Pardon the rather overwhelming amount of "sad" posts, but that's what I'm feeling. I feel alone. I feel like I have to throw up constantly. I feel so squished and open all at the same time it's a little maddening. I've lost him and I'm not sure how to proceed with my life alone. There is a lump in my throat that is not going away. There is an ache in my heart that cannot yet be relieved. I wonder if this is how old empty houses feel? Those achingly lovely turn of the century confections that make my heart happy. How do they feel when there are not people inside them? Rather like I do without my boy. I know it's going to take time, and I know I'll have good days again (like yesterday), but the bad days come and take all the sunshine away. All the hope I work up throughout the week to make it to the weekend that the next day won't suck as badly as this one does gets stolen away in one breath.



I have been told by some to have a meaningless fling with some random person as some party. That will ease the loss. Perhaps that would work for some people, but I am an artist. I feel things differently than some, and not at all for others. Music moves me, it surges through my very blood and makes me shiver. I told a friend once music does to me what alcohol and drugs do to others. That same heady, reckless, restless, feeling that sits in your heart and makes you move. You can't sit still. I can't sit still.
Relationships with people are similar. I ache with love when I watch someone I love sleep beside me. I drink in moments and save them for later, for winter when I'm cold, for being alone. The happy blissful golden moments that are kept in my soul. Mothers know this feeling, they drink in the ephemeral moments of their babies. The first words, first steps, first smiles, laughs. They soak it up and save it for later to soothe them when the child has become an adult and left.



Sitting alone is dangerous right now. Having no where to be, and nothing to do leave me restless and empty. Everyone is at work, or school, or running errands before I woke up and I'm left alone in my room with only the ghosts for company. Trying not to go crazy thinking about what I've lost, and hoping, praying for what is to come. If I had a cat, I would being cuddling it a lot right now. It makes me want something to care for again. A cat, a baby, something, anything. It makes me want to do a play or go to work just for the excuse of having to be somewhere. Sitting alone, something I relished when I was younger, is deadly to me now.

She trudges on

I am in a bubble of space that isolates the outside world from my senses. Touch comes slowly, sounds are the first to assail my battered mind. Thoughts, words come last. I am drowning in my own despair. I know I need help, but don't know if I will get the right help, or if the help will fix my despair, depression.
I pace my floor at night consumed with thoughts of feeling alone, ugly, worthless, useless and concluding that I should leave this world. What's the point of going on? I'm not sure if this stems from loosing love I thought would last forever, in addition to just being depressed anyway, but it hurts. It's affecting my work, it's affecting my life, my future. There are too many people who love me for me to be so selfish as to leave them all, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it. I want to take the pain I feel inside and make it physical. I want to hurt as much in my skin and muscles as I do in my heart and soul.
So I go to work because I know it will distract me from my pain, but it doesn't cure what hurts. Which makes me wonder, what does hurt? And why? Where do I get the idea that I am ugly, horrible monster of a person to the point of not valuing my own talents? To the point of considering wasting my talent in forcing my own death. Death comes for us all, it's what you do with your precious life in the meantime that makes legends or fables or changes in the great wide world. I am just silly enough sometimes to want to make my death come sooner so the world will no longer be troubled with trying to keep me here.
I am sad to loose love I thought would last forever. It weakens my faith and hope in the future. In the fact that there is someone, made especially for me to spend the rest of my life with. I am shattered in this resolute faith of the hope of love. I want to drink until I pass out just so I sleep through the night. I want to beat my body until the bruises show, purple and black, badges of my heart's pain. I want to cry until I can't cry anymore so I purge all the pain from my soul. I want to be happy again and dance in the sunlight. I think I know how to accomplish this, but it's going to take time and patience and hope. Trust in the future, in the promise that the future will be different and that difference will be better. Please, God, let it be so.

