49 Never a truer word spoken!

Meet Demetra Jones of Sonora, Hardin County, Kentucky.The year is 1916 and she has just celebrated her 11th birthday.
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I do hope Claire*, of No Knitted Knickers fame, won't object to my highlighting her comment on my last post, Water Meadow ...

[I] spend most of my time [on the blog] trying to distract readers from the fact that I make very little, which, given it's supposed to be about learning to make things is a bit of an issue.

Sure sounds familiar to me! I just don't have the time for knitting that I did and I'm struggling with that. Although I did fritter away an hour or two today deciding on a pattern for a winter wrap and choosing the yarn from my stash. I've settled on Ashby from Brooklyn Tweed and some Jo Sharp Classic DK Wool that's the colour of glacier ice. It's the perfect winter colour, the palest of aquamarines ... I'll show you soon, I promise. (See, I'm distracting you from the fact that there's not a stitch on the needles yet!)

Please tell me Claire and I are not alone in this. We can't be the only two for whom time pressures come between us and our chosen crafty occupation and, in turn, our blogs. And is it just me who struggles to post if I don't have a picture of what I'm posting about to share? Which trait, I might add, hasn't been helped by the washout summer of 2012 ... all those damp, gloomy days made daylight photography an impossibility for much of the season, and I do loath using flash. I fear I've been over reliant on alternative picture sources of late, but sometimes they're a source of wonders that are impossible to resist.

See the bow in her hair? And is that crochet, or tatting? I really can't tell.
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Being a perfectionist doesn't help. As Sue said, "... if we're at all picky about what we make, our output is somewhat slim, and by default, so is the posting ...". And of course, being a knitter, even if I don't frog a project it takes me a good while to complete it. And longer again to take a shot of it that I'm happy with! Knitting is very much not my favourite thing to photograph**. In fact I'm thinking I might tackle a few stitched makes purely for the photo opportunities they'll provide.

The Hattatts - Jane? Lance? it's always a mystery who - observed that I "have a lot going on in [my] mind and in [my] life at the moment". To which I can only answer, too much! Regular readers will know that though I'm far from being a warts and all blogger I don't balk at the occasional reality check. And our current reality, aboard the good ship knitsofacto, is not an entirely comfortable one. The Mr's expected redundancy may not have materialised but we are still sailing stormy seas and - to continue the seafaring analogy - pieces of eight are in jolly short supply just now.

Which is not to suggest we're on the verge of destitution, but unearthing some buried treasure is definitely on my to do list! To put it bluntly I have money making plans - essential if my studio is to become a reality and my stash of yarn is to continue to grow - and I'm hoping you'll forgive me the few discrete sponsor links that may appear in the months ahead, and that you'll be as excited as I am about the possibility of a little knitso' shop launching sometime soon.

Here she is again, with her younger sister. Lewis Hine's caption reads: "Father said:'She's the only farm hand I got. She helps a lot in the field work and house work too.Is good in school - 5th grade.' He owns the farm and expects to build soon."
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I can actually tell you a little more about Demetra. She was born, in the log house you can see here, on June 23rd 1905. And she died, on October 29th 2006, at the grand age of 101! She had married farmer Sandford Ferguson in the summer of 1922, and survived him and three of their five children. Apparently she credited her longevity to her faith, vitamin supplements, and a life long fondness for fat meat. And a year before her death she was still eating sausages fried on the same GE electric range that she bought in the mid-1940s when her home was finally wired for electricity. They built things to last back then!

It's awesome what you can stumble across when rooting through archives for something else!

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* To whom many thinks for the giveaway win which recently caught up with me. More on that in another post. And while I'm thanking people, thank you for your too kind comments on my last post, you made my day :D

** I'm clearly not alone in this, at last year's London Knit Nation the first classes to sell out were Franklin Habit's 'Photographing your Fiber' offerings.