White Friday

Only one pot of Christmas cactus remains at my house after giving away almost all my plants back in 2023 to eliminate tripping hazards for my sweet husband. The final Christmas cactus, as well as my final hoya plant, were to be personally delivered to my mom in California the week after Thanksgiving last year. She'd never owned either species, and she loved the photos I sent, so I saved the last two for her. The Thanksgiving week snowstorm over our Colorado Rockies prevented us from road-tripping, and I was rewarded on Thanksgiving Day with beautiful red blossoms. When I converted White Friday photos to black and white, my red Christmas cactus rendered the perfect hue for my tenth annual White Friday blog post. (Wow!!! Ten years today!!!)

We received another five inches of snow the day before Thanksgiving last year, and I was able shoot 188 photos of mostly quickly melting snowflakes. Out of that batch, I got 88 halfway decent shots. I finished editing my photos at 1:30 a.m. White Friday 2024, so snowflake photos were my first official 2024 White Friday project.

When Lizard awoke, he decided he wanted a tortilla with cheese for breakfast instead of homemade waffles. White Friday again. I put a mixture of white Italian cheeses on a white tortilla, and second project of the day was soon doing a great disappering act. Lizard loved it!

My next White Friday project was the daily hip pain management course my insurance company provided a couple of weeks earlier. It was a free service provided to help me (and presumably all the company's clients) stay healthy. Most of the exercises they gave me were very easy, but anything that can take the jolt out of arthritis is worth a shot, right?

Finally, it was time to crochet. I kept wondering what WIP I could work on that might satisfy my White Friday yearnings. I could make a Christmas T-shirt or sweatshirt; I had three unused Ts and two unused sweatshirts hanging in my closet leftover from craft fair goals at least a decade ago. I could work on my Moda Blockheads project; it could certainly use any kind of attention. I could work on Hawaiian Punch. I could craft any of my Spoonflower panels into a mini or baby quilt; all the panels are white on the backside. If I used white thread, that would count, right? Ultimately, I chose to make a new snowflake for my Snowflake Monday blog post ten days away. (The following week was already done.)

I ended up using the pattern to make a couple of snowflake necklaces, too. I'd just found out exactly two weeks earlier to the day that my sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had a pink glow stone, and covering it with sparkly thread provided by Sisters of the Snowflake founder Autumn gave me courage to go forward in faith on behalf of my sister.

We had a backyard visitor while I crocheted. Vanilla sky provided the perfect background for this particular photo.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with Lizard's mom a week late because of the big Thanksgiving snowstorm. This provided a second chance at more White Friday photos a week late. I count them because I could have gone shopping, or I could have gone for a haircut. Instead, for the first time in many years, I took snow and snowflake photos on the Grand Mesa!!!

No better way in the world to celebrate White Friday, in my opinion! Well, perhaps attending the brand new Grand Junction temple will make this year even more special. It wasn't yet open in 2024.

Grand Mesa snowflakes. Oh, my goodness! It was so cold, but the flakes were SO big! I can't wait to go back!

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White Friday

White Friday last year is such a blur. That week turned my life upside down, but in writing today's blog post in early November of 2024 (I traditionally have composed my White Friday blog posts a year in advance, as they happen, or right after), I realized my life wasn't the center of the universe last year. Lizard's life took the biggest hit he's ever faced, and we're still dealing with some of the repurcussions. What began on Thanksgiving 2023 may influence the rest of his life. It was not something we planned for or expected, and now it's something we are forced to deal with on an almost daily basis. But Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, not moaning and groaning about things that can't be changed.

I'll start with the White Friday soap. I thought I'd detailed our White Friday ordeal on my blog earlier this year, but a search turns up nothing except the aftermath. I hinted several times at what happened, but I never explained. It all started with White Friday soap. In a hotel room. During our Thanksgiving celebration with Lizard's family. Even that is foggy now. White foggy.

Back in about April or May, I thought I should probably write in more detail about what happened. Now that the annivesary is upon me, I'm not sure I can do it. It might take a bit more healing. A bit more gratitude. A bit more distance. If it doesn't appear weekly or monthly on my blog beginning next week, rest assured I kept a good journal. I will share the story at some point.

Lizard was up for only a very short drive on White Friday. Although we did get a few fog photos, I was mostly limited to White Friday photos I could take in the neighborhood and white thread crochet, which, I confess, I wasn't as motivated to do at that time, and white thread hand-quilting.

