, I had a whole class outline in my brain.

So I’m very excited to be teaching crochet – specifically for knitters! – at the 2nd annual Knit City in October. And by “crochet for knitters” I most certainly do not mean “for only minimal use like picking up stitches or adding an edging or doing a provisional cast on.” By “crochet for knitters” I mean that I’ll be teaching beginner crochet in a way specifically tailored to people who already know how yarn works (and who may have a healthy skepticism about crochet). It’s beginner crochet, taught just for knitters.

I hope to see you there. And lest you think you must be local to attend such a fabulous event, allow me to tell you now that teachers and speakers will be coming from all over for it, and Vancouver is an outstanding city to visit. So you should come, no matter where you live. You just should.

A Finished Shawl (Plus a Teaching Announcement!) is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Ok, no, I get it, it can be hard to breast feed. What I’m bothered by is the rampant rhetoric that implies that basic parenting is some sort of extraordinary achievement, as if children haven’t been raised since, literally, the dawn of humanity.

Then there was this: From Soy to Sex: Why ‘Natural’ Often Means Bad for Women, by Jessica Valenti. In this case, I love what she wrote; what bugs the crap out of me is that she had something to write about. Damnit.

I spent the afternoon yesterday wearing my cranky pants.

So this really bugged the crap out of me yesterday. is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

• No commentary needed: Mercedes Tarasovich-Clark’s pinboard for Twin Peaks
• I bought some vintage Sesame Street bed sheets to make Owen a blanket for the camper (exactly like the ones I had when I was little!), then realized I’ve never done such a thing. Diane to the rescue with this great tutorial on how to make a new blanket from thrifted sheets and blankets.
• Tech writer Paul Miller spent a year offline, during which time he discovered the internet wasn’t, in fact, the cause of his bad habits. His essay concluding the experiment is one of the most poignantly self-aware I’ve read. You should read it. Especially if you think the internet is ruining society.
• “I alone am responsible for defining what I want, and then creating it.” – Tara Swiger on How to Be (your own version of) Awesome
• Lee Meredith’s new Betiko Shawl Collection. I pre-ordered it immediately.
• Wil Wheaton on the scourge of the internet: They make comments.

Link Love: Thrifted blankets, Comment Trolls and Twin Peaks is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Then today, for no reason at all, I woke up and was all, “I miss Instagram.” Which, weird. I hadn’t given it a thought in months.

Then Diane told me that what I’m really missing are photos of her cat.

So I’m back on there – kpwerker is my name. Chat with me through hipster-filtered square-format pics, eh?

The first one I posted upon my return is this one, of a Honey Cowl I’m knitting out of some unlabeled hand-painted yarn samples I’ve had for years, which I joined into a magic ball.

What kinds of crafts do you post on Instagram? Tell me in the comments with your username!

Back on Instagram is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I loved coming upon this:

Have you seen – or made – anything like this that makes you stop and see familiar things in a new way?

The Trees Had Eyes is a post from Kim Werker's blog.