My friend Jess got married in Boothbay Harbor, ME this September. It was a beautiful place and an incredible wedding. I made this tablecloth and napkin set for her and her betrothed and their English cottage. Mohan helped out with the top-stitching on the napkins.
Technical Details:

Serged edges
Table cloth has blind-stitched hem
Napkins (about 17 X 17) have fancy accent stitch
Fabric from Premier Prints via Fashion Fabrics Club

Here are a lot of nice sewn holders for knitting needles out there, but I wasn’t up for another sewing project, so concocted this little holder out of some left-over Malabrigo Rasta that I had on hand.
Size 13 needles
Cast on 25 stitches
Seed stitch about 10 rows
Cast off

Made a bunch of moebius cowls for family for Christmas this year with yarn from the lovely new yarn and fabric shop in Mid-Cambridge, Gather Here. These are very fun to knit. More details available on my Ravelry page. Pics below.

Viewed this blog entry on Teru Kumayana’s work in Afghanistan over 5 1/2 months. An award-winning photojournalist, Kumayana spent 10 years taking photos in Afghanistan for Newsweek and NGOs, and “five years trying to get out.” Realizing that “his photos didn’t end the war,” he went looking for “a different approach”. He was invited by a Marine officer whom he’d met 6 years before in Eastern Afghanistan to join his Batallion of over 1000 marines for a tour in Helmand, Southern Afghanistan. To his suprise, the officer obtained permission from …

We’ve been running out of plastic grocery bags for trash and storing of food, so I googled a bit to see if cloth bags might work for bread. The consensus I found was that linen might work well so Mohan and I sewed up this linen bread bag from a medium-heavy weight linen sample I had on hand accented by a bias strip of a lovely vegetable print that I also had on hand. We used two lengths of cotton thread for the double draw string. Will report back on …

Just got the news of Steve Jobs’ passing. My husband Hitesh was a huge fan. Here’s a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005 that has some profound messages. Also note that Jobs was vegan :-)
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly …

My son’s 1st/2nd grade class did a segment on listening this last week (this was a first for this classroom). The kids discussed what’s involved in listening and apparently concluded that it’s a “whole body” experience. They created a series of photos to illustrate this point. You might notice Mohan in the second-to-last and last photos.

A sad and difficult day.
I first heard this song, “A Song of Peace” at a friend’s memorial service this summer. The tune is Finlandia by Sibelius and the words are by a poet named Lloyd Stone (1912 – 1993). In the video below, it’s sung by a group called Harmonious Combustion.

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine;
this is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine:
but other hearts in …

This moving story by Timothy Williams in the 7/19/11 edition of the New York Times is a question and answer with the now late Anthony Stroman, a Dallas stonecutter, who shot people he believed were Arabs following the 9/11 attacks and one of his victims, Rais Bhuiyan, 37, a former Air Force pilot from Bangladesh and a muslim, was seriously injured and partially blinded in his right eye. He worked (unsuccessfully, in the end) to spare Mr. Stroman the death penalty, and delivers a message of love and compassion. Excerpt …

I was always intrigued and amused by the lobster liberations taking place at the Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies in Medford, MA.
Recently, Reuters did an article on a recent outing, which was followed by pieces in several other news outlets, including New England Cable News (see below):
Some Gloucester Fishermen made a Youtube Video spoofing themselves catching the lobster that the buddhists had just liberated. The Buddhists, interviewed after, insisted they weren’t angry: “being angry won’t help the lobster, and it won’t help us, and it won’t help them. …