Postcards from a disorganised mind

The blocks

2012-01-27T21:55:00.001Z

Here are the first four blocks of the skill builder. All of them were done with fabric from my stash, hence the scrappy appearance. I'm trusting that the quilt will come together, and even if it ends up ugly, it'll be good for snuggling under.

Four of the fabrics in this log cabin block were from previous projects. The red and the yellow were used in the coasters that were my first patchwork project, and the pink and darker green were part of the cushion covers that I showed you a few days ago. The lighter green came from a box of random yarn and fabric that my knitting group had.

Some of the same fabrics have been used here. The red stars, darker green, and gold as before. The yellow with green sunflowers was left over from a project bag that I made last summer; the cat fabric (I love the cat fabric so much) was the coasters, and the centres of the lighter squares was the cushion covers again. The light fabric with blue flowers was from a dress I made myself - it turned out hideously ugly and ill-fitting, but I really like the fabric. Good job, too, because I've oodles of it left.

Here we have more of the cat fabric. The cats have birds on their heads! It's so fun! The floral fabric is one that I bought with the idea of making a project bag, but it's too light for that really, and anyway, I needed something light for the background of this block. Two of the triangles were sewn on back to front, but I didn't notice until the end, and I didn't care enough to unpick the whole darn thing and resew them. Once it's part of a quilt, nobody will notice, right?

This one's my favourite, so far. The background fabric is that hideous dress again, and we have the pink from the cushion covers and the cats up at the top there. Bottom left we have more of the fabric from my knitting group, and two new fabrics in the middle and lower right. I bought both of those with project bags in mind, but I was getting low on stashed fabrics (I have a small fabric stash), so I broke into them for this block and the next. The yellow has bees on it. Bees! It's fantastic, I'll try to get a better picture when I've recharged my camera. The purple is a very pretty subtle flowers and stars and variegation print. Michael chose the layout of this one, because I couldn't decide how to arrange the blocks. I think he did a good job.

I have some of the pieces for the next block cut out, but not all. Hopefully I'll get it done on Sunday. I've been super busy this week reading for my dissertation; I got through The Beauty Myth and The Female Eunuch this week. Both are very much of their time, but very important books in the feminist canon. For pleasure I'm still reading Possession. I've started using Goodreads; this is my profile over there. Add me as a friend! I've been enjoying reading people's reviews of books that I've read or am planning to read.

A quilt, perhaps

2012-01-22T21:22:00.001Z

I've decided to join in with Leila's We Can Do It! Skill builder sew-along, only about seven months late. Today I hauled out my sewing machine, got out my stash of quilting weight cotton, and got really stuck in to the cutting and sewing. I finished the first four blocks today, the log cabin, nine patch, churn dash and pinwheels. My plan is to make a throw to go over the back of the sofa.

I had the machine out a couple of days ago, and finished off a cushion that was begun back in about May. My Mum and I made the pieced fronts and got the backs ready for sewing, but only one got finished that day. It took until earlier this week for me to get around to making the piping and assembling the second cushion.

The cushion on the right has been in use for months, the one on the left is the new one. I figured out piping for these, which I really like. You can see, though, that the sofa needs a throw or quilt to hang on the back of it.

10 facts about me

2012-01-13T13:38:00.002Z

* I feel a close affinity to ladybirds (ladybugs) and hedgehogs. I think that if I was an animal, I would be a hedgehog.
* I have a phobia of moths and butterflies. They horrify me. Apparently, this is a fairly common phobia.
* My favourite scent is coconut. I use coconut shampoo and conditioner, and sometimes coconut soap. I also love gingerbread and honey scents. I don't wear perfume.
* My favourite kind of cake is a traditional Victoria sponge cake, with jam and cream. For my last birthday cake, I made an almond sponge cake and sandwiched it using raspberry jam. It was delicious.
* My favourite sandwich is apple jelly with peanut butter. I love salty and sweet things together.
* A shaman once told me that my power animal is a river, and my spiritual ancestors are the east and west wind, which appeared to me as red and white chinese dragons. This was during a guided meditation session. I am wildly sceptical of this sort of thing, but it makes for a fun story.
* My favourite colour is deep purple, an aubergine shade. I also love blues and greens, and have a problem with buying too much teal yarn.
* I strongly identify as a Ravenclaw in terms of the houses from Hogwarts. I value intelligence and learning. In the Knitting and Crochet House Cup, I play as a Slytherin, which is great.
* Around 75% of my yarn stash is sock weight. I knit primarily with sock weight yarn. Sometimes this is a bad thing, because projects can take ages to get done. The stash that is not sock weight is mostly DK.
* I like using bamboo needles more than metal. I've never used wooden needles, but I'd like to at some point. I warp all the knitting needles I use because my gauge is quite tight. I knit with the yarn in my right hand, and when I hold it in my left, my gauge is a lot slacker.

(This post is partially to help with anyone doing Crappy Day Packages for me. I hope it's helpful, and if it's not helpful, I hope it's interesting. Doing My Best has a Crappy Day Package exchange going on at the moment, and there are three days remaining in which to sign up. I took part in the last one, which was great fun. If you're wondering whether to sign up, go for it!)

Making things

2012-01-10T17:56:00.001Z

Here are the few things which I made for people for Christmas last year.

My sister received this Ishbel Beret:

And embroidered into the hem of the brim was a message: "For Beth with love from Cayt Win. 11"

I managed to confuse her by marking the wrapping 'Do Not Bend'. I also bought books for my Dad, and wrote "Handknitted by Cayt" on the packaging. It's good to make people laugh.

Beth also received these fingerless gloves, another Ysolda pattern in the same yarn.

For my brother, I made gloves. The cuffs were done in stranded colourwork, and I embroidered patches in conductive thread on the thumb and forefinger to make them smartphone-compatible. I also knit his name, my name and Winter 2011 on the insides of the cuffs.

Here they are being expertly modeled by Michael. You can see the grey/shiny part of the thumb that is touch-screen conductive. Both of my siblings gifts were knit in Old Maiden Aunt, Beth's in 100% Superwash Merino in Seen the Ocean, Al's in Merino/Cashmere/Nylon in Derelict Daughter.

I also knit a pair of socks for my Nanna. Her favourite colour is blue, so they are BLUE. Here is an end-on picture. They are Sunshine, by Cookie A.

Aside from Michael's socks, which you've seen before, I made a pair of socks for my dear friend. This picture is one that she took, not me.

The pattern is Skew, by Lana Holden, and apparently they fit her very well.

So that's all the handmades I gave for Christmas, only two weeks after the fact!

Reading for Pleasure, revisited

2012-01-01T10:12:00.001Z

Well, as can be seen from my list of books read for pleasure last year, I didn't manage to read a book every week for pleasure. I read 43 books for pleasure last year, and while I began several more, the ones that I did not finish did not make it onto the list. I've decided to continue with this enterprise - I do think it's worth doing - and am recording books read for pleasure this year, too.

