CRAFTING WITH ANASTASIA--GUEST KNITTER AND AUTHOR DAWN EASTMAN

photo courtesy of Johntex

Dawn Eastman lived in Michigan for many years in a house full of animals, unusual people, and laughter. She now lives in Iowa with her husband, son, daughter, and one extremely bossy small dog. Pall in the Family is her first novel.

Learn more about Dawn at her website and blog.

Knitting a Novel

I’m excited to be visiting Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers today to have a chance to discuss two of my favorite things: knitting and writing.

I have been knitting for almost 40 years. I’ve been writing about that long, but not as faithfully. Writing is sometimes difficult for me. Maybe the ideas aren’t flowing. Or the ideas are there, but the writing isn’t bringing them to life. Or I’m using all of my energy worrying about a deadline and not actually writing. And sometimes I’d just rather be knitting.

Recently, while driving–one of the few times I can’t write or knit, I reflected on how my approach to knitting has informed my approach to writing. There are many similarities between finishing a large knitting project like a lace shawl or a sweater and a large writing project like a novel. I realized that as my knitting habit matured, so did my writing habit. The writing comes easier for me if I remember to apply my knitting rules to my writing project.

Rule 1: A little bit every day adds up. For me, a large knitted project seems to grow of its own accord.  I love to knit, so every day I spend some time working on whatever is on my needles. I don’t even think about it; it’s just something I do. Every. Day. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same habitual relationship with my writing. When I get frustrated that my writing isn’t moving forward at lightning speed, I remind myself of this important fact. Particularly when either doing the laundry or organizing my daughter’s closet seems more appealing–those are the truly dark days. Usually, I knit a few rounds while considering my options.

Rule 2: Practice makes you better. I have occasionally tried to teach others to knit. I’m always surprised at how frustrated some will get that they are not producing cabled Irish sweaters within the hour. Knitting looks easy, especially when the piece is finished, but there is a learning curve. And the more you practice the easier it gets. Writing also looks easy, especially when you are fully involved in the story. When I first started writing with a goal of publication several years ago, I was initially surprised at just how hard it is. No longer could I sketch out a story for my own amusement and leave it behind. Now I had to truly craft a piece of writing that would appeal to others. It was a bit like moving from scarves to sweaters. A scarf will fit anyone and is fairly easy to finish. A sweater project requires more consideration of the wearer, and an attention to details like shaping and size.

Rule 3: I need a pattern. I stress that I need a pattern because not everyone does. Some knitters pick up a skein of yarn and just start knitting to see “what the yarn wants to be.” They often create beautiful pieces. I suspect that these are also the sorts of people who can rent a car in a foreign country and “see where we end up.” I don’t fall into that camp in my knitting or my writing (or my travel to foreign countries). I cannot start writing without some sense of where the story is going, preferably in the form of a multi-page outline. I won’t discuss the writing camps of plotter and pantster here. If you are a writer, you know what I mean. The key is in knowing how you work best, not which group has the better method.

Rule 4: Even if I follow the pattern, I sometimes have to rip back. My mind wanders, or I misread the instructions and repeat the mistake for many rows, or I realize I prefer a technique that is different from the one in the pattern. I find that I don’t mind ripping out work that isn’t up to my standards. I like to knit and if I have to re-knit a sleeve, that just means I get to enjoy knitting that sweater for a little while longer. I am working on bringing this attitude to my writing. Sometimes all those words just need to be cut. I know that it will make the story stronger, but I haven’t yet developed the friendly relationship to the delete key that I have to re-winding a ball of yarn.

Rule 5: Finishing is sometimes the hardest part. I am the worst finisher ever. Sometimes, I will finish a project and let it languish for months–years–for want of a button. I have a very cute vest in my basket that has been finished for almost a year. It needs ONE button. The detail work isn’t fun for me. It’s the knitting I love, not the sewing up. I don’t like to seam a sweater, sew on buttons or weave in the ends. The same goes for editing a long piece. I’m not in the story anymore happily discovering where it will take me. It’s done now and I have to check my commas and search for synonyms because I’ve used the word “glittered” fifty times in one manuscript. But the more I write, the more I enjoy editing as I see how much that effort can improve a story. Maybe I need to apply my editing attitude to my knitting.

I’d love to hear from writers who are also crafters in the comments! Do you approach your writing the same way you approach your craft?

Pall in the Family

The aptly named Crystal Haven is the destination for tourists seeking psychics, séances, and the promise of contacting the spirit world. In this small western Michigan town, everyone knows the Fortune family. Rose is gifted with Tarot card readings. Her sister Vi is a self-proclaimed pet psychic.  And her daughter Clyde is…

A cop. A cop on leave from Ann Arbor, more specifically, who’s come home to kooky Crystal Have to re-evaluate her life. Mom and Aunt Vi can’t wait for Clyde to finally embrace her own psychic gifts and join the family business. Clyde would prefer the low-stress lifestyle of a dog walker, and the low key company of her nephew Seth.

But when a local psychic is killed, leaving behind a traumatized Shih Tzu, it seems to be in the cards for Clyde to get involved.  With her old flame Mac leading the investigation, that may prove awkward. Whether she uses her skills as a cop or her long-denied psychic abilities, it’s up to Clyde to divine a killer’s identity before someone else suffers more misfortune.

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CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--FIBER ARTIST AND MYSTERY AUTHOR LINDA RODRIGUEZ

Hand spun and Crocheted Healing Shawl

Award-winning author Linda Rodriguez writes the Skeet Bannion mysteries. Linda admits to spending too much time on Twitter, Facebook, and her blog.  