Demeter's Daughter

She was drifting again. LIke the wind could pick her up and blow her away, up into the clouds. She only wished to be with him, he was her anchor, her two strong arms that wouldn't let her go.
But it was Spring and Demeter's Daughter had to, once again, emerge from Hell.
Her thoughts glide sluggishly, slick as oil but still brackish and torpid, praying to find that thing that clears her head and allows her to return to the light of day. She remembers dancing in sunlight and embracing the dawn. When life was innocent, placid, naive.
Now things are of a gritty, worn out, greyish cast, crunching under feet unpleasantly. She desperately wants to wake up. She begs for God to make it better again.
She slips from night to day, day into night again, stiffly, slowly like a sleepwalking zombie.
People ask how she is and she lies so well now she forgets to tell the truth to people she loves. She forgets to tell herself she's lying. She hates telling because she feels like she's complaining, and that's never been allowed in her childhood. All she can wish for it for it to end. And soon.
Please, oh please, just let it all stop long enough for me to breathe. My soul is tied to a string and dragging behind me, shards of glass and rock piercing it's core, to lodge without leaving, scarring forever.
She she collects herself, scraping together the blood and bones into a passable girl. Opens her eyes from the mist to squint at the day. To work faster, better, harder, stronger. To pray for Saturday to come, and soon.
She forgets for a few scant hours to press against the dark smothering sadness and simply allows herself to be. Filling coffee cups with inky brown liquid and taking baptized dishes from the washer. She merely follows along, doing what she's told because the robotisim is soothing to her ringing ears, her twitching eyes. She doesn't have to think except to give the correct change.
Until she has to take a break, until she is done with work and standing on the street corner feeling the buses buffet by her grey and black form.
Her entire body is consumed with the desire to mount the steps of his bus, to allow the metal dragon to spirit her away to a place where it doesn't hurt quite so much. Her self control is second nature now, and it burbles beneath her dewy face, claiming dominance. Winning without fighting, and fight for control.
She ducks into her novel, and a fresh Southern Carolina breeze steals her away to another world until her mother calls and she raises her wet head from the literary waters. She wants nothing more but to duck under again, let the world go passing by until things stop hurting. But life grabs her by the soul and won't let go.

Have Sleeves...

...Sweater to Follow?
It seems I have a wee problem.











I have begun two sleeves with only enough yarn to complete ONE SLEEVE! Gah. How silly it that? It's quite silly in terms of knitting but as my budget is severly limited to enough for two skeins of Noro, it's understandable. So my sleeves sit in a knitting bag, on my work table, tempting me with their loveliness and promise of cozy warmth in which I might wrap myself up in come their completion.

I am alive, really!

Wow. That's all I can say. Wow. Like, "How much is wow?" "Right between 'ouch' and 'boing!'" "Wow." (White Christmas) It's been months! Months! Since I wrote here. I am still here, however I'm no longer at my school. It was a wonderful experience and I've learned (rather expensively) that I'm not cut out to be a fashion designer in the fashion world. Maybe on Etsy where you aren't going to die if DVF doesn't like your designs. Someplace where things can be my own take and if you like them, that's cool.
This is all to say that I'm still here and more silliness, honesty, and my crazy life is to follow!

Big League...

I start school tomorrow. And it's nothing simple like Highschool or Community College. This is the big league baby. The Art Institute of Seattle. Ack! I know I'll be okay, and I'll get the hang of things, I just wish I knew which books I need to take and if anyone will be nice to me?

Goodness. I may be an adult but I still have the same worries I did when I was in grade school. I suppose some things never change, then eh?

Autumn Child

I don't know why, but for some reason I am most pensive in the Fall. Perhaps it's because I was born then, and I've come full circle for another year. I can't say exactly, but I don't mind it. I'm in love with the lush colours, the smells, the crispness of the air. It's all so much that I feel like I want to explode with happiness.
Perhaps it is simply the turning of a season, because I feel in love with the new, upcoming season in the Summer and especially in the Spring. Of all four my two favourite are Fall and Spring. They are the most turbulent, the most alive, full of colour and life and wonder. And rain. I love rain.
In the meantime, I knit away, working on gifts for family and friends, product to sell on my Etsy ( Hibougirl Crafts ) and marvel at the wonders around me.

~ What seasons do you like best, and can you say why?

So this is where I work...

