This shawl is knit with KnitPicks City Tweed DK in the color “Splash,” a lovely blue-green. The yarn is soft and warm in a blend of merino wool and alpaca with touches of Donegal tweed.  The pattern is free form according to the suggestions Connie Delaney offers for her Triangular Shawl. I look forward to wearing it on a barefoot stroll along the edge of the ocean.

While I knit, I ponder. Lately I have been rereading The Anger Workbook by Lorrainne Bilodeau, a Hazelden publication copyright in 1992 and full of valuable insights valid for today. My marginal notes go back to the year 2000.  On page one the author states that “emotionally mature people recognize, understand, and use emotions in their intended functions.” She writes on page 31 that anger is not a primary emotion, that it is secondary to fear or anxiety. Anger “masks another emotion,” she says. “It defends, and therefore, its performance more closely matches that of a defense mechanism than that of a feeling.” Farther along she states that “any defense used, whether it be rationalization, projection, or outright denial, hides feelings and keeps other people at an emotional distance.” The book is filled with gem thoughts, very different from childhood concepts that what I did or failed to do was the cause of another person’s anger.

Mentally and emotionally there are stitches to take out and re-knit ~

A sweet-smelling candle can be made by filling the peel of half an orange with olive oil and then lighting the core as a wick.

Today I play Sinding’s “Serenade” and wonder how life might have been if I had been assigned this piece when I was 12, or when I was 15, or when I was 20.  Or how about the Gigue from Bach’s B Flat Partita? What would it have been like to meet these pieces when I was a child? Doesn’t music grow the person? I wish for a 32 year old woman named Michelle, today, that she could learn to play the piano, learn these pieces. I think the music would help with healing.

My “Antoinette” porcelain doll, by Schmitt & Fils, now has her new wig. I decided on a taupe mohair, more blonde and less white than my first choice.

“Antoinette” is an exquisite Bebe originally made in Paris, France, by Schmitt & Fils in the 1880s. This reproduction is one of the last dolls I completed in the porcelain studio of Sandy Tracy of West Gardiner, Maine. The doll was poured from a Seeley mold. Here I am experimenting with taupe mohair for her wig. She is twelve inches tall. Her ears are pierced. She is to wear a chemise, petticoat, drawers with drawstring at waist, stockings, one-strap shoes with rosette or buckle, earrings of beads on wire, and a fabric and lace hat with feathers. The elaborate dress will be low-waisted with a bustle-like back.

This morning the sunshine peeks through the leaves of my Falling Leaf Pattern yellow scarf on the windowsill. I will work on it after I finish a little red baby hat for Yvonne.

Most of these early spring days I spend oil painting, with twenty paintings already finished this late winter.

This is what a painting looks like without mud! Definitely it could use some depth, foreground, background, more flowers, and something in lower portion, in all that unused space. I squeezed out so much beautiful red and orange and yellow, not needed, for what I was doing, and painted this to use them up. I will finish this painting later. For now, finished or unfinished, the flowers were screaming out to be photographed from where I set the painting on the chair.

If you don’t hear from me, I am painting.

Judith Durant’s Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders includes the pattern for this luscious stole, thirteen inches wide and seventy-eight inches in length. I used the Jolie French angora  and merino yarn by Tahki Imports.