Of the books I read last year, 5 were non-fiction, and 38 were fiction. 8 were graphic novels or comic books, and 14 of the fiction novels were young adult or children's books. I read two collections of short stories. I also read over 20 books for various classes.

Of all the books I read last year, there was only one which I felt afterwards was a bad book, and that was the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I found it cutesy and ill-researched, unlikely and unnecessarily unpleasant. I would recommend When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by Judith Kerr, for a book from the perspective of a child about World War 2. There was also one, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I felt I had missed the window in which I would have most enjoyed it. That book, I think, would have been much better for me to read at 17 while taking myself far too seriously, because I found it challengingly immature, but I think I would have loved it five years ago.

My hope this coming year is to read more substantive books for pleasure - I'm reading Possession, by A. S. Byatt at the moment, and I'm finding it dense and mentally nourishing, in the manner of fruitcake. I will be seeking out more Booker prize winners and books which are Great as well as being great. I also hope to read more collections of short stories. I received Forbidden Cities, which is a collection by P. Morris, for Christmas, and I'm excited to read more of that. I'm also hoping to read more adult novels, hoping for a higher proportion of grown up books to young adult books, and since I read no drama whatsoever in 2011, I'd like to read some in 2012.

Joyous and blessed Solstice to you!

2011-12-22T07:09:00.000Z

It's here! It's today! It's the solstice!

Here is the time where the days start getting longer and the nights start getting shorter. The sun is coming back, and I'm thrilled. I can't wait.

In some cultures, there's a tradition of having new clothes for Yule or Solstice. Jólaköttur, or the Yule Cat, takes sacrifices from those who don't have new clothes at Yule. I don't celebrate Yule, but I have a new hat anyway. I lost my most wearable hats, and had to whip this one up in a hurry. It's such a lovely pattern. Yarn is - you guessed it - Old Maiden Aunt, in Derelict Daughter and natural/undyed Merino 4 ply. The pattern is Selbu Modern, a free pattern. Since this hat was made with my leftovers from my mittens, it was a very economical hat.

Rad'idin

2011-12-20T17:29:00.002Z

Last year I took a class on language and gender, and wrote a paper on the constructed language Láadan, a language created by Suzette Haden Elgin to express the experience of woman in the way that languages of patriarchy express the experience of men. One of the words which has no direct translation in English from Láadan is rad'idin. It means roughly 'a holiday which brings with it so much work that it is a dreadful burden rather than a holiday'. An un-holiday, if you will.

I think that this time of year causes much of this feeling. Speaking to my mum on the phone she's expressed a feeling of being overwhelmed, and I'm certainly feeling it (of course the labrynthitis doesn't help much). Before I go back to visit my parents for Christmas, I want the house clean, and it's currently... not. Not to mention, the stuff like reading more books for pleasure this year (that sort of fell by the wayside when the autumn semester hit) and the knitting I still have to do are hanging over me. I'm currently test knitting a shawl with over 350 stitches per row, and 26 rows to go before casting off and blocking and photographing so I can provide feedback to the designer, and did I mention that the deadline is looming?

Michael has his birthday in January (silly month to have a birthday if you ask me, which of course he didn't), so I'm trying to make his birthday gifts as well as frantically finishing off Christmas gifts for people. It's solstice tomorrow and instead of doing something to celebrate, I'll be spending it either tucked up in bed like I have been for the last two weeks, or very slowly doing light housework. That's after I manage to drag myself to the doctor, of course.

Ideally, in the next two weeks I'd knit three pairs of mittens, one hat, finish the scarf and the shawl I'm working on, read 14 books for pleasure, clean my house from top to bottom and sew some last minute gifts. I'm actually more likely to spend it sitting in bed, knitting and reading, but failing to do the housework that needs doing. The only things that will definitely get finished are this shawl and the one gift I have yet to finish off, because the gift is such little work remaining. Actually, I'll go and do that now.

None of this was helped by my losing my two most useful, wearable hats, and having to make myself a new one pronto, because it's too cold to go out without one. I whipped up a beret over the last two days, and it's blocking now, near a radiator to speed the process along. Photos to come... sometime.

Secret Crafting

2011-12-12T13:21:00.001Z

I've been engaged in a good deal of covert crafting - well, not covert really, because the recipients of some of this work do not live with me, but knitting which I've been avoiding speaking about on twitter and on here, knitting which I've been avoiding photographing too clearly, not wanting to show it in its entirety just in case. I've taken some partial pictures, though, which I'll show here. Full pictures to come in a couple of weeks' time.

I also made a pair of mittens for myself, adapting the popular Endpaper Mitts into a pair of mittens.

They're pure wool, and very soft. It's the first major stranded colourwork item I've done, and I'm very pleased with how it worked. The cuffs and thumbs are solid purple, and otherwise they're patterned all over. I've one more gift on the needles, and I'm test knitting a fantastic shawl at the moment as well - pictures of that to come. I also got some more silk hankies from Juno Fibre Arts, and I'm planning to knit mittens from them. Silk is much warmer than wool, so hopefully they'll make a good warm pair of mittens.

The Hardest Thing

2011-11-25T11:15:00.001Z

I was reading a website recently and a quote caught my eye. Somebody said, 'The hardest thing in this society for a woman to be is not an astronaut or president, it's ugly.'

It reminded me of something said by my creative writing prof. She read us a piece she had written about being seventeen years old, which started with something like 'Seventeen was the year I learned to be ugly.' She told about a boy who would follow her between classes, walking behind her down the hallways, chanting, 'Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.'

I think that as women, we are told so explicitly how it is okay for us to look. At Shakesville, there's a series of posts called 'Impossibly Beautiful', which talk about how even the women held up as rolemodels for us, the women who we are supposed to want to look like, are airbrushed and altered until some of them are unrecognisable.

I think it gets even harder because it's almost never phrased as what we should look like, always what we shouldn't. Don't be hairy. Don't be fat. Don't have birthmarks or blemishes. Don't have wonky features, big teeth, a big nose, small eyes, imperfect teeth, frizzy hair. Don't have hair that's too long or too short, too straight or too curly, too styled or too much left to its own devices, and incidentally, we're going to move the goalposts more or less weekly, so your hair that was too short last week is too long this week, and just when you dig out your curling iron, we're going to decide that straight is back in. Don't be too pale or too dark, don't be too tall or too short. Be thin, but not too thin. Don't be bony. Don't be disproportionate in the relative lengths of your legs and body. Don't be too busty, don't be flat chested. Don't have a butt that's too large or too flat.

We are trained to look for what is 'wrong' with ourselves. We are taught to separate our bodies into parts, to chop ourselves up before the mirror. To identify problem areas, and areas that are not problematic... yet. Areas of our bodies that we can stand to display in front of the world, unlike the parts which we are expected to hide and be ashamed of.

