Blatherskite

I am now a member of the Plurkette Hencircle Hmm…how to explain this. Let me start from the beginning. In the beginning (of June) I joined Plurk. I found it to be a wonderful thing. A total time-suck but very fun. I have met all kinds of wonderful people of all sorts in the few weeks I joined, most of them knitters.

Miss Violet came up with the idea of starting a Plurkette Hencircle. A Hencircle, I am learning is a group of women who wish to embrace the Farmgirl lifestyle. She had me at farmgirl. So I joined. Our first assignment is to write and introduction. So here I am.

I am a 39 year old happily married woman without children or pets. I grew up in Spokane, WA and lived here until I was 19. Then I moved to New York to be a nanny for a year. After that I moved to the Bay Area where I lived and worked in various jobs until 3 years ago when I moved back to Spokane. For 7 of the years in the Bay Area I lived in Santa Cruz, CA. I loved living there and I miss it very much. I feel like I left part of my heart there. I graduated from UCSC with a degree in American Literature and I graduated from SJSU with an M.L.I.S. degree. I worked as a Science Librarian for about 2 years at Santa Clara University, and now I am a Youth Services Librarian at Spokane Public Library. I absolutely love working with children and I am very passionate about children’s literature.

I also love photography. I would love to someday be a travel photographer or something like that. I have been interested in photography for as long as I could hold a camera. You can see my photography on my Flickr page if you are interested. I shoot with a Pentax K10D.

Now for the farmgirl part. I have this deep desire to make things from scratch. My knitting journey is a great example of this. I got into knitting because I saw a book in a bookstore about spinning yarn out of dog hair. This really appealed to me on a deep level. I like the idea of recycling dog hair into something usable. I bought the book and read it. I was a live-in nanny at the time and realized that this was not feasible for me at the time. It just looked like too much work and where on earth would I fit a spinning wheel? So I decided I should learn to knit instead. The rest is history. I finally learned how to spin year ten years later! And I absolutely love it. There is something so primal and satisfying about spinning fiber into yarn.

My grandparents had a farm so I know this is where I get my inner farmgirl. Until very recently I never really thought about why they had the farm. I am currently reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and it got me thinking about my grandparent’s farm. It was very small. I think it was primarily used to feed the family. I think my grandfather sold some of the things he grew locally but it’s primary function was food for the family. I must have been a hell of a lot of work. I mean, both my grandparents worked regular jobs on top of taking care of this farm. When I think about this it kind of blows my mind. They wanted to have fresh food and they wanted to raise and grow it themselves. They came up during the depression so this probably had a big influence on them. I think it’s really cool that this “home grown” idea is something that I am also thinking about now as an adult. I think it is really cool that there is a community that wants to go back to this kind of living.

The next thing I want to learn how to do is make soap. I’ve been obsessing about this the past few months. So I will probably post some of my adventure in soap making as I learn how to do this. Yeehaw!

I am really looking forward to being a part of the Plurkette Hencircle community! Nice to meet all of you!

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• Farmgirl at Heart (powerfulproduce.wordpress.com)