What is it about Martha Stewart? If you want a good watch while you are playing with your Christmas yarn and pointed sticks, tune in to the Netflix biopic, Martha. Talk about a phoenix. Launching her own I.P.O. in 1999, she became the first self-made woman billionaire in American history. Five years later, she’s wearing her “Coming Home Poncho” that a fellow inmate crocheted for her as she leaves a federal prison, a.k.a. “Camp Cupcake.” We have watched her rise and fall and rise again, and there’s a lot to admire here. Perhaps Joan Didion said it best in her New Yorker piece: “This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills. This is a story about a woman who did her own I.P.O. This is the 'woman’s pluck' story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story . . . The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of “feminine” domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips." Joan Didion, The New Yorker, February 21 and 28, 2000.

This is a Martha who is 83, and she’s got an edge—she even drops an occasional f-bomb! But it’s an edge that she has earned, and she’s not going to sand it down or dip it in sugar. And in the midst of the triumphs and the tribulations, she’s learned a few things worth listening to: “If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy for a decade, get a dog. If you want to be happy for life, plant a garden.” She learns something new every day, and she lives by the dictum that “when you are through changing, you are through.” This is a Martha who is perfectly human, flawed like the rest of us and weathered by experience, but still standing and inspecting her peonies. She makes us think that whatever happens, we'll survive--a message we could use right now.

Speaking of transformation, of taking clown-colors and making them wearable, check out Bootie’s shawl that she over-dyed with Kool-Aid. Her daughter actually wears it on a regular basis! A knitting triumph, but it didn’t start out that way. Between this and Martha’s story, you’ll definitely find some inspiration in this episode, and a healthy snack with Martha’s Lemony White Bean Hummus! Please check out the Show Notes at www.bootieandbossy.com

Want to start out the New Year with a great read? If you are an Ina Garten fan, as we are, her new memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens and this episode are for you! And with the audio version, it’s like Ina is keeping you company while you’re knitting—as Ina would say, “How great is that?”

We decided that Ina is a bit like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. How can that possibly be, you ask? To be clear, she does not compare herself to a Phoenix. But as she describes growing up in a strict, 1950s household obsessed with appearances where her mother (a dietician) saw food as sustenance and insisted her daughter focus only on her studies, Ina rises from the ashes to create a food empire grounded on the opposite of those values. Ina’s food is about love, something she learned when she started making cookies for her then boyfriend, Jeffrey: “baking something delicious was a way to express my feelings and to connect with Jeffrey—I’d think of him while I cooked, and when he reached for one of my cookies or brownies, I knew he’d think of me” (35). Grandma always said the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

What Ina wanted—and still wants—is to be “independent and self-determined,” and if that meant leaving her job in the White House to own a specialty food shoppe, then that’s the point: she wanted the freedom to make that decision, even when everyone else, including her parents, thought it was wrong. And guess what? Ina was right. The irony is that she worked incredibly hard to make cooking easy for the rest of us.

“You weren’t lucky. You make your own luck.”

Oprah Winfrey to Ina Garten (303)

There’s only one thing we must take issue with, and we are going to side with Oprah Winfrey here, who smacked Ina on the arm when she returned to her seat after accepting an award and expressing gratitude for all of her good luck. Ina made her own luck. Oprah wins that one.

A Phoenix is also the theme for Bootie’s latest knitting project for our sister Melissa, who decided she needed a pussy hat emblazoned with a Phoenix rising from the ashes of 2024. As all good things, it was a collaborative effort, with Liss designing the Phoenix, Bootie’s son providing the graphing paper for a knitting-stitch scale, and Bootie knitting and embellishing with duplicate stitches. A lot of work, but it looks great!

So make a big batch of Ina’s delicious carrot ginger soup—very healthy, depending on how much cream you add—and snuggle in for a listen to Ina reading Be Ready When the Luck Happens and to our podcast!

P.S. Did we mention that Ina is also a knitter?!

Show notes at www.bootieandbossy.com

Shear delight is the only way to describe our conversation with the wonderfully talented Christina Kading, who began her career as a second-generation sheep-shearer at the age of 8 ("I was born on top of a sheep!"). What's so hard about sheep shearing, you ask? First there are the kicking animals who don't necessarily want a woolcut, even though they have it growing out of their ears and eyeballs. Then there's the sheer physicality it demands, second only to jackhammering. And finally there's all the sexism, the men like Gary in Pennsylvania who didn't think Christina--a woman!--could shear his alpacas. Step aside, Gary, and let Christina Kading show you just how capable she is. She can do so much more than shear Gary's alpacas, though that alone would be enough--she's an accomplished artist, working in wood and wool, and a mixologist to boot. Try out Christina's recipes for a Jade Gimlet and an Espresso Martini--they are divine concoctions to warm up and refresh on a cold winter night (or day).

"Just because we are women, and we are gay, doesn't mean we are not capable of shearing an alpaca."

Christina Kading

We met Christina at Rhinebeck where she was selling her rugs, hand-made from the unwanted wool from her shearing. Her designs are wonderfully geometric and coincide with the wood tabletops she makes using pyrography, a technique of inscribing designs with fire. Her fascination with lines and shapes began in her high school math classes (as a way to avoid learning math), but that has blossomed into beautiful art informed by sacred geometry, the sense that we are all connected through universally shared lines, shapes and patterns.

We hope you enjoy our conversation with Christina as much as we did--we learned a lot, and it is true that "sheep-shearers are just irresistible. . . we just hypnotize people with our loving, gentle, sheep-shearing skills. I don't know what it is, but it gets them every time." So grab a Jade Gimlet or Espresso Martini and take a break from the holiday chaos to tune in for a great conversation with a fascinating artist and sheep-shearer!

Check out the Show Notes at www.bootieandbossy.com