It's not difficult to see who is profiting from women being taught to hate their bodies. Just look at the clothing being advertised when the magazines tell you which body part is unacceptable right now. Look at who is making these clothes to hide the parts of your body deemed too unsightly for society to be able to stomach. Look at the paints and potions sold with the promise that they'll fix what's wrong with your face. Look at the poisons and starvation packaged up for us with the promise that, one day, we'll get thin enough to be acceptable. We'll become thin enough that society won't puke upon seeing us.

It is so hard to be ugly in this world. We are taught that we, as women, are things to look at. We are taught to link our self-worth to our appearance, to the number on the scale. We're told that looking good is more important than feeling good. We're told that ugly is unwomanly. When I look at the covers of women's magazines, I think, why do these magazines pretend that they're anything other than what they are? The headline on each one should be, "Women! Hate yourselves!"

I'm short. I wear glasses. I have hair that's longer than is fashionable, and wear home-sewed long skirts and hand knit shawls with clunky boots. I'm fat enough that strangers ask when my baby is due. I don't shave my legs, or my underarms. I don't pluck my eyebrows or wear makeup. I have an autoimmune skin condition that affects every part of my body with unsightly patches. I am intensely aware of the ways in which my body does not adhere to the way that we are told women's bodies are meant to look. I am also very much okay with it.

I love my body. This is the body of a woman who dances, who swims, who writes, who loves baking. It's the body of a student, a reader, a feminist. It's the body I use to cuddle with friends, to squeeze someone's hand or shoulder, to knit lace shawls. This body is intensely functional, and I love that. Even the parts of my body I sometimes wish I could change - largely the scars from my teenage depression - tell the story of my life so far, and I love those, too. This body is, above all, mine, and I refuse to hate it.

I know that I usually keep my personal politics off this blog - it's much more about knitting and recipes and everyday occurrences - but I wanted to say this. I am a woman, with my scars and my hairy legs and my jiggly tummy, and being ugly does not change that. I am a person and no matter how many companies have invested however much money in my self hatred, I am not just an object to be looked at. I will not hate myself. I absolutely refuse.

Giving away more shawls

2011-11-24T14:11:00.001Z

This month there's been a knit along going on in the Old Maiden Aunt* group on Ravelry - OMA is my favourite yarn dyer, her yarn is always gorgeous. We were offered the choice of three shawls to knit, one of which was the juneberry shawl, which I made back in May/June/July time. One of the other choices was Karise (ravelry link), which was already number one on my queue.

I got one of the skeins which I received as part of the yarn club at the beginning of this year, and began. I showed you the beginning of the shawl here, but I don't think that I mentioned having finished it, or blocking it, both of which I did.

This morning, I gave it away.

I folded it neatly and wrapped it in light blue tissue paper, and took it to the lecturer who is supervising my dissertation. I said that I hoped she could find a use for it, and handed it over. She opened it there and then, and was appropriately gushy and enthused about it. She admired the beautiful yarn (all lilith's work, so lovely), and exclaimed over how intricate it is, how delicate it looks. I was very happy to have found a good home for this shawl. I've seen her wearing purple before, so I was fairly sure she liked purple, and she said as she was opening it that she loves purple.

You know when people say it's better to give than to receive? This is the feeling they're talking about. I love giving people things that have a lot of time and love in them, and she was the perfect knitwear recipient.

*Yes, I link to her website when I mention her yarn. No, she doesn't know I do it. I just feel very enthused about her beautiful yarn, and want to make sure that anyone who stumbles across this blog and likes the look of the yarn will know how to get hold of it.

A knitting tutorial

2011-11-05T23:14:00.001Z

This one's for Beylit. It made me laugh.

On recognising, and being recognised

2011-11-05T23:07:00.001Z

Swistle wrote a post asking, If you saw a blogger out and about, would you say hi?

I wrote a comment, and I realised that I was taking up more than my fair share of comment space, so I've come to finish my thoughts over here. This is what I wrote in her comment box:

I have been in the position where I saw someone in the street that I recognised from the internet, but it's more that we're both members of a forum with 7000 people on it, and I wasn't sure it was her, so I didn't say anything. I did message her later, though, and ask was she in that city on that day, and she sent a message back saying I should have stopped her and let's do coffee sometime. That was nice. I should message her and see when she wants to do coffee.

If it were you, Swistle, I think I would go over, but I would be HORRIBLY AWKWARD and probably embarrass myself totally and then you'd - I don't even know. It would be excruciating. But I like you, so I'd do it anyway. Most of the bloggers I read, I'm not sure I'd recognise them. I'd say hi to Marie Green, and DoingMyBest, if I thought I'd recognise them. Pretty much all of the rest, nope.

Situations like the party are why I carry a knitting project with me most of the time. At times like that, I pull out the knitting, and then it's okay that nobody is talking to me because I'm counting stitches, and clearly I'm Totally Self Sufficient and FINE.

Oh. Um. Talking of knitting, there are at least two knitwear designers whose blogs I read who live in a city about an hour on the train from me. It's also the city where Michael's parents live, so we're there fairly often. If I saw either of them, I'd be really torn, but I think I'd want to say hi. I really like both of their designs.

This comment is too long. I'm going to continue it in my blog.

I think that I'm unlikely to be in a situation where I would recognise a blogger who I read regularly, because most of the blogs I read are from people who live in the States, and I am not there very often. Similarly, most of the people who visit this blog are from the States, although UK readers come in second. Third is the Netherlands, though I'm not sure why. Nevertheless, if someone ran into me and recognised me from my blog, I think I'd want them to say hi. It'd be nice! On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I'm shorter and fatter in real life than on the blog.

On the other hand, I don't want people who know me in real life to read my blog unless I tell them it's okay. My mum reads my blog, and that's fine, but if my peers began reading it, that would be weird. Clearly I should have thought of that before choosing to blog under my own first name. And as has been seen in the past, clearly it's happened. People claiming to know me in real life have posted mean, anonymous things here before.

I found the blog of one of my lecturers recently, and I feel really weird about it. On the one hand, I really like reading it - it's interesting and she's a great writer. On the other, I feel kind of creepy reading it, and I can't tell if commenting on it would make it more creepy or less creepy, so I'm erring on the side of not commenting. On the first hand again, she chose to blog under her real name - first and last. I was looking for information on a book that she wrote when I stumbled across it. Surely if one does that, one has to accept that people who know one in meatspace are going to find and read the blog. On the second hand, still creepy. I don't know. I've added it to my feed reader, and I'm reading it, but not commenting. In some ways that's the creepiest of all options, maybe.

There are also a couple of blogs I read which are people who I know in real life, or who I know a little bit. Penny, for example, lives in the same area that I do, and we've run into each other in the yarn store before. The same with Helen.

I don't know. It's so many grey areas. I think that to sum up, mostly the answer is maybe. Maybe I'd go say hi to a blogger I recognised. Maybe I'd want someone who read my blog to say hi to me. It would depend on so many factors. Maybe I'm over-thinking this. It's kind of my forte.

