What’s in a name?
OK, so I’ve bounced about the good ol’ intarwebs under a variety of handles. A while back, I decided to sort of “divorce” my fannish online name with my knitting one, for not that many folks like to read about my fannish interests. However, I also decided to change my knitting name late one evening, and thus made a fairly obvious (to me, anyway, a few days later) grammatical error in choosing it. Thus, when I moved the blog over here from blogspot, I corrected that error, and am now going by “moiraeknittoo”.
Background - I’m pagan, and I probably had my first inkling of this way back in elementary school when we covered Greek mythology. The concept of Fate, and her various incarnations, intrigued me even then. The Moirae are another name for the Greek Fates, or the three who control the destinies of everyone. Clotho, the youngest aspect of the three or “maiden”, gathered the material and spun the threads of life. Lachesis, the middle aspect and “mother”, measured (and in some tales) wove the fabric of life. Atropos, the oldest or “hag”, determined the manner of and time of a person’s death. One of my favorite commercial ficational accounts of this is Piers Anthony’s With a Tangled Skein, Book Three in the Incarnations of Immortality series.
Anyway, the concept stuck with me throughout the years, and when I finally picked up needles, and then went on to tinker with spinning, and went one step further and daydreamed about one day creating my own patterns and/or fiber blends? This domain name was realized. It was a way to blend (no pun intended, swear!) my interests in mythology and fiber arts and one of my sources of inspiration for my works.
In all the version of the myth that I’ve been able to find, none of them mention knitting. Since that’s a fairly huge portion of my fiber activities, I brainstormed this username as a reminder that yes, while my namesakes may hold a power over life and death I would not care to have? They might just take a break from all that heavy Destiny and Fate stuff to pick up some needles and knit a shawl or two.
From handspun, of course. ;)
So no, my real name is not Moirae, Moira, nor am I of Irish heritage. It’s all about the Greeks, and one sole geek here at moiraeknittoo.