Blanket in a box
Good morning from the bagel shop
This is Clouds Form Over Land, a newsletter from Ashley Gremel about resilience, imperfectionism, and our relationship to the earth.
I’m not sure about everyone else, but sometimes it seems like any thread I pull these days leads me to big hope or big despair, and it feels like it’s my job to stay in the middle. But sometimes the middle feels more like numbing than the steely stability I’d like to believe it is. So with that in mind, I’m going to write a few newsletters about blankets and trust that the yarn leads to whatever wants to come through that week.
Back in the fall, my pal
sent me a blanket in a box. The contents included a variety of worsted weight scraps and seven stripes of knit fabric that Jess had made a few years ago. There was a stripe of fabric cast on the needles, so I was off to the races from the opening of the box.After navigating the Intracoastal Waterway for a couple of months, then the job and housing markets, it was a balm to my worn-out soul to sit cross-legged on the bed, making small decisions about how long to carry on before switching to a random color. I stitched the blanket together while watching Scavengers Reign with the house and Matty, which also reminds me to share this 6-minute clip about Scavenger Deities that was in Richmond at the VisArts Center, and since recommendations come best in three, here’s a little animation called Visible Mending for my fiber friends and other fixers.
The blanket sits on Scott’s desk where Cypress the cat can alternate between naps and watching Scott move pixels around on the screen.
Last month, Jess launched the
for her musings on writing. She also leads us in . Our next read is The Quickening! My mother-in-law liked the book too and I’m excited to dig in.
Row-a-day blanket with the extra scraps
I love those temperature blankets that make the rounds at the end of each year and wanted to borrow the strategy to collect a different kind of data — where I slept each night. 2023 was parsed into so many different locations, from Colombia to Mexico, Florida through Virginia, a few trips to Michigan, and some local road-tripping to camp and celebrate weddings. Woof! It’s occurred to me that to feel settled, I might have to stay in the same place for a bit.
So I cast on 366 stitches in a color that felt like my current dwelling: a dark purple with red and blue speckling (if anyone knows the term for this in yarn, tell me please!). So far I’ve added one stripe of cream for a visit to Azimuth with Cypress and seven stripes of green for visiting my folks. If I wasn’t at the bagel shop, I’d snap a pic!
Don’t forget to look out the window
I saw my house, a cloud break over Lake Michigan, and the Statue of Liberty.