Rehoming stuff

2011-11-03T23:37:00.001Z

Yesterday I had a friend come over for dinner. It was really lovely. She's a knitter, too, and we talked a bit about my shawl collection. I love knitting shawls, but there's a limit to how many get properly worn.

I have two large ones, a light one and a heavy one, and two that I wear as scarves. Those all get used regularly. Then I have the others, the ones that I made but don't wear, that I don't like, or that are less well designed, less of a joy to knit, or just didn't end up the right colour for me.

One of the latter kind was my Earth and Sky shawl (that's a ravelry link, because apparently Mr West doesn't have it listed on his website). I knit this one as a mystery knit along, so I didn't know when I started it how it would look when it was done. I barely had any idea at all, other than that it would be three colours. I used a shade of purple and two greys, and I loved my colours. The shawl itself, though... not so much. The pattern is fine, it was well written and clearly explained. The problem was just that it wasn't my sort of thing at all.

The blocks of colour don't work for me. The strong lines were too stark, the texture insufficiently lacy. It didn't make my heart skip when I looked at it or thought about it. It went to the top shelf of my wardrobe and lay there, abandoned in favour of Ishbel or Haruni.

When my friend saw Earth and Sky, though, her face lit up. She pulled an incredulous face when I mentioned that I didn't wear it, and that I was sort of looking for a person to give it to, but I hadn't been able to think of anyone who I thought would love it.

An idea came into my head. I gave her the shawl.

I feel great. She gets a shawl, that she can wear as a scarf, and I get to feel like knitting it wasn't a waste of time. I'm so glad it's gone to someone who can appreciate it, and who'll actually wear it.

I'm knitting Karise at the moment. The colour is gorgeous, and I love the pattern. If I don't end up wearing it, though, I already have someone in mind who wears similar colours to that. Now, if only I could find a fitting recipient for my travelling woman...

Epitaph

2011-11-02T22:50:00.002Z

According to the internet, yesterday was National Plan Your Epitaph Day.

The internet is a strange place.

It got me to thinking. For a long time, I've said, bury my body under a pear tree. Then, when the pears are ripe, I want my friends to eat them and say, "Mmm, Cayt is delicious this year." I'm pretty sure I got this idea from the radio, probably about ten years ago, but I can't remember for sure. Anyway, I think it's a pretty good way of disposing of a body, once all the useful parts have been distributed as usefully as they can be.

I cast on for my next shawl. I'm using Old Maiden Aunt 100% Merino in a colour called Leanan Sidhe, which is named for a sort of scottish succubus/vampire type creature. I love how it's knitting up; there are so many subtleties in the colour which can't be seen well in the skein but when it's knit, they become apparent. I'm looking forwards to getting to the lace part of this shawl. Much as I love shawls with a stocking stitch body and a wide lace border, the stocking stitch is fairly dull to knit. It showcases the yarn beautifully, though.

NaNovember

2011-11-01T22:02:00.000Z

It's November, and for me, that means NaNoWriMo (again). This year I'm writing a sort of fantasy bildungsroman about Merlin. Ish.

I worry that I might have bitten off more than I can chew this month, but I suppose I won't really know until I try to swallow. I'm planning on knitting a pair and a half of socks (I'm on a huge sock kick at the moment), as well as knitting a lace shawl (not a very complex one) for a knitalong in the Old Maiden Aunt group on Ravelry. Plus I'm writing a novel, 50,000 words - that takes around an hour a day - and I have a short story to write and revise for my creative writing class, and an assignment for my Jane Austen class, in addition to the regular work for those classes.

I have a bunch of finished knitted objects that require photographing, but here's one that I finished last week - a pair of socks, a solstice gift for Michael. He's modelling them in this picture, but as soon as I'd taken the photo I took them back, and he can open them next month. I'm really happy with how they've turned out.

Miss Peregrine; A Tale of Time City

2011-10-23T11:08:00.002+01:00

Well, I gave up on Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which I discussed here. The problems with it are multitudinous. The problems with the book itself - I'm finding characters two dimensional, the peculiar children are gimmicky and the main character, Jacob, is whiny and stupid. Miss Peregrine is entirely unfit to be headmistress of anything, let alone a group of children requiring special protection. It's told in first person, and it uses that technique where I, the reader, can see and draw conclusions that the main character can't, but it's taken to ridiculous extremes. I'm working things out ages before Jacob. He emerges into a world where everyone's wearing old fashioned clothes, and carrying gas masks, and the statue that was recently erected is missing, and it takes him ages to figure out he's gone to the past. There are parts of it where I was listening while I walked, and I literally rolled my eyes at how obvious and stupid it was.

There's also the aspect of did not do the research. The slang used by the children was utterly wrong, the slang used by the modern Welsh characters was cringeworthy. Not to mention, the modern Welsh characters are treated with such disdain by the narrative that I felt deeply uncomfortable listening to it. All of them are grumpy, all of them are lacking in intelligence - I felt that the author despised Welsh people.

Then there's the problem of the narrator. I don't know how accurate his Florida accent is, but his British accents are abysmal. They go not only all over the British Isles, but all over Europe and the Commonwealth. He'll be doing a voice and I'll wonder, 'hmm, is this character meant to be Italian or Pakistani?' and then the speech tag will say, "he said in a strong Welsh accent." Clearly this voice actor has never heard a Welsh accent before in his life.

To make matters worse, he's clearly aware that he's struggling with these accents, so whenever a character who's meant to have a British accent speaks, their speech gets broken up into individual words which makes characterisation impossible. It also makes the characters sound like they are universally stupid, which is really jarring when a character is supposed to be a headmistress or a shockingly intelligent person (hello, Tasha-Yar-is-a-very-attractive-woman-Syndrome).

I got halfway through and gave up. It's not worth my time, and next time it makes me roll my eyes I might strain something. Part of the problem might be that it's a young adult novel, but I hate making concessions for YA books just because they're aimed at younger readers. A good book should be a good book, it shouldn't be a-good-book-considering-it's-aimed-at-young-readers. There are so many great books out there, including ones written for young adults. I don't think that 10-13 year olds should have to put up with substandard writing. Anyway, when I heard that the ending was open ended, so that he could write a sequel, I decided that I was done, and took it off my MP3 player.

Speaking of good books for younger readers, I went to one of my local libraries recently, and poked around the young adult section. I was looking for books by Diana Wynne Jones, who I adored as a young adult, but could find only two copies of Witch Week, and a copy of A Tale of Time City.

I took out A Tale of Time City, and was dismayed to find that not only had only three people borrowed this book ever, nobody had borrowed it in the last year. I took it with me as I wandered the rest of the library, but ended up taking only A Tale of Time City out with me.