...if you want to argue about the virtues and evils of Starbucks, take it elsewhere. I don't care. I mean that respectfully because I'm not here to debate how wonderful or awful my employer is. I love coffee. Plain and simple. I don't really care where I actually get it as long as it's good. Anyway. I digress.
I was searching for a picture that captures Starbucks/it's logo and I stumbled upon the below blog. I was so delighted and amused I've put the link here for whomever stumbles into my wee corner of the blogisphere.

Linkey Linkey, here it be!

As I was walking home today, it struck me that, in Seattle, Summer is ending. No one really wants it to end, even I, a firm Autumn, am mourning the end of summer. It's inevitable. Seasons change when we don't want them to and refuse to change when we do want them to. But when we just move from one day to the next the change seems so sudden because you haven't been paying attention. I think an awareness of the word and it's weather around me are a result of being homeschooled and raised in a family where life is taken a little slower. We take time to dig in the good dark earth, to feel the gritty grains under our fingers and let the brown stain our skin till we can see the ridges of our fingerprints. We play with the earthworms and tenderly transfer new bulbs to safer growing places. I think with an upbringing such as this one may never loose sight of what is happening in the changing of the seasons.
So I walk home feeling the sun on my face, almost too warm but I didn't want to care because it felt so good, and the wind telling me that colder weather is coming. I can smell a barbecue somewhere and the scent reminds me of the beginning of summer when you could smell some of the first barbecues. I can smell the heat evaporating the water on a lawn as I pass it, a lawn mower in the distance putters for some of the last times until the spring. Thinking ahead I realize I'm starting school in a month, I've got a paid theatre gig coming up, and I can't wait for it all to get here. However such emotion is tempered with savoring the last few moments of summer. Soak up the last bits of good sun (but please don't get burnt! :), drink some of the last lemonades, lick your popsicles, and play in running water until it's too cold. Then snuggle up in a warm sweater and grab a cup of something hot and enjoy the cooler months knowing it will all come again. Soon.

Memories...

..no, not the ones in the street light. But ones I treasure now that the force behind creating them is gone. I would give my right arm to spend my sleepy saturday mornings in rehearsal, half awake, taking blocking notation for future reference. To move on to the set, to graduate, as it were, into performance. I feel as though I have lost a part of me, vital to my happiness as a person. I feel incomplete without some faint promise of rehearsal, of the performance stress that I hated then, but miss now. So, for all the complaints, for all the tears, sweat, and curses beneath the breath, I would have it all back again. And that's a good thing to know about oneself, if it's frustrating right now. So please enjoy the memories if they are meaningful to you, and if not, please enjoy the look into my treasured past.

No fruit for you!

I feel ungrateful. Why's that? Well, I've got a good job, I'm working on becoming enrolled in a good school that has an astounding post-school employment rate (for the field in which you studied), I've got a good life, but I'm still unsatisfied somewhere amidst it all. There's some part of me that is totally neglected and it's crying for attention, only I don't know which part. Or at least, I can't decide if it's my theatre crying or my crafting, both of which have been sorely neglected of late.

Maybe I just don't like the transition period. The place where you can see everything lining up for you, only you can't touch it yet. It's there, slowly becoming tangible, you can practically taste it, but you can't take a bite. Maybe I don't like that. I can taste the show, I can see the school, but I can't bite into it and give it my all just yet.

Knit Meme

Knit Meme
Originally uploaded by hibougirl

So, Icve finally caved and jopined the wide world of memes I guess they're called. Here's one for knitters. Head over to my Flickr page to view the answers. :)

The questions are:

What is your first name?
What is your favorite yarn?
What was the first thing you made with yarn?
What is your favorite color?
Which crochet or knitting designer do you have a crush on?
Favorite handmade gift you have received?
Dream project?
Favorite notion?
What will you crochet/ knit next?
What do you love most about yarn?
One word to describe your craft.
Main inspiration to craft.

Goodness, but it's been too long since I posted! There hasn't been phenomenal anything lately until I cleaned out my studio and got a "new" sewing machine. Just wanted to poke my nose in. More later, as I'm not able to type very well tonight. Too much good dinner and Riesling.

A novelty and reflections on a life misplaced

First off, my new gnome lights. Yes, I bought novelty lights in the shape of little gnomes. Now my family is saying I love and collect gnomes. Let me set you straight, not really, but it's slowly turning into a minor fetish.