Higher elevations of the nearby canyon got a bit of snow Thanksgiving night. So a touch of white was just waiting to be photographed. At the time, I wished Lizard felt better so I could shoot more. Now, in retrospect, I'm so thankful he agreed to go out at all. We got snow White Friday night. The white Grand Junction temple made for perfect White Saturday photos.

The drive home was treacherous for the first three or so hours because road conditions did not improve without the blast of sun the canyons got later in the day, after we'd already nagivated our way through. It was too dangerous to pull over to take photos, so I got only a handful of photos before we got into the canyon shadows and only one snowy shot at an official rest stop.

The snow followed us home, and we had a White Monday while I worked from home.

I finished only one snowflake during the Thanksgiving holiday. It wasn't totally original. It was inspired by an old snowflake.

My White Friday hand-quilting still is not done yet. Still packaged from our 2023 Thanksgiving trip. I never took it out of the bag after we got home. Never had time. Now I'm two weeks and a day away from White Friday 2024. This project will be one of my goals for next year's White Friday blog post. And I'll try harder to snap more White Friday photos in 2024. But you won't see them until 2025. :)

Another 2023 White Friday goal was to finish the hand-stitching of my QAYG Hawaiian Punch, which I fully intended to gift to my 50-plus-year penpal in April 2024 for her birthday. I finished this part of my White Friday stitching in January of this year, so not totally White Friday. I was able to finish this portion of the project once Lizard's White Soap skin trauma abated. Working on this piece in peace for the first time in a couple of months reminded me of the true spirit of Thanksgiving and my very own White Friday tradition.

I just recently learned it's okay to pat myself on the back, quite literally, for making it through one of the darkest times in our lives, the six weeks there was no white and no light. Almost no hope. Just fear. Just panic. The resulting gratitude is something I hope I can incorporate into every day, not just Thanksgiving, and not just White Friday. I am thankful for Lizard, for faith, for prayer, for overcoming, for healing, for friends and family, for hobbies, for snow, and for being able to stay home and keep my wallet shut on the biggest shopping day of the year.

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White Friday

Snowflake crochet doesn't always come easy. We'd found ourselves stuck in a hotel one summer night at least 12 years ago when unfavorable weather (dangerous lightning) brought an early end to a backpacking trip. We made a quick run to the local department store, a very mini version of the typical establishment, and I was horrified to find not only NO thread crochet hooks in stock, but no crochet thread either!!! How could that possibly be!?!

As soon as we got back home from that trip, I put my emergency thread and hook storage in the car, and I've carried it around ever since. Everywhere we drove, I always had the tools I need to design a new snowflake, should the inspiration arise.

We don't get to enjoy 14er climbs or cross-state cycling trips these days, but I've still got that emergency stash in the car. White Friday Eve (very late in the evening of Thanksgiving Day) in 2022 was spent winding a big ball of white thread from that stash so I could design a new snowflake on White Friday while we were visiting my mother-in-law.

I'm finding myself becoming more creative in White Friday photography with our adaptive travel limits. We actually did make a road trip prior to Thanksgiving in 2022, but our desert destination boasted no snow and no forecast of snow the entire week of our family Thanksgiving visit. However, during a White Friday bicycle ride along an irrigation ditch, we found white.

Alkali leaches out of the soil (or bricks) when it rains or snows in the high desert. The white residue also can be rinsed off with water. When you're hungry for snow like I always am, alkali apparently can be the next best thing.

Even though I didn't have real snow, I did have snowflake photos from eight days earlier that needed to be edited.

I fully intended to string about 100 white crocheted snowflakes during White Friday 2022, but I was too busy (having WAY too much fun) making jewelry. Including one white necklace...

I did make one white snowflake.

And one white snowflake necklace. I encased a white glow-in-the-dark rock inside the middle of the snowflake.

And I did finish stringing a few snowflakes. Not enough. Stringing snowflakes is pretty boring for me...

The best part of our no-shopping White Friday last year, however, was finding a safe way to climb down into the nearly dry irrigation ditch (and then back out after I was done) to shoot genuine white ice!!! In the desert! Hundreds of miles from my youthful stomping grounds, White Sands National Monument!

