first of a series of paper trails

everything on my desk in october 2025

I spend 85% of my time in one room in my apartment. It is a self proclaimed studio, but it is also where I work my 9-5 (which is more like an 8-6) remotely. I work there, eat there, knit there, scroll there. I’ve taken calls in every corner of the room. The walls have heard everything from design critiques to long pauses on the phone with my mom. This room has seen every version of my attention from focused to frantic.

The edges of my desk are lined with quiet witnesses: postcards, scraps of paper, yarn samples, receipts, ticket stubs. The room is small enough that everything touches everything. I drag skeins of yarn across the same surface where my laptop charger trails. Post-its with thoughts that felt urgent at the time become now small, stale flags that wave next to my knitting machine. The room absorbs all of my half-finished thoughts until I forget where one day ended and the next one started.

I don’t clear it off right away. Stuff just sits there for a while, gathering in small piles. Some of it is useful, some of it is trash, most of it is in-between. I like watching that slow build-up. It feels like the desk is taking notes on what the month was actually like, not how I meant it to go.

Every month I tell myself I’ll clear it off, start clean. But before I do, I try to read the traces like tea leaves. This time I’m breaking my desk into four sections (printed ephemera, yarn, books, odds & ends) and tracing each thing back to its moment of arrival as I close out October.

printed ephemera

1. New business cards One thing I learned this month is that asking a graphic designer to “just print something out” is a fools’ errand. When I asked Tito to print out a “few sheets with just my name and email on them” for upcoming markets I did not anticipate a fully designed business card. Though I’m absolutely thrilled with them.

2. Name tag & flyer from Cover to Cover: A Mini Magazine Conference I popped down to Toronto for a few days this month and had the pleasure of attending the inaugural Cover to Cover book fair by Issues Magazine Shop. As someone still pretty new to self-publishing, I showed up ready to learn and I did. I heard editors talk candidly about the realities of working with contributors when you don’t have endless budgets or time. There was a sense that DIY book production is less a field than a shared condition of people choosing to turn ideas into objects, even when the margins are thin and the outcomes uncertain. What I found moving was the way the conversations hovered between practicality and devotion. There was no illusion of “best practices” in that room; there was only practice.

3. Flyer from Volume Art Book Fair I was touched to be tabling Needlebound at such a vital and longstanding art book fair in the city. When you table your work you lose the ability to wander (so I didn’t get as much of a browse as I would’ve liked), but you gain the chance to watch your work in someone else’s hands. A few people told me they’d been following the project online and finally got to see it in person (I don’t have a smooth response for that moment yet). Pansy Cafe also made the best cardamom bun I have had in Montreal. I ate one too quickly and then spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about getting another.

4. Prints by Ron Ron Club from the Also Cool Halloween Market Minou graciously asked me to table some knits and books at Systéme for an evening, alongside a handful of great local vendors. I strongly believe that Système is the platonic ideal of a market venue as both a vendor and a shopper. Sometimes I get totally overwhelmed when I’m at a market with dozens of tables and often leave with a sense of guilt that I did not spend enough time at each stall. Système can only fit about 5–8 vendors at a time, which deflates all that pressure. You can take your time and not feel like you’re abandoning a hundred other makers in your peripheral vision, so both sides (browser and browsee) get to breathe.

   

   Tito and I at our table at Volume Book Fair in the yellow morning glow of the stained glass of Casa D’Italia

---

yarn stash

1. Lanna Grossa - Basta

   Ever since I found this yarn, I’ve drifted back into the practice that first pulled me into working with fibre in the first place: crocheting in front of the TV. This month in particular I’ve gotten really into Hacks (the first show I’ve seen that captures the specific unease of being in your twenties on a work trip in Vegas). The yarn turned into a small batch of hats I really enjoyed making, mostly experiments in colour and texture. I sent a few to Retail Pharmacy (NYC) and Take Three Boutique (Montreal).

   

2. Knitting Loft Single Ply Merino

   Lately I’ve been using this single ply merino for pillow cases. It has a slight fuzz to it that soft enough to press your face into, but structured enough to hold a detailed image. The latest pillow is about that AI bunnies on a trampoline video that confused everyone for a week.

   

3. Sock Yarn from Biscotte

   I wish I remembered the name of this yarn. I tossed the label without thinking because I was rushing to finish a Sleepytime Tea Bear costume in time for Halloween. I sketched the hat shape on a scrap of paper, then freehanded the whole thing on my knitting machine. At the Halloween party, I was the coziest person in the room which was my only success criteria.

   

4. Twisted Willow - Merino Linen Singles Single

   

   I love this yarn. I used it for a hat inspired by a star motif I pulled from a paper about AI and microscopic imaging. Because it’s hand-dyed, the saturation varies from skein to skein. The slight variegation in the skein feels true to the the unexpected textures of the source image from the paper in all its irregular specks and the visual rhythm of microscopic imaging.

---

books

1. Medium Hot - Hito Steryl I absolutely devoured this on the train from Montreal to Cobourg. The use of heat as a conceptual framework felt timely and potent. Steyerl writes about images not as surface artifacts, but as thermal objects, things that generate heat, require cooling, and move through economic and ecological circuits; what we think of as “content” is just the final cooled-out layer of something far more feverish. There is one chapter about the AI images of deformed bodies, limbs twisted, faces just slightly wrong. These are the result of models straining at the edge of what they’ve been trained to simulate. The body distorts because something in the chain is under strain: (labor, silicon, heat). Really, really terrifying and good.

2. The Life of Things: The Stitch - MacGuffin I have been admiring this publication from afar and appreciated their vision of honing in on the life of a single object (a sink, a window, a rug). When I heard MacGuffin was dedicating a full issue to “a modest gesture with an expansive reach,” I didn’t hesitate. A stitch is barely an object at all. It’s a gesture before it is a thing and the act that makes the textile possible. I ordered it without reading the description.

3. Weird New Jersey Magazine I picked this up on a quick trip to Burlington, Vermont (not New Jersey) at a used book store attached to an antique mall. It sat between old issues of Playboy and a spiral-bound church cookbooks. According to Wikipedia it is “a semi-annual magazine that chronicles local legends, purported hauntings, ghost stories, folklore, unusual places or events, and other peculiarities in New Jersey”. A quick flip though revealed bizarre ads that remind me of the kind of thing you see on an Online Ceramics shirt and a tone that hovers somewhere between earnest and conspiratorial. Their website is still true to that voice. It was 5 bucks.

odds and ends

1. Plushie from Alpaga Sutton

   In late summer, I visited Alpaga Sutton in the Eastern Townships. At the gift shop, I was on a self proclaimed yarn ban at the time so I settled for getting an alpaca wool stuffed bear instead, which now sits on my table staring straight at the yarn I caved buying anyway, like a tiny, woolen auditor.

2. Pink Pantheress 2025 Tour Fan Most of the band merch I buy is an in-the-moment decision that ends up living in the back of a drawer. This fan dodges that fate by living quietly in my drawer until I snap it out (and transport back to witnessing the crew at Massey Hall desperately try to pull down the curtain during Stateside).

3. Le Labo Encens 9 Candle The scent is frankincense first (resinous and a little ceremonial) softened by amber and sharpened by clove. It’s been a great transitional autumn scent.

4. Elorea - Hazy Blue I bought this one for the name before the notes. ēnae—the Korean word for that faint, blue haze you see at sunset where the sky turns soft just at the horizon and the landscape feels just slightly out of focus. It’s super fresh but balanced with a powerful bergamot note followed by a pinch of amber.