Yesterday I spent most of the day at my grandparents house in West Seattle. My mother's childhood home and the place of many of my childhood memories. I love my mum's room with it's french doors leading out on a little closed balcony. I love the lion's head down in the garden below. His name is Aslan, naturally.





Now it's just my grandpa living in this big house, and it feels kinda lonely without my grandma there. She's still living, but she's at an Adult Family Home where they can take good care of her with her dementia. There's bits and pieces of her still around my grandpa's home. Her perfume, make-up, clothing, jewellery and I often find myself looking through them wondering what she was like as a young girl, mother. She wasn't a milk and cookies grandma, she was strict and hard on my brothers and me. For all that, we respected her as she was and still is our grandma. I just don't know much about her, from her in her own words. On the flip-side of this is my own family who has raised me with tales of my family history. I know what my parents were like a kids, and teen-agers, adults. All the parts I wasn't present for, I've experienced through their words and stories. So I wonder, looking at my grandma's things, what was her life like before I met her? I wish I could know, I wish she could have told me. Taught me how to sew without a pattern, cook by instinct. With each thing I discover about her, I want to learn more only now she barely remembers herself. It's a sad thing, and I pray that some day I might learn more about her so I can tell her story for her, to my children, and they can tell their children in turn.

D'oey!

*a big resounding smack* <- this is the sound of my palm firmly hitting my forehead, perhaps a couple more times. I FINALLY figured out how to make a blog list, and lists of my favourite things for people to peruse! OH MY GOODNESS!
I just had to let you know I've hit the "I get it!" bit, and admire my dorkiness.

And now back to your regularly scheduled knitting blather...

You know you're a geek when...

...you write a letter using mostly the first lines of all the songs (in chronological movie) order from Across the Universe. Feel free to link back to this, but treat the below as an original work (cause it is) with the exception that the lyrics belong to The Beatles, so I'm not claiming them as mine. There, I think I've covered myself. Anyway, enjoy!



[Dear] Girl,
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup they slither while they pass they slip away. It feels so right now, close your eyes and I'll kiss you! I wanna hold your hand, it won't be long till I belong to you. What you would you do if I sang out of key? Would you stand up and walk out on me? Had it been another day I might have looked the other way, and I'd of never been aware, but as it is I'll dream of [you] tonight. When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, Let It Be. Come together, right now, over me. Why don't we do it in the road? No one will be watching us. If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true? I want you!
Dear Prudence, please don't be long cause I might be asleep. I am he as you are me as we are all together. For the benefit of Mr. Kite, there will be a show tonight because something. Oh darling let me take you down cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields. You say you want a revolution, well we all want to change the world. I look at [it] all, see the love there that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps. Across the universe, when I get the bottom I go back to the top of the slide where I turn and I go for a ride till I get to the bottom and I see you again. [You're] not a girl who misses much.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. Hey, Jude [took] a sad song and [made] it better. Don't let me down. There's nothing you can do that can't be done, picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. All you need is love across the universe!

Lord of the Flies

Not too long ago I made a decision to try and work through all the classical literature you're supposed to read in high school and college, which I never have. It's not that I've been un-exposed to classical literature, just found reading it quite a bore. I've watched a lot of film adaptations of stories; Frankenstein, All Quiet On the Western Front, various Shakespeare and some Dickens. Reading these works is another matter entirely.

On a whim I made my decision and have made it through some of the first chapters of Lord of the Flies. Also on my nightstand is Animal Farm, but I've not had the courage to being that just yet. Oddly enough both of these books are creepy. Simply reading the first few paragraphs of LOTF I was overwhelmed by the underlying sense of something sinister coming to get me. I was afraid of any new things introduced in the book, of the finger-like shadows of palms, of the birdcalls. I believed I was there with the boys, feeling the heat of the jungle island drip off my skin, the temporary relief of the breezes that blew in off the water. Ralph positively terrifies me. He's sinister, and I feel, slowly going crazy. Piggy will die first or be the last to die. I'm not exactly looking forward to delving back into the book but I want to know why they are all there on the island, how they will find food (and kill their food), and if Ralph is going to murder everyone or something equally as strange. So I plod on, suspicious of the crackling of branches beneath my literary feet, and wonder if I'm going to make it till the end.

