This week, we’re heading to red rock country in Utah to explore Capitol Reef National Park. Capitol Reef is chock-full of things you might not expect from a desert-dwelling national park, like historic orchards, full of pears and walnuts, and and actual wrinkle in the earth (scientific name: monocline). But it’s also full-on desert, with cliffs, canyons, domes, and bridges.
North Cascades National Park in Washington State is home to over 300 glaciers and the rugged and breathtaking Cascades Mountains. It’s lauded as an important place to study the effects of climate change and global warming, and features temperate rain forests and alpine peaks and woods. It’s less than 3 hours from Seattle, which means I should definitely plan a trip there…
Park number three in our series is Wrangell-St Elias in Alaska is 13.2 MILLION acres. As the park webpage states, that’s as if Yellowstone, Yosemite, and all of Switzerland were combined. MASSIVE! The park itself ranges from the ocean all the way to mountain peaks, so imagine our delight when we realized the colorway could be anything and everything? We believe we chose well in the colors we used to represent this beautiful public space… what do you think?
Our second National Park of 2019 is the gorgeous Channel Islands. From the National Parks webpage: “Channel Islands National Park encompasses five remarkable islands and their ocean environment, preserving and protecting a wealth of natural and cultural resources. Isolation over thousands of years has created unique animals, plants, and archeological resources found nowhere else on Earth and helped preserve a place where visitors can experience coastal southern California as it once was.”
Check out the Channel Islands Instagram page for aaaaaalllll of the inspiration!
The sample for Shannon’s Lickity-Split socks was made in Channel Islands.
Saturday, June 8th is National Best Friend’s Day, and we here at Knitted Wit could not be more happy about it! We’re celebrating with a colorway that brings Lorajean’s soul-color (purple) and Shannon’s soul-color (lime green) together in one deliciously interwoven colorway. We are also celebrating by texting Golden Girl’s theme song lyrics to each other aaaaallllll day long! Wanna play along? Get ready for a wonderful ear-worm:
Thank you for being a friend…
Traveled down a road and back again
Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant
I’m not ashamed to say
I hope it always will stay this way
My hat is off, won’t you stand up and take a bow
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
Well, you would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say
Thank you for being a friend…
Thank YOU for being a friend, too! For exploring these off-the-grid holidays with us, for supporting and loving us, for being our pals and confidants. Spend some time on Best Friend’s Day reaching out to the people in YOUR life who deserve the biggest and best gift, who will travel those roads with you, who are your people.
Our June HerStory recipient, Nnedi Okorafor, is a Nigerian-American sci-fi and fantasy writer who delves into what she refers to as Africanfuturism in her varied works. She is a second-generation Nigerian-American who spent her formative years in the midwest, kicking ass and taking names both athletically AND mathletically. She fell in love with science fiction and fantasy at a young age, and considers Nigeria, which she visits frequently, to be her muse. It was her bout with scoliosis at 13, and the resulting short-term paralyzation, that inspired her deep-dive into creative writing, and caused a “what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up” swerve from entomology to fiction writing.
Her books, and the histories and backstories of her characters, are deeply inspired by African themes and culture, and thus are so very different than the histories and cultures that have long dominated the genres she writes in. Both sci-fi and fantasy have long been the realm of the white male, focusing on Euro-centric histories (see: JRR Tolkein, CS Lewis, etc), and it’s only recently that women and BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People/Person(s) of Color) have been gaining a foothold in the mainstream of these genres. Reading Nnedi Okorafor’s work, one gets a sense for the magic and mysticism that informs the lives of her characters. She deftly weaves deep-rooted tradition with far-reaching technology (as in the Binti series) or a magical world that’s co-existing quietly with non-magical society (as in the Akata Witch series). And then there’s the straight-up feminism inherent in her books. Her heroines are young women, working against a still-existent and oh, so pervasive mysogyny that threatens to stymy their abilities to reach their full potential. But, through hard work, inherent skill, and learned knowledge, they survive and thrive. Much like real-life heroines like Nnedi Okorafor.
Our June HerStory colorway is inspired by the book cover of Akata Witch, the first book in Nnedi Okorafor’s young adult series about a young woman coming into her own in a world she never knew existed (but explains so much). It’s been referred to as the “Nigerian Harry Potter,” but it’s so much more. The story is so rich and beautiful, and Sunny’s journey is so amazing and fraught with stress and tension. If you are a fan of sci-fi and fantasy (or just a fan of good storytelling), grab the book and cast on a pair of socks to honor it and Nnedi Okorafor today.