Knot Magic

In my Skeet Bannion mysteries, Every Last Secret, Every Broken Trust, and Every Hidden Fear (coming 5/6/2014), Skeet’s best friend Karen owns Forgotten Arts, a fiberarts store in the small college town of Brewster, Missouri, twelve miles north of Kansas City, Missouri. I gave Karen this store because I’ve always had a secret desire to own a fiberarts store just like it—and that’s one of the bennies of being a writer, living out dreams on the page. Karen raises Romney sheep and angora goats on a farm outside of town with the help of a Chilean shepherd and spins her own fiber into one-of-a-kind yarns that people drive miles to buy. She sells machine-spun knitting and weaving yarns, as well, and looms, spinning wheels, and all sorts of knitting, spinning, and weaving equipment.

I love the moments when I’m going to have Skeet walk into Forgotten Arts and spend some time there, perhaps buying yarn for her own knitting projects. And I do know what I’m talking about because I knit, spin, and weave, as well as make crazy quilts and art quilts. I probably could open a shop like Forgotten Arts out of my own house, which is overflowing not only with books and manuscripts—as you’d expect from a writer—but with spinning wheels, hand spindles, looms from inkle to the large rug loom in my living room, way too many knitting needles, sewing machines, and an overload of whole fleeces, prepared spinning fibers of all kinds, weaving and knitting yarns, and fabric. How did this craziness come about?

Both my grandmothers were accomplished needlewomen. My Scottish grandmother, the minister’s wife, sewed perfect quilts, dresses, and curtains. She even dyed old nylons and made realistic-looking silk-flower corsages for all her granddaughters at Easter. She never saw a pattern in a magazine that she couldn’t make. She taught me how to sew doll clothes and quilts by hand and rapped my knuckles sharply if I was lazy or clumsy and took big, sloppy stitches.

In her youth, my Cherokee grandmother had been a weaver of baskets of stunning beauty still used every day in her home. At the time I knew her, she knitted and crocheted. She showed me how to create a fabric out of one long continuous piece of yarn with only two sticks or one hook. She also taught me that stitches of any kind—knit, crochet, or sewing—were related to ancient knot magic, as was all weaving of cloth or baskets with its interlacing of fibers. She didn’t spin, although her mother and grandmother had, and she believed it was the most powerful magic of all. She had traveled to New Mexico and seen Navajo weavers carding, dyeing, spinning, and weaving wool. She told me that they were still in touch with that old magic.

So I started out ahead of most of my age-mates, thanks to these two very different women. I knew how to make my own clothes and, later, those of my children.

E li si, my Cherokee grandmother, was not a pattern follower like my other grandmother. She taught me to envision within my own mind what I wanted to make and to design and create it as I worked. In my twenties as a broke young wife and mother, I would use the craftsmanship and skills taught by one grandmother and the vision and creative confidence taught by the other to make the fashionable black velvet sofa and loveseat my young husband desired that I didn’t want us to go into debt to have.

Always in the back of my mind remained E li si’s words that spinning was the oldest and most powerful magic. I already knitted and sewed items for my loved ones in which I poured intention and desire into each stitch—for health and healing, for protection, for comfort in grief and pain, for success, for luck, for all the good I wanted to give those I loved. I had begun using color to reinforce these intentions and different stitches to create symbols to underscore my wishes and desires for my family and friends.

One day, I walked into a yarn shop to buy more knitting yarn and found a display of spinning wheels and spindles with a woman giving a demonstration of the ancient art of spinning. I walked out with a hand spindle and half a pound of cherry and indigo hand-dyed merino wool, and I set out to teach myself to spin. I learned that merino, buttery-soft and beautiful as it is, is not the ideal fiber for learning to spin. My progress moved much faster when I found Romney, a longer, sturdier wool.

Tapestry Detail

Spindle, knitting needles, tapestry loom play a role in keeping me in touch with my ancestors and the traditions of knot magic and making tangible wishes for the ones we love. I am drawn to the most labor-intensive, hands-on experience because much of the creativity moves through my hands in direct line to the hands of those ancestors before me who spun, knit, sewed, and wove with the simplest looms. This act of making is a kind of reverence—for the fiber and the animals and plants from which it came, for the chain of daughters and granddaughters who have learned and passed on the skills down through the centuries, for the relationships with family and friends and the community formed of caring for them.

In 2006, one of my dearest friends faced aggressive breast cancer. The prognosis was alarming. Desperately concerned, I worked round the clock to spin and knit a multicolored shawl full of healing and strengthening intentions. She wore the shawl through surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and recovery. She beat the cancer and has since passed the shawl on to fifteen women friends and friends of friends faced with diagnoses of cancer. All survive and thrive to this day. Each wore the shawl throughout her ordeal. Many doctors have allowed them to wear the shawl during surgery, knowing the role of comfort and belief in defeating cancer.

I have since met several when they have come to my readings to meet me and thank me, but originally, I knew none of these women, save Deborah, my beloved friend for whom I originally made that shawl with so much intense desire and desperate, focused wishing for her survival and good health. Working with my hands and focusing that energy with love is a fundamental part of my life, and it’s brought all of these wonderful women into it, as well.

Every Broken Trust

Life has settled into routine for half-Cherokee Marquitta “Skeet” Bannion now that she’s gained custody of fifteen-year-old Brian Jameson—until a party at her house ends in a killing and an attack on Skeet’s best friend, Karen Wise, after a drunken man claims that Karen's husband’s accidental death years earlier was murder.

Brian’s friendship with a politician’s rebellious daughter and Karen’s fixation on finding her husband’s murderer frustrate Skeet’s efforts to keep them both safe while she tracks down the killer. Skeet struggles against the clock to solve a series of linked murders before she loses Brian forever and her best friend winds up in jail—or dead.

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