Hi there!

Welcome to the obligatory welcome post.  Some stuff you might like to know:

1.  Who the heck are you?
We are Miche and Amie, two revolutionary women of the 21st century, gettin' our craft on.  Yes, we are sisters (we adopted each other as adults).  No, we do not actually have the surname Defarge.  We just like the imagery of women doing their thing and bearing witness to a changing world.

2.  What the heck do you do?
Amie spins and knits.  I knit, and am currently plucking up the courage to learn to spin.  I've also stuck my big toe into the world of design, and so far the water's lovely.  We sometimes have Amie's handspun (and sometimes hand-dyed) yarn, and my hand-knitted Musicians' Mitts (more about those later) for sale.  We'll be setting up an online shop soon.

3. Where the heck do you do all this?
We're in New Zealand.  Amie is in Christchurch.  I grew up in Christchurch and live in Dunedin.  We text and IM a lot.

4. Revolutionary women, you say?
We totally are.  Anybody who lives, is working towards, or is even thinking about the life they want rather than the life society tells them they should want is a revolutionary.  If you're reading this, chances are you're a revolutionary too.

5.  So what's revolutionary about knitting?
Everything!

Knitting and other handcrafts put the crafter in touch with where their "stuff" comes from.  Most of us are so divorced from the origin of our "stuff" that we have no idea how it gets from the raw materials (or even where they come from, or under what conditions they are produced) to the store we buy it in.

Not only that, it gets us to think about how and why we do things.  It taps into our creative side (and yes, everybody has one) and pretty soon we find ourselves wondering what would happen if we used this kind of yarn instead of that one, whether the thing we're making would look better in this colour rather than that one, and if we make the ribbing section a bit longer... and before we know it, we're making unique, made-to-measure pieces.  Isn't that fantastic?

Even better -- knitting is good for you!  Knitting produces the same kind of brainwave patterns as meditation.  Knitting lowers blood pressure, can be an aid to concentration, and is, probably most valuable of all, a chance to just sit the heck down and chill out for a while.  Western society's not as good at that as it could be.

And the icing on top -- knitting is a social activity.  Knitters' groups and "stitch'n'bitches" are everywhere.  My local knitting group has everyone from grannies to teenagers.  We sit, talk, laugh, work stuff out, plan our next projects, discuss the extent of our... no, I'm not going to say addiction (every single one of us says we can give up whenever we like) -- let us say instead our enthusiasm for our craft -- and help each other out when we get in a tangle.

So here we are, then.  Sit back, cast on, chill out.  And feel free to say hi if you're so inclined.  We'd love to hear from you.