I know it’s been almost 2 months since I last posted. In my defense, end-of-semester was VERY intense this time around. The semester is now over, though I still haven’t settled into anything like a calm summer rhythm. I’m still running workshops and trying to coordinate submissions for CCCC ’25, and I know I’m going to need to spend a significant amount of time re-reworking my classes given all that has been changing in relation to LLMs/AI. But on that note, my “Writing about and with AI” class went amazingly well this past semester and I’m so proud of it…and I also have been invited to be a guest speaker in a series about AI and pedagogy that is being run at Smith College this fall, on the basis of the (pre-recorded, because I couldn’t travel) talk that I gave at this year’s CCCC conference in April.
It’s been a pretty wild academic year, between winning a big teaching award, writing and publishing 4 different book chapters, and getting attention outside of my own little world (in the form of media interviews and now this invited speaker gig!) for the work I’ve been doing trying to encourage people towards critical AI literacy and away from re-entrenching linguistic biases in their attempts to “police” their students’ use of AI. I’ve always joked that I have a “weird” background for a writing professor (given that my training is in computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and brain and cognitive science, not in English or composition & rhetoric), but suddenly it’s just about the most perfect background for helping colleagues and students navigate the world that OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others have thrown us into whether we wanted it or not: I know a lot about how both humans and computers “do language” and I’ve now got almost 15 years of teaching first year writing under my belt, too.
Anyway, back in November, I decided I wanted to knit a baby blanket for our assistant minister’s baby-to-be, and I started to knit a Nectar Blanket. It turned out, though, that trying to keep track of a hexagonal lace pattern with 3 very yarn-interested kittens and a rather intense workload was just…not happening. I kept having to put it down mid-row and I must have started the second hexagon over (after messing it up in some way I couldn’t fix) about a dozen times before I eventually gave up…and then promptly kind of forgot about the blanket-making plans.
But then baby was born, and I remembered that I had wanted to knit them a blanket! And I thought about what I could reasonably knit (since I needed a pattern I could basically knit in my sleep, given the level of kitten-distraction plus just plain old brain fog I was dealing with) and remembered the Mitered Crosses Blanket that I had knit for M all those years ago. Being all garter stitch, it took up more yarn than the Nectar Blanket would’ve per square inch, so I had to get a little bit creative about how to turn it into something blanket sized.
Basically, I knit 4 squares according to the pattern, and then I knit a mini-square half the size of the main squares with the little bit of rainbow yarn that was left. From that mini-square, I picked up and knit garter stitch strips in the white yarn the length of the large squares, and then seamed it all together.
I used all of the colorful skein of Juniper Moon Farm’s Cumulus Rainbow (in Prismatic Kaleidoscope) and just over 2 skeins of the white Cumulus. I still have that first hexagon from the attempted Nectar Blanket, too…not sure what to do with it!
Today was Rev. AJ‘s first full sermon after his paternity leave, so I figured it was the perfect time to give him the blanket (plus a set of Eric Carle books from M’s library, which she wanted to hand down to the baby).
I left all of the end-weaving to the very end (because I wasn’t entirely sure whether my plan for how to put it together would work, and I knew it would be easier to deconstruct if necessary if I hadn’t woven in the ends). There were SO many ends to weave in…
…but the end result was worth it.
whit::knits 
Ooh, there’s a link to your talk! I’m so intrigued by your perspective on all this stuff, so I’m definitely going to have to find some time to watch it!