daddies + daughters

There's nothing quite as sweet as this. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there. (Including ours.)  :)

Dareness

The Dares girls are back at it. I'm smiling from ear to ear, because each and every one of us busted out the paper and glue this week. Jamaica, Gen, Nisa, Kristi, Vee, Tina ... if you haven't seen it yet, go now ... go. (P.S. April Foster is our guest this week. Play along and you could win Studio Calico's Countryside Collection.)

k.i.p. day

World Wide Knit in Public Day was June 11th, and knitters/crocheters all around the world will be celebrating all week long. So I thought this might be a good time to look back at some of my k.i.p. photos from this past year and tell you some of the stories that go along with them.

On this day, I was working on a ginormous gray scarf out of Rowan Big Wool at a coffee shop downtown. A woman sat down by me and told me about her trip to Colorado and how she thought her coffee group that meets on Merle Hay had missed her.

This was taken against some very lovely hotel carpet from my first knitting retreat weekend with my pals Sarah, Amy, Nichole and Melissa. I finished knitting a sweater in one weekend.

Downtown coffee shop again, where a man who claimed to be an inventor sat down nearby. He showed me notebooks of drawings for farm equipment/machinery that he had hoped to produce someday, along with a arboretum he wanted to build somewhere downtown. He asked if I had any connections.

And yet another downtown coffee shop knitting day. A man who said he was 80 years old sat down and filled me in on the history of boxing. Sugar Ray Robinson, Sonny Liston, Willie Pep and more.

Through my public knitting, I've gathered a few things. Knitters in coffee shops are approachable and inviting. (Even though I normally just look down and avoid eye contact. Usually because I'm counting.) I am shocked at how often someone will sit down in a chair right by me to chat or tell a story.

The other thing is that everyone knows or knew someone who was a knitter. A grandma or aunt or neighbor or teacher. And that relationship always comes with a story as well.

So, to all of the storytellers and chatty coffee patrons, thanks for keeping it exciting. And happy Knitting in Public day.

my first pair

Okay, at first glance, I will admit that these look pretty disgusting. But to me, they're an old friend. Perfectly faded. Kind of gross. But it's not like I can wash them. I'd wash off all of the history. Do you have any idea how many Lollapaloozas/Ozzfests/Vans Warped Tours these shoes have been through? (They may have even helped me survive a school dance or two.) It's like Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. "I never wash my pants. I like to keep the night on them."

This weekend, I'm going to a 90s-themed party. So, I found myself digging through an old box of my high school stuff. I unearthed lots of old t-shirts, some Levis cut-offs, and these old shoes. My very first pair of All-Stars, ever. I wore them through four years of high school, and drug them through every concert and mud pit I encountered along the way.

The soles are worn smooth. I used to re-draw the star and the All-Star label on the back time and time again with a Sharpie every time it wore off. Oh, and apparently I liked to draw the Airwalk logo. (This was 1992-96, and I thought Airwalks were the shit. Obviously, this was before you could buy them at Payless.) There's half of a Hennepin Ave sticker that I found on the ground after some friends and I saw a show in Minneapolis. The rubber around the soles have my old favorite bands written on them ... L7, Slayer, Rage. The '1034' you see written there is my high school locker combination. The only boys' names I ever wrote on them were the Beastie Boys.

And so. This concludes my ode to an old and slightly disgusting pair of shoes. Do you hold on to old memories/stuff like this? I'm pretty happy I kept these.