I read it last night, and realised that the reason I had loved Diana Wynne Jones so much as a child is that her books are brilliant. Well written, funny, subtle enough to be interesting but by no means impenetrable. She trusts her readers to do the reading, to remember the details and put the clues together. I read A Tale of Time City in one sitting (such luxury, to be able to do that), and fell in love with it again. It's such a shame that the library doesn't have a better selection of her books available. I loved The Homeward Bounders, Power of Three, Howl's Moving Castle. A Tale of Time City, while not one of my favourites, is still a great book, and a great change from the disappointment that was Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

The best season

2011-10-20T23:09:00.002+01:00

My lecturer entered the seminar this morning huffing cold breath and wrapping her coat more firmly around her.
"The weather is awful," she said.
"It could be worse," I said. I was knitting on a sock at the time, and wearing two shawls.
"It's 2 degrees," she said. "It's not likely to be much worse, in October."

When I awoke this morning, the bowling green outside the kitchen window was frosted, the green of the grass muted, like dried herbs. I dug out another pair of gloves from the knitwear stash and warmed them on the radiator as I drank tea.

Autumn is my favourite season. Maybe it's because it's the season that contains my birthday, but I like to think that it's the freshness. For pagans, particularly celtic reconstructionists, hallowe'en (Samhain) is the point where the old year gives way to the new. The autumn has always meant fresh beginnings for me. The crispness in the air that it brings smells like promises to be made.

Some days, I like that I'm awake for a couple of hours before the sun rises. I like sitting in the living room, knitting or reading or drinking tea, watching the cream walls flush with red as the day makes itself known. I like knowing that it's going to get worse, that I should savour this much light now, and I like knowing that after it gets worse, it'll get better. It's reassuring, like nothing dies forever.

Other days I resent the shortening of the light, and I wish that we had more September and less November. Today, though, there's a freedom to the first frost that I find gives me energy. I turned in my first paper of the semester, and feel deliciously light with that burden removed from my shoulders. Tomorrow I'm going to indulge and read a novel that I don't have to study for class - daring, I know.

Accent Vlog

2011-10-18T00:25:00.001+01:00

I finally got around to doing the accent vlog. I find that I confuse people with my slang more than with my accent, although I get asked All The Time at work where my accent is from. Once a woman just leaned in really close to me and said, with no preamble, "Canada."

I watched Swistle's Accent Vlog, and I saw Jonniker's, and I saw someone else's (someone from Alaska? I can't find it!), and so I made one because apparently saying that you're thinking about doing something in Swistle's comments is the same thing as PROMISING to do that thing. So Fine. Here. I'm sorry for the crappy lighting.

Notes:

Say the following words:
Aunt, route, wash, oil, theatre, iron, salmon, caramel, fire, water, sure, data, ruin, crayon, toilet, New Orleans, pecan, both, again, probably, spitting image, Alabama, lawyer, coupon, mayonnaise, syrup, pajamas, caught

And answer these questions:
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bug that curls into a ball when you touch it?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you use to change the TV channel?

To the person who found this site through searching 'being lonely post cards'

2011-10-17T23:22:00.003+01:00

I hope that you found what you needed, and that you're not feeling too lonely. Or, if you were looking for post cards to send to someone that is lonely, I hope that they aren't feeling too lonely.

A while ago, I was feeling horribly lonely. I put on twitter, "I am consumed by loneliness." At that moment, I was feeling terrible. I felt so alone, and so lost, and so incredibly tiny. Then something amazing happened. A wonderful woman, a lovely, kind hearted, mother of five from at least three thousand miles away, tweeted back to me, "I'm sorry! I understand. Can I help?"

It's so easy to feel lost and alone, and it's so easy to feel like when you write a blog, or on a forum, or tweet, you're sending words out to nobody and nowhere. But behind every account is a person, sitting and typing. That a person would take time out of their day to send a message of humanity and caring to a lonely 21 year old in Scotland is amazing, to me.

So, person who searched for 'being lonely post cards', I'm sorry, and I understand. If there's anything I can do to help, please email. My email's over there, on the left. Be well.

On reading and listening to books

2011-09-23T13:47:00.001+01:00

Reading for pleasure is oddlydifficult when one is an English Lit student. It seems as though it should beeasy, slotting in books for fun among all of the books for class, but it's not.At the moment, I'm reading Mansfield Park, for my Austen class, and Readinglike a Writer, for my creative writing class, and trying to audition books formy dissertation in between. I'm halfway through a graphic novel that shouldonly take half an hour to read in the first place, but I haven't managed tofind time between studying, tidying, and trying not to let my friends thinkthat I've fallen off the face of the earth.

I have been listening to books,though. I recently listened to N. K. Jemisin's TheHundred Thousand Kingdoms, and enjoyed it so much that I followed itimmediately with The BrokenKingdoms (those links go to the audible pages for the versions Ilistened to). I was initially unsure of the performer, but I'm really glad Igave her a chance. It didn't take long before I felt that her performanceenhanced the experience of the book. Her accent is unfamiliar to me, but theevents of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms take place in a land that is unfamiliarto me. It was a little jarring switching from the first book to the second;both are narrated in the first person, but by different characters. There was abit of disconnect as I felt like 'But that's Yeine's voice!' when beginning tolisten to the second book. Again, though, it didn't take long before I wasgetting into the story. I actually feel that I enjoyed listening more than Imight have enjoyed reading these novels, not least because there are characterswith names that I think I would have found distracting. I'm not sure if itmakes sense or not, but when I read fantasy novels with unusual names, frequentlyones with apostrophes and random capitalisations or letters grouped together inunpronouncable ways, it puts me off. Listening, though, character nameslike Zhakkarn and Kurue were just names, beingsaid aloud. I loved both books, and am eagerly awaiting the third book'spublication, next month.

Currently I'mlistening to two books. One, MissPeregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, I'm listening to as I walk to andfrom university. It's a little uncanny, a bit gruesome, and too unsettling tolisten to at night, when going to sleep. I'm enjoying it, though, although thenarrator isn't great, and I think it's probably a fairly mediocre book. I'monly about an hour into it, though, so I'm giving it a chance.

The other bookI'm listening to is RedSeas under Red Skies, which is the second book in the Gentleman Bastardsequence. The first book is called The Lies of Locke Lamora, and I read thatfirst a few years ago, and have reread it several times since. I've also readRed Seas before - I tend to read them back to back, actually - but again the narrator,Michael Page, adds a lot to the experience. Red Seas is a comfortable book,excellent for going to sleep to. I do not mean to imply that it is dull, justthat having read it before, it's easier to drift off while Locke and Jean dotheir thing. As a side note, listening to The Lies of Locke Lamora made iteasier for me to read Jean as the french boys name, rather than the englishgirls name. Jean is a he.

