Welcome y'all, my Yarni loves. It's past time, a clock that we were crafting a better world. So let's dig into our tools and our project bags and see what meaning we can find to help us in the work of becoming and braving a better world for all. Hello, we're still in a pandemic over here. Stay home and purl. The world we live in has so many colors and textures which are all made up of the same basic elements and the crafts we do have so many awesome ways of reflecting this. In knitting all the patterns and textures you see are really only made up of two stitches, knit and purl. Now the knit stitch is usually the one that's first taught, hence the name knitting. It's obviously seen as the normative stitch, which is an interesting thing to contemplate all in its own. If the first stitch to be invented had been the purl, I guess knitters today would be called purlers. But it makes sense that the knit stitch is the norm because it is really a simpler set of motions. And you can do a lot with just the knit stitch, but eventually you're going to want to do something more complicated to create a more complex pattern. And for that you need both the knit stitch and the purl to do what you were first taught and then to learn the exact opposite. But is it really the opposite? For the purl you go into the stitch from the front instead of the back and you go from right to left instead of left to right and you wrap the yarn right to left instead of left to right, which all seems opposite. But really it's all just mirrored. Because that's really what a purl stitch is, the mirror version of a knit stitch. But it's hard to see that when you first learn it and you're just beginning because it all seems foreign, as foreign as the knit stitch when you first learned it. Hitting and purling are all about controlling the texture of the stitch where the bump goes on the front or the back of the fabric in front of you. Once you learn to knit and purl you can learn to make countless new patterns and designs by combining these two in different ways. The different patterns of knitting, stocking net, garter and a gazillion other stitch combos are all created based on when and where you are knitting versus purling. Like when you combine knits and purls in the same row in certain repetitions you can get ribbing which help keep your socks on and your sleeve ends cozy. It's an interesting thought controlling where the bump goes. Like a push versus a pull. In gardening I dig a hole but I also need to learn how to fill the hole too. If I want the seeds that I've planted to grow I have to learn one thing and then the opposite or mirror thing to bring something to fruition. Like both sides of this thinking opposite and mirror because it's important for me to realize I need to learn something completely different than what I was taught or brought up to think in order for me to have a better understanding of the world. It's also important for me to realize that that seemingly opposite thing whatever it is is the understanding of another person in my human family someone different but the same someone with hurts and fears and desires just like me someone like the person looking back at me in the mirror. It's interesting that we tend to reject often outright the opposite while we accept what's in the mirror even though it's really an opposite reflection. But I don't have to accept or affirm that opposite thing if it goes against my core values like say racism homophobia, Nazism but phobics can usually only overcome their fears if they take the time to understand where their fears come from. Sometimes we really do need to learn something and then learn the exact opposite thing in order to create something that is even more meaningful and grounded in all of our realities. To craft a better world we have to be prepared to learn new stitches.