What's In A Name?

I suppose it's about time to explain the moniker.  Nom de plume.  Pen name.

First, let me list for you my passions: those themes or objects or influences in my life which compel me, speak to me, and are there completely of my own choice and volition.  Things I pursue because I want to, not because I'm compelled to - aside from my own desire.  I guess you could apply the word "favorite" ... but it just doesn't speak to the intensity I am wont to feel about these things, as if they speak to my very soul (my apologies, Maria).

All the same, these are a few: 

1) Fibre Arts

2) Math (and numbers),

3) Books (the paper kind, though I'm warming up to the electronic kind, and I have long-enjoyed the audio kind),

4) Francophonia (I made that word up, just now. Meaning: all things related to the french-speaking world),

5) Theatre and other Fantasia,

6) Cheese, and

7) Pie.  

Sure, there are others, but these are Major.  I find I have already carried these themes in my recent blogging, as also they appear in my life.  

Aaand back to topic numero uno.  Really, Mrs. Pi is a pseudonym with many levels.  On the superficial, I'm sure you've got two so far.  

I am a Pie Person.  I have never liked cake.  It lacks complexity.  It's too much of one thing: sweet.  I love the culinary juxtaposition of the savory, dry crust and the sweet, moist filling of a pie.  I love the endless combinations, the possibility.  Consider the fact that pie is a homophone of a number, and you have my next segue:

As creative as I like to think I am, I am also a math nerd.  I love to solve problems.  I work with figures, just like the grown-ups The Little Prince bemoaned in his namesake novel.  I love when numbers align.  I graduated in the year 2000.  I got married on 9-10-11.  I like to play the "date" game by taking the numbers in today's date and making them into an equation that balances.  Don't mistake me: I am not a math genius.  I think "math nerd" and "math genius" have a subtle but significant distinction.  For example, today:

11/16/2011

1 + 1 + 1 = (6 / 2 + 0) * 1 / 1

Not a game, you say?  Well, I admit it's not complicated.  But I have fun with it, and so Game, I say, Game!  

I use simple operators.  Sometimes I'll drop in exponents if I need to.  But ne'er log nor e nor pi.  So I confess: I'm no math genius.  But I still love math.

Pie, Pi.  Mrs. Pi.  Need some more?

My wedding favors were apple Pies-In-Jars (recipe courtesy of one of my favorite blogs: Our Best Bites, pies themselves courtesy of my Penna bestie and her lovely mom):

Fresh out of the oven

Pretty on display

All 120 of them!  Ten dozen pi(es)!

My wedding cake was technically a groom's cake (my husband loves chocolate cake) but I had a wedding pie, also courtesy of my Penna bestie's mom:

Mr. Pi cut me a slice o' pie, I cut him a slice o' cake.  And if you care to know, we were kind and did no dessert "smashing".  Also, if you are attentive to detail, you'll see my signature symbol in the crust of my beautiful wedding pie.

That's most of what's in my name.  As midnight approaches, I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

"Someone has made you the happy recipients of a pie from The Pie Hole. As in "shut your." Or, in this case, "open your," because it's really good!" ~Olive Snook

Mrs. Pi

How It All Began

Christians have conversion stories about how they converted to Christianity.  I've also got one of those, but this blog is a different genre, so I'll stick with How I Converted To Knitting.  It's true, I was converted.  By Vickie Howell.  I guess it started before her, but she was the main catalyst.

Knitting for me has been a learning experience, a development ... or to be more dramatic, a metamorphosis.  Hell, it could pass as a pure metaphor for my life.  I've made lots of mistakes, I've started back at square one, I've unraveled, I've gotten tangled up in knots, I've struck inspiration, I've hit dry spells, I've left things undone, I've improvised, I've broken rules, I've enjoyed successes and failures ... ok so I've never been much of a poet, but you get the idea.  One of these days, I'm going to tell my boss I need to frog back to the beginning and start over on one of my projects at work (in insurance, mind you), and she's going to look at me like I have baobabs growing out of my face.

I can't pinpoint what it was that first made me want to try knitting.  I do know I was in high school.  Maybe it was when my mom got involved in the prayer shawl ministry at church, and watching her, it just looked like something I could enjoy.  Maybe it was when I found out about my Grandma's book, Twice-Knit Knitting, the one that pretty much got my parents together (but that's a story for another day).  Things in my life just sort of seem to pop up as recurring themes before they feature as a main topic.

Or maybe I just found myself in the yarn aisle at the craft store.  Yes, in fact, I think that was it.  Glamorous?  No.  But there it is.  I was at one of those big box craft stores - you know, the ones that carry aisles and aisles of "yarn" (well now, someone's turned into a bit of a yarn snob).  I was with my mom, and I asked her if she'd teach me how to knit.  We bought a skein of plain, acrylic/wool worsted and a pair of needles, and the rest is history (too cliche ... argh, where do they hide the accent aigu?) thus a knitting phenom discovered her calling!

Um, hardly.  The needles felt awkward in my hands (despite having mastered other tactical challenges like folding origami cranes and using chopsticks - shout out to four years of Japanese exchange students: Sakura, Yoko, Maho, and Takako).  I couldn't grasp the concept of making a slipknot.  I started off with the only cast-on method my mom remembered - the simple one, where you essentially have a string of cursive "e's" on your needle.  I had at it for a while, reading along with I Taught Myself Knitting.  And I'm fairly certain I abandoned that first effort soon afterward.

But I picked it back up, I did.  Ok, so a few years went by, and I was in college, and I needed something to do between scenes of a college play. The second attempt only went slightly better than the first.  And I confess: I dabbled in crochet.  It became sort of an obsession.  I spent a few months crocheting to my heart's content.  And then I knit a scarf, I think.  And that was it for a while.  Techniques and terms and fibers and needles lay dormant, marinating.


Until 2006.  I was living in my first house, just purchased, and I stumbled upon the show "Knitty Gritty" with Vickie Howell, on HGTV.  I was hooked.  I DVR'd each and every episode.  I learned names like Lily Chin and techniques like "long-tail cast-on".  Something about seeing knitting up-close, performed live by real knitters ... I'd be lying if the pleasure I got didn't make me feel like something of a voyeur.  There was a flurry of fiber activity, and a true knitter was born.  After a seven-year progression from larva to pupa to chrysalis ... I was a beautiful butterfly.  Why yes, I do sicken myself sometimes with inclination to cliche (insert accent aigu).


From then, I knitted not just scarves, but hats, and mittens, arm warmers and socks.  I started a vest and sweater (I'm better at starting than finishing).  So I'm not an expert knitter, but I'm not a novice, either.  I'm proficient.  All thanks to Vickie Howell.


Which is why, right now, even though I have cast on and ripped out the same mitten four times, I refuse to bad-mouth the Vickie Howell for Caron's Sheep(ish) yarn, difficult though it may be, and though it splits and breaks and somehow refuses to follow its own gauge, I will not stoop to calling it cheap, or resort to name-calling, even though it's completely good for absolutely nothing.  Because I owe her.  She converted me to knitting.

Mrs. Pi