I got into audiobooks largelythrough listening to Discworld books narrated by Stephen Briggs. I find himinfinitely preferable to Tony Robinson, who also narrates a lot of Discworldbooks, but I know people who feel precisely opposite to how I feel. Currentlyon my audiobook queue is The Final Empire, which I got because it's one that Ikeep picking up and putting back at the bookshop. When I finish one of the onesI'm currently listening to, I'll start it.

I'm also considering The Girl whoCircumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and The Emerald Atlas (whichis partly because I enjoy Jim Dale's voice so much), and Great Expectations (which is partly because Michael Page,as recorded above, is so enjoyable).

I think that an audiobook with the right narrator can make the experience better than reading in one's head. The wrong narrator is like your primary school teacher who takes no joy in reading to children, and does the voices wrong, and pronounces Hermione 'her-me-own'. It can utterly kill a book. One of the bonuses of audiobooks is that they make books portable - I listen to books while walking, knitting, tidying or washing up. I read print books while knitting, but they're hard to read while doing the other things.

I suppose I find some time for reading for pleasure, even if it's reading with my ears. It's hard though, and I do need to prioritise more.

A terrifying experience

2011-09-21T11:07:00.001+01:00

On Saturday morning, I awoke with a headache. It was bad enough that I grumbled about it, but not so bad that I ran immediately for the painkillers. I went into the living room and turned on my computer, and as I was trying, and failing, to read Hark! A Vagrant (a very funny webcomic that you should probably check out if you like literature, history, Canada, or laughing), I realised that I had a blurred out patch in my vision. I could focus on two, maybe three letters at a time, but not a whole word. I went to Michael's room and asked did he have any painkillers.

I took some paracetamol, and climbed into Michael's bed. It was around this time that my speech started to fail. I could find the right word in my brain, but it would get lost en route to my mouth. D became F or B, V became C or N, vowel sounds got switched. I would start saying a word several times, but get stuck at the beginning and just repeat one syllable until Michael stopped me. At this point, Michael told me to call in sick to work (I, of course, was sobbing out that I could still go to work. I'm unreasonable. I don't understand myself.), and, after a lot of persuasion, I called and stammered out to my manager that I had a migraine, and would not be able to go to work that morning.

Around this time, Michael looked up 'migraine' online. He began reading out a list of symptoms to me: "Headache on one side of your head, vision problems, speech and reading problems, extremities becoming numb or tingly, vomiting, diarrhea... go to bed, Cayt." I climbed back into his bed, and he talked to me calmly. I don't remember now what he talked about. Nothing too taxing, I think. Then my ring and pinky fingers on my right hand went numb. The numbness spread across my other fingers, then down my hand, my wrist, my arm, until it reached my elbow and stopped, only to pick up again on the right side of my face. The feeling began coming back with a painful, pins-and-needles type tingling that terrified me even more. At this point, I was convinced I was having an aneurysm or something of the sort. Michael looked me in the eye, very calmly. "This is all there in the migraine symptoms list. You're not having a stroke. It's okay."

He helped me back to my bed, and brought me the sick bucket, just in case any other symptoms decided to manifest. Lucky that he did, because I spent the next few hours being sick about every half hour. The symptoms were just about over by 1:30pm, six hours after I'd initially awoken with an aching head. I slept the rest of the day.

I hadn't had a migraine in about four years, and I'd never had one that bad before at all. It was a generally terrifying experience, and one that I hope does not repeat itself. Ever.

Still alive

2011-09-15T13:55:00.001+01:00

This was a triumph...no, wait. I am well aware (shamefully so) that I have neglected this blog. Working 5 or 6 days per week over the summer, in addition to researching for my undergraduate dissertation meant that I let the blog fall into a black hole in my life. I have been knitting, though, and soon should be able to take some photos and put those up, and who knows, maybe I'll have some fascinating insights, sooner or later. I'm doing my senior year of my undergraduate degree, and something that is more or less a full-scale freakout is happening over my dissertation, so I'm busy, but very happy to be studying again.

Myoclonic Twitches

2011-07-23T17:43:00.003+01:00

Temerity Jane posted recently about sleep paralysis, which I'm lucky enough not to have experienced, although Michael has. He sometimes tells the story of one time when he was experiencing sleep paralysis and he had a hallucination about his sister coming into the room and looking at him, and the weirdest part of that is that he has never had a sister.

I do have an irritating sleep-thing, though, that I experience regularly, and that's myoclonic twitches. They're also known as hypnogogic twitches, and it's that thing, you know, when you're lying in bed, drifting off to sleep, your dreams have begun but you're not quite asleep yet, and then you make some action in your dream, and your body goes, "WHAT? YOU WANT TO LIFT YOUR ARM? SURE. HERE." And your body makes that action, because this is kind of the opposite of sleep paralysis. You're mostly asleep, but the paralysis thing hasn't kicked in yet, so you end up lifting your arm or kicking your leg or whatever, and then you're wide awake again and the spot that you had perfectly warm and comfortable is lost because you moved and you have to start the whole process of going back to sleep over again.

I don't think it's as scary as sleep paralysis, but it's annoying and weird. I've only ever met one other person who's said they've experienced it, but I'm sure it's not unusual. Not very unusual, anyway.

So apparently the key to keeping my house clean is me being lonely, bored and a little ill

2011-07-18T10:17:00.002+01:00

I've spent the last week being ill. It sucks. I had tonilitis with all the fun bonuses that come along with that - the dizziness, the aches, the grouchiness and propensity to burst into tears at the slightest inclination (although I admit that watching UP was probably not a great plan. It's a great movie, but seriously traumatic). I spent all the time that I wasn't being paid to get out of bed, in bed (yes, I go to work even when sick. Why? I have no idea), from last Monday until Saturday.

Yesterday, Sunday, I was feeling less ill. Still unwell, but less, "Oh, go away, I will lie here in bed napping and pretending to be interested in things because I have no interest in anything." I wanted to have a friend over, talk to someone, maybe watch a film or play a board game (my life is exciting). Of course, everyone was busy. Michael was off having Sunday lunch with his parents, and my other friends were either working or already had plans, so my first day out of bed in a week, I spent home alone. I phoned my mum, and spoke to her and my dad, earlier in the morning I spoke on the phone briefly to my sister, but most of the day I did housework.

Turns out, when I'm in bed for a week being ill, and Michael is looking after me, very little gets done in the way of housework. Pretty much every plate, cup, piece of cutlery and pan in the flat was in need of washing, so I did load after load of washing up, did some laundry, got some hoovering done, tidied, sorted, threw rubbish out and took recycling to the box outside the front door. In some ways I feel really accomplished. I like having a tidy clean house. In another way, I feel irritated that my first day out of bed was spent doing housework.

Still, at least now I think I know the trick to getting myself motivated to clean.

A thing that sort of bugs me

2011-07-03T09:56:00.002+01:00

I frequently have friends around to my little flat, and when they arrive, it is customary to offer them a cup of tea. Frequently I will put the kettle on a little before they are due to come, so that I can make the tea as soon as they arrive and they will have fresh tea in their hands within five minutes of being through the door.