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White Friday

This is my eighth year opting for white rather than black the day after Thanksgiving. I am a craft fair crafter, and I have missed running my office craft fair the last two years. There's no gift better than handmade, but I've never participated in a Black Friday event, and I do not Christmas shop on Black Friday. Eight years ago, I decided to take my feelings on commercialization public, and today's blog post is my latest installment of alternate ways to spend the day after Thanksgiving.

Christmas is about giving, not spending. Black Friday, for me, is not a time to stand in line waiting for a store to open, and it's not a time to spend, spend, spend. It's a time to enjoy family, continue the attitude of gratitude and to seek out ways to make the world a better place. This is where I share what I did the previous year to keep my Friday white, even though snow often may be nowhere on my horizon.

The first snowfall of autumn 2021 broke the previous record of November 21, 1934, for the Denver metro's latest measurable accumulation. We got nearly an inch at our house the day before Thanksgiving on November 23. However, Denver International Airport got none, so the official snowless streak extended until December 10, 2021.

Our 2021 White Friday plan was to shoot the sunrise, and hopefully some beautiful white pelicans, perhaps finding some frozen areas along the lake's edge and maybe even traces of unmelted snow in the shadows. The wind was furious, and our completely cloudless skies tricked us into thinking the sunrise wouldn't be spectacular. So we watched from our living room window as feathery clouds began to materialize just as the pre-dawn sun painted them pastel pink and then peachy yellow. Darn! There was a fierce wind... sort of the story of 2021. Bittersweet regrets.

(the next day)

But hey, white is white, right? The feathery clouds lasted the rest of the day.

The moon was pretty awesome, too!

We thought we might drive up to the mountains to find some white, but Lizard has a difficult time being seated in the car more than about ten minutes, plus, we were trying to save money for the replacement of our front and back stairs the following week. So my White Friday began with a photo editing session. I got to shoot snowflakes the day before Thanksgiving 2021 -- my first snowflake photographs since April 17, 2021!

The snow didn't last long, and most of it was clumpy, so I took some not-so-macro shots, too.

Also waiting to be processed were photos from our afternoon walk on Thanksgiving Day 2021. These are some of the photos that inspired my (unrealized) plan to shoot the sunrise on White Friday.

My white picotee amaryllis was still in the basement, and my white Christmas cactus was getting ready to put on a show, but not quite there yet.

The amaryllis had sported its first-ever summer bloom in August of 2021, and it hasn't bloomed again since. Fingers crossed for early in 2023; I didn't get any of my amaryllises down into the basement this year until nearly Halloween.

I made a snowflake with white thread. That actually wasn't too unusual for 2021 because for whatever reason, most of my 2021 flakes were white. Perhaps the shortage of real snow made me crave white flakes?

I also took some photos of some old flakes on white fabric (or a very pale blue batik that looks white via the iPhone). That was something new for me. I typically like true blue batik best as a background, but for a special project I'd been contemplating for a while (my now finished digital temperature quilt!!!), I'd been shooting every new snowflake on a variety of batik colors. But not on white. I don't know why it previously never occurred to me. It looks kind of cool. To me...

I also hunted down and pulled out the fabric for the Christmas snowflake skirt I'd been wanting to create for about 15 years. Unfortunately, that's as far as I got until the following week. But I do have a finished white snowflake skirt with white crocheted edging I finally get to wear this Christmas season! (Finished the edging while visiting my mother-in-law after Christmas.)

I also pulled out my Moda Blockheads project fully intending to get at least one block sandwiched and quilted and then begin the white thread crochet around the edge for my quilt-as-you-go join-as-you-go snowflake quilt. I did make a backing totally from scraps (which included some whites), and I did get the first and biggest block sandwiched (which required batting from my leftover stash, all of which is white or off-white). However, I didn't quilt it until two full months later! The lace edging (made from white thread in my stash)... Well, that finally got going in February of this year. Block 1 is done now! I may be trying to finish another block or two today...

Last but not least, I did not spend any money on White Friday last year. I did, however, spend the following week what I would have spent had I gone downtown White Friday. My employer was still on controlled limits of employees (as well as visitors) allowed in the office at any given time. I reported for two hours on my assigned day. After I finished my work duties, I walked a few blocks to the Giving Machines. To me, charities are the best way to spend money on White Friday. I bought diapers (YES, white!!!) for needy moms and bus passes for refugees. If the Giving Machines are available again this year, you can darn sure bet they'll be receiving some money from Lizard and me! If not on White Friday, the very next week.

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