Crafty Haul and a New Project

JoAnn's is having a sale all this week and it's a lucky thing for my bank account not to be there any more. It was horribly difficult to walk to the cash register with six skeins of yarn and eight fat quarters. I'm not greedy by nature, but when yarn or fabric is on sale...I WANT IT ALL!!!



However I was very, very good and left some for other people. The store on the other hand should have given me something for my promotion on their behalf. I was in line and a young lady in front of me glanced back at my basket full of this cacophony of colour and made the fateful turn. I knew she was looking at my haul, so I caught her eye. "They're lovely colours," she said. "Aren't they?" I replied, all innocence. Then, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial whisper I told her they were half off. $5.99 yarn ($6 I know) for $3! Her eyes grew wide and after a moment of "step forward, step back" she jumped in place and ran off to buy yarn. "I don't need any more yarn," she had said. I didn't remind her that no knitter ever doesn't need more yarn. We do, more importantly, we want it. I speaks to us and it's colour, texture, and usually price seduces us into taking it home, placing it on a mantel, shelf and simply admiring it with blissful sighs from time to time.




Now this lovely lady is my first attempt at a top down sweater-ish something. I'm on my second skein of yarn and almost kicking myself for not purchasing a third, but we'll see. I'm thinking of some lacey sleeve because I, personally, loathe cap sleeves. They do nothing for my arms (nor many female arms for that matter) and I end up looking fat. So far I love it, I love the technique and plan on knitting most, if not all the sweaters I design from now on this way. It's so simple! It's called the Azrael Bolero (or maybe Jacket?) I dunno yet.
But I'm in love with it's yummy sparkly goodness.

Fabric of Life and Times

She was awake, that much was certain, but when it came to actually thinking in an orderly fashion all was lost. Perhaps it was too early? Reaching through the curtains that surrounded her bed her questing fingers finally groped their way to her cellphone. 10am. Not too early, too late. With a groan and several unspoken curses she flings back her covers, twisted and tangled with a listless sleep, and lies there for several moments, eyes closed, smelling her baby blanket. Finally after a moment too many she rises a little unsteady on her feet, to fumble her way to coffee. Her eyes search for the nearest sweater, vest, jacket...and slips one on. Grey with a ship on the back. She makes coffee automatically now, hesitating only to wonder if she has performed the steps correctly.
The phone rings, her cousin on the line, and she lets her brother answer it. Turn out to be for her and through a haze she speaks to her aunt, not her cousin at all. Thus her morning leads into her day determining in it's unofficial way how her day will turn out. Most of her day is spent staring off into space and wondering why. More coffee in consumed, her bedroom is tidied. This changes her previously cynical perspective on the day, altering it to passably pleasant. She still stares off into space and continues to wonder why. Why is her brain so slack? So torpid, sluggish, swollen and lethargic? Where has the wonderment it once possessed gone? Why does it not yearn for learning, plan moments to steal for reading something new, day dream about stories in her head? Has she grown up so much that the child she promised to remain has been orphaned? All of these queries and more ramble through the river of thought in the space of several hours of one day. Now the sun has set, dipping into s northern slumber while the pale sliver of moon casts it's pallid, mysteriously enchanting glow on the uninterested cities. She considers her day and it's not quite so bad after all, there's a new one tomorrow to make up for any deficiencies of today. Her consolation found, she is content to spend her evening reading and listening to raucous music.

Some Knitting, sadly nothing witty.

While this blog is called the Knitting Stagehand, there's not been a whole lot of knitting or stagehanding. Well, let's just say that I took care of a bit of that today, just for kicks.

These are for my Grandpa to keep his hands warm as he writes.



Pirate Mitts I made not too long ago now, only just blogged. My darling Pirate-In-Stripes hasn't seen these yet, and it's the only reason I've still got them.


And last but not least, my version of a slouchy hat. I love the idea of making a hat that is, ultimately, the perfect bad hair day hat. It slouches down the back of you head covering most of you hair while lending you an aura of bohemian, "I just got up and look gorgeous." I think it's still too short to actually slouch down in the back, so it's back to the knitting needles for these!