Also, I like slightly fancy tea (it's Lady Grey. I love Lady Grey tea.), but Michael likes normal, builder's tea. And a while back, I got Rose Garden tea, because it was in a pretty box and it sounded good. So, we have three teas to choose from. I do not feel this is a particularly excessive number of teas to have.

But, when I have friends around, and they come in, and I, teapot in hand, say, "Would you like Lady Grey, Rose Garden, or regular tea?", I would like people to make a choice. It really bugs me when people say, "Oh, I don't want to use up your special tea." If I wanted it to be not used up, I could have not offered it! When I offer a choice, I want people to make a choice! It's not as though I'm listing hundreds of teas, and expecting people to recite them back to me. It's just three teas! Aaaaugh!

Anyway. It just sort of bugs me.

Jiggity Jig

2011-06-25T22:25:00.002+01:00

Well, I went down south to visit my family, which was lovely. I got new glasses while I was there, started work on a quilt top, did some knitting and crocheting and spinning. Generally I spent time with my family. It is so nice to have family that I like. My parents and grandparents are fun, interesting people who I genuinely like as well as loving them.

Since then, I've been working full time at the shop. It's great, really, I like my job and I love getting to spend time talking about yarn, playing with yarn, and arranging yarn. Today I redid some displays, in and around serving customers.

Swistle pointed out that many bloggers, and particularly many plump bloggers never show pictures of themselves on their blogs, or never show full length pictures. I'm not sure when a full length picture was last taken of me, but I don't think I've ever put a picture of myself on this blog. I'll have to bully Michael into taking one so I can put it up.

I have been a very unreliable blogger lately. I have been so busy, spinning and knitting and reading. I'm reading Anna Karenina, which is lovely, but frustrating, as all translated texts are. I find it so! annoying! to be unable to tell which parts of the tone are coming from the author, and which from the translator. I know that Constance Garnett is the standard translator for most of the Russians, but I'm reading the Rosemary Edmonds version. I can understand why some scholars devote their lives to translations. I feel already as though the text itself is enough of a barrier between me and what's in the mind of the author, the translation makes the original intent impenetrable to me, leaving me with the product but not the soul of the original creation. I don't know. I'm aware that I'm probably talking nonsense.

The day before yesterday, I spent a lovely hour sitting in a coffee shop, writing a long letter to a dear friend. Do you know how hard it is to track down writing paper? I can get disney stuff, but other than that, it is almost impossible to find any! I found some in the end, but it was extortionate. I'm not sure what to do about it.

Hello New Month

2011-06-04T21:15:00.004+01:00

Goodness, May just flew by. I looked back over what I achieved last month and was pretty impressed with myself. In addition to four papers for class, and having guests staying with me, I spun two complete skeins of yarn - one silk, as seen here, and one wool:

This one had a very short staple length (the length of each individual hair in the fibre) and really wanted to be a laceweight, but I wanted a thick and thin with lots of slubs and that's what I got.

I also finished eight knitting or crochet projects in May, seven of which were also begun in May. Some of them were tiny projects, like the miniature crocheted golden snitch I made for a friend, some of them larger like the green beret or this baby hat:

or these booties:

I'm still plugging through my current lace shawl, which is Juneberry, knit in shelter, and I bought yarn today to crochet a cardigan. I've also been spinning more, this orange mystery fibre that in parts is very snarly, and in other parts spins a dream.

My Dad's visiting at the moment, and the day after tomorrow he's going to drive me down to visit my family, so I'm looking forwards to that. I miss them something rotten.

Leisure, and no guilt

2011-05-24T09:26:00.003+01:00

I had forgotten how lovely it is to be able to do the things I want to do, and to have time for them, and to not feel guilty that I ought to be doing other things. As it turns out, the things I want to do mainly involve reading and knitting, although I've been doing a lot of baking recently - which reminds me, I have to go and start some yeast to make bread for lunch, hang on.

Right. So I've been baking, really making bread for the first time in my life, which is really great, and the best part is the luxury of the time to do so. We've also had pizza a whole bunch of times lately, which is great, because it's so easy to do one for Michael (who eats meat but hates pineapple on pizza) and one for me (who doesn't eat meat but likes pineapple on pizza). Last night we had no ingredients in the house - but we had flour, yeast, oil and sugar, and tomato puree and cheese, so we had pizza. These are ingredients that we always have in the house (we haven't always kept yeast in, that's new, but we use so little each time that it'll last for a long while yet, and it's cheap, so winning all round really), but ordinarily we would have had to go out for ingredients to make something else. Although I am now out of oil, so I need to get that tonight.

And reading! How odd that I'm doing a degree in English Literature and yet during the semester I don't really get to read properly. Because I'm always doing analysis, reading for meanings and depths and applying theory, I don't get to read for pleasure. It's been weeks since I've been able to just romp through a book in a day, which I did yesterday with The Subtle Knife. I have a divider in my bookcase which separates books on the 'to read' list from books that I've finished, or am not planning to read in the immediate future, and that divider has been moving slowly to the right as I'm able to finish reading books and move them across. I started the Amber Spyglass this morning, and when I'm done with that I'm going to read If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino, which is metafiction, very experimental but so good.

Also yesterday, I knit a sock for a toddler, in the shape of a duck's foot. It's so cute I think I may be half dead from it. Seriously, look!

Semester's over!

2011-05-19T12:58:00.002+01:00

I handed in the last of my essays for the semester this week, so that's me done with third year! Yesterday to celebrate I had friends over and we watched How to Train Your Dragon, and I made pizza and brownies. The cheesecake brownies I make are so delicious, I think they're pretty similar to these ones by smitten kitchen except I don't put chocolate chips on top, and I make them in cupcake cases so that they're prepackaged into portions and I don't have to worry about cutting them.

The pizza dough, we made a batch on Sunday and had pizza for supper, and refrigerated the rest of the dough. I used the Pioneer Woman's dough recipe, and it keeps really well in the fridge. It was even more delicious last night than it was on Sunday, so that's one that I'll definitely plan to do again.

I finished a hat yesterday while watching How to Train Your Dragon (which I think is actually one of my favourite films, and very beautiful, and I would advise everyone to watch it, and particularly those with children), so now I have a lovely new hat to wear. It's a slouchy beret, so it has enough length in it to pull right down over my ears when needed, but it looks good sort of pushed back a bit, too. Very versatile.

I also finished spinning the silk hankies, and plied them on themselves using the chain ply method, which, for those of you who crochet, is much like making a very large crochet chain and using that to ply. This meant that the colour changes that were there in the singles were there in the finished yarn, too. So, I now have about 50 metres of pure silk yarn, which is very beautiful but probably not much use for many things, so I'll have to find an appropriate pattern for it.

I think that you can see from the pictures that, for the most part, pink is plied with pink, and turquoise with turquoise, and purple with purple. There's a little bit of the barber-pole sort of effect, but not very much, and I'm very happy with it.

