October 11, 2023

sweater weather! (+ teaching next week)

• fun with anatomy
• teaching and event news (Middlebury, VT)
• a new sweater (and some old patterns)
• a good barn

Summer was not easy on my body, so I was not looking forward to the (usually painful) cold snap of fall into winter, and I'm still dreading winter, but fall so far is not so bad. It just feels like more of what summer was: the aches of change. But now I can bundle up into cozy layers for comfort! The garden is winding down - we had a phenomenal asters season; they and the goldenrod are fading but the marigolds are going strong and the bumblebees and other insects that are still out and about are enjoying them at least as much as I am.


My body is also in the "gets worse" part of "gets worse before it gets better" of a new physical therapy regime. I'm in pelvic floor PT and it's absolutely kicking my entire butt, much more even than I'm used to for PT. But I am learning a lot of neat mechanics, stuff I wish I knew years ago, like, that the (rib) diaphragm and the pelvic floor need one another to function, and that the digestive system needs them both, because the abdomen is a closed pressure system. If one part stops moving, the rest can only hold up for so long. Wish someone had told me that when my diaphgram started spasming six or so years back! I'm also learning the names and locations of all the little obnoxious muscles that make my life difficult - I'm looking at you, obturator, iliacus, and friends - and I really like accumulating that knowledge, as well as of course being able to lecture problem muscles directly. Pull your weight, glute medius! 

Teaching
I'm unexpectedly in residency next week!
("Toby how can a week of residency be unexpected," you ask, well, sometimes life goes that way. Circumstances changed for other people involved and I was in the right place at the right time to do this part right now.) 
I will be at Middlebury College for their Movement Matters series "The Global Body in Conflict". This is an interdisciplinary series about the connections between dance (making, performing, experiencing) and social change/conflict transformation. I'll be specifically working from my experiences as a trans and disabled dancer, in my particular strengths of relationship, communication, and embodiment. Most of the classes are part of student coursework but two events are open to the public, for free - all dance levels, all bodies:

• Movement workshop: "Transfer & Translation", where we will look at how movement gets passed from body to body, and what skills are used to understand and internalize something from outside your own body, as well as looking at accessibility and disability aesthetics, hopefully. October 18, 2023, 4:30–6:00 PM ET
• Artist talk: I'm going to chat about what matters to me in my work, how it's made, and how I present it, particularly looking at fluidity/complexity, expectations, and audience trust. I think. I need to nail down my notes this afternoon so I can prep my clips/images! I'm hoping this will be recorded, but I don't know yet. October 19, 2023, 5:00–6:00 PM ET

Masks will be required at all my events.
I have a lot a lot a lot more thoughts on these topics than I'll be able to fit into the artist's talk or even the residency as a whole, and I will probably collate them into a Patreon essay after the fact, so it is as good a time as ever to become a patron ;)

Sweater (and other knits)
Sweater weather, sweater time! I'm wearing last year's bears sweater as I write this, and I have a new sweater on the needles this winter. I bought a beautiful three-skein fade set based on three species of owls - barn owl, great-horned owl, snowy owl - years ago wanting to make a feather patterned sweater from it. I found a lovely nearly-black teal mohair blend for a backing color. And then I couldn't find a pattern that did what I wanted - radiating feathers in increasing sizes - so it sat in my stash, and waited. This year, flush with the success of the bears, I finally felt ready to tackle making a pattern myself. I even swatched (knit a test sample, washed, stretched, and dried it for measuring) like a responsible adult, and then it was time for graph paper and math.



The graph paper is actually the easy part; making it fit is harder. The sleeve split required actual algebra. But with time (about three hours just of numbers, cross-referencing existing sweaters and patterns, and math) and care and a bit of luck, it's working! I split the sleeves from the yoke and it fits and all is well, which means the hard math parts are all done and it only gets easier from here. Here's a photo from that try-on, as well as one from just before the sleeves got split off. Working a sweater this way, you start at the collar and go around and around, and before you get down to the underarms, the whole top of the sweater is nearly a circle, so it lays out very beautifully. (After this, you put a stretch of stitches on opposite-ish sides of the circle onto holders, and join the front to the back to keep going around, now as a tube instead of a circle. Later you come back to the arm stitches and do that as its own tube.)




I can't wait to wear it! 
Undecided so far if I'll release a pattern for this publicly. Depends how gnarly it gets to try to write it up, really. If I do, it will be a recipe-style pattern with a worksheet to guide your own math, and the colorwork charts. (I also have had an idea for a coordinating hat with the leftovers, with a frankly ridiculous front-to-back half-pi construction. One thing at a time, Toby.)

If you're interested in knitting shawl-style feathers, I released a pattern "Soar" some years ago now that will give you your own wings, in either compact triangular form or a wider swooping crescent. It has a great progression of feather shapes culminating in a short-row edge for nice primary flight feathers. 



I've also heard from a number of people recently, all of a sudden, about making my fine lace pattern Whisper Gallery for various special events, and the way it has connected relationships in their lives, and that always makes me so happy.



Barn
Only a quick teaser on this one: a few weeks ago, I got to go with dear friend Nicole Dagesse (aerialist, improviser, teacher, wonderful human) and photographer Andreas John (also very skilled, wonderful thoughtful human, and going to help me bring A Singular They to screen at last) up to a beautiful old barn at Holden House in northern Vermont. We were there in part to scope out the site for filming potential (and oh! it's amazing!) and also to do a photoshoot, which is fun and useful to us of course but also useful to the owners of the barn, who are fundraising for some necessary repairs. It is a simply amazing, unique, historic structure. No official photos yet, but look, even the cell phone photos of setting up look so good. The light stayed like that for us all day.



Back to lesson planning now, and wrapping my torso in heat,
Toby

p.s. for some reason I decided I wasn't going to show y'all the passacaglia again until its borders are on, but all the paper piecing is done! which happened at the end of july, almost exactly a year after I started. I've been dithering about moving on from there because I'm scared of quilting it but, first things first, borders. soon! sneak peek!