Spinning with Silk Hankies

2011-05-05T13:20:00.003+01:00

I should be working on essays, so, of course, I'm writing and spinning and taking pictures. I've been spinning with silk hankies which are very different to spinning with roving or fibre, and I took some pictures of the process to document it.
Silk hankies are the cocoons spread over frames in layers. The cocoons are boiled and washed to get the spit out, then stretched out on frames, with many cocoons being layered atop each other. They can then be dyed all as one unit. I bought mine from Juno Fibre Arts, on etsy, which I chose partly because they are in the UK. Silk hankies are inexpensive, at around 20 pence per gram. I got 16 grams and I've spun around twelve hankies and haven't made a dent in the pile at all. Here's how the pile looks:

To spin them, you peel just one layer off the top of the pile. It's really thin and feels very delicate, but actually it's very resilient. It does stick to everything it touches, though, and it's so fine that it can be hard to get just one.

Before starting I exfoliated my hands using sugar and olive oil, and put plenty of ultrabalm on the psoriasis on my hands. I have it on the backs of both hands, and if I had it on the palms of my hands I think I would struggle to spin silk hankies, as the hankies would snag on my hands a lot.

So, you take the single delicate looking wispy cocoon, and many tutorials tell you to make a hole in the middle. Before making a hole, I like to stretch out the edges - you can see in the picture above that the edges are thicker and look more resilient than the middle of the hankie, and they are harder to stretch. So, I pull out each edge and corner so that I'm left with no solid looking parts, and it's all wispy.

Then I make the hole in the middle. I took a picture of this, but it came out blurry. Once the hole in the centre is big enough, I put both hands in and stretch it carefully apart. I try to stretch it pretty evenly, so it doesn't snap until I want it to. I stretch it to my full wingspan, which is about five feet, so I have a loop of stretched out silk about ten feet in circumference.

For thicker yarn, I'd break this now and spin it like it is, but I'm spinning closer to a laceweight right now, so I break it and go through it, drafting it along until it is the thickness that I want it. I've broken every hankie in the same place, the dark pink part, so there'll be somewhat of a repeating pattern in the yarn that I'll end up with. You can see that I've stretched it pretty fine here.

And then it's just spinning. Part of the difference between this and spinning wool is that with wool, you're pulling the fibre out to the thickness you want as you spin it, while the hankies are stretched out before you put twist in. Also, this silk is a lot more prone to tangling than wool is, so I had to be pretty careful with the fibre that had been drafted.

I think that pretty soon I'll wind this off and ply it. I've been winding my yarn onto empty toilet roll tubes, which work pretty well. The yarn that I've plied so far has been 2 ply, mostly plied back on itself, but this I think I'll navajo ply to preserve the colour changes. Then I'll knit something with it, depending how much I have and what weight it ends up.

Gifts

2011-05-02T22:12:00.002+01:00

I have a dear friend who lives far away doing a semester in London right now. It's coming to an end, and she's coming up next week to visit. I've made her this hat and glove set so that when she returns to the icy waste that is Ohio she will still be warm.

The hat is blocking over a mixing bowl in that picture, to get the lace to open up and give it the slouchy feel I was going for.

Handspun!

2011-04-24T11:04:00.003+01:00

Okay, so I've been spinning now for eleven days, and I think I might be a little addicted. It's so exciting, though, and I can do it while watching TV or reading and I'm seeing improvement in my spinning already. I've made a few different yarns, so here are some pictures.

This is the first stuff I spun. It's undyed Corriedale, which I read was good for beginners.

I was pretty proud of it - I made yarn out of fluff! - but this picture shows how much variation there is in thickness.

Then I pulled out some mystery purple fibre that I got in a mixed bag, and spun it fine. There wasn't much of it, so I spun some more corriedale and plied them together.

There's still some thick-and-thin-ness to that one, but it's much more even. I'd say it's about a sock weight, and I think it's the prettiest yarn I've made yet, but I only have about 11 yards of it, which is not much use for anything, so it's staying like it is.

After that, I pulled out some black fleece that had shiny white slippery parts through it, also from the mixed bag. I browsed the website where I bought it and I think it's probably black shetland with bleached silk, but I'm not certain. I aimed at spinning about a sock weight single, although I got a bit thick and thin at times anyway, and then plied it on itself. It ended up about aran weight, and I have 65 yards of it.

After I'd plied that - I plied it on itself, by making a centre pull ball and plying from the inside and outside ends - I went back to the corriedale and started spinning a little finer, and that's what's on the spindle at the moment.

I've been keeping it in a cotton project bag from Old Maiden Aunt - they're on her website at the moment, but I got mine with the sock yarn club earlier this year.

The spindle is from IST crafts, which I chose primarily because it's fairly local to me. It's sycamore on a walnut shaft, and the whorl is topped with tulipwood. I think it's so pretty.

So there we are, a picspam of my handspun.

Names and stuff

2011-04-23T19:48:00.004+01:00

I was just telling the SO*, "So, maybe I was on the internet the other day, and maybe I fell over and when I got up I realised that maybe I had bought some silk hankies from etsy."

And he said, "My love, we should get you to a doctor, because it sounds like you are having complex seizures." This is one reason why I love him.

*Marie Green tweeted that she finds it very confusing when bloggers don't call the people in their lives by their actual names, but instead by letters and the like, and I thought about this and I went and asked my partner if he would mind being identified by name in my blog, considering how infrequently I even talk about him, and he said no, that'd be fine. So, his name is Michael and I will call him by name from now on and will put him in my sidebar. And I have no idea whether Marie Green has ever even looked at this blog, but at least now if she ever does, she will know who Michael is.

And yes, I tweet, but I tweet under my usual internet name, while this blog is written under my actual first name, which, if you cast your eyes to the right, you will see that it is a fairly unusual spelling and there are only a handful of us with that spelling in the world, and I'd rather not connect my username with my real first name, which is why I don't link between there and here. This could all have been avoided if I had written this blog under a pseudonym to begin with, but I didn't, so OH WELL. And now anyone searching for my name plus Michael's name will find this blog, which is one reason that I don't talk about people I know or about my job or say anything too outrageous. I'm vastly more foul-mouthed than this blog would suggest, in real life.

And also, I just went and changed my twitter profile so that it refers to this blog in a somewhat oblique way, and my twitter-avatar is the same as the one on this site, with the fairy wings, so I guess it's possible to identify me as the same person.

It's here!

2011-04-13T13:55:00.000+01:00

The spindle and fibre are here!

Because clearly what I lack is another fibre related hobby

2011-04-10T17:39:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I bought Respect the Spindle, by Abby Franquemont, and yesterday evening, I ordered a drop spindle from IST crafts.

I've been thinking about learning how to spin for a long time, so I decided to just go for it. It's not that enormous an investment if I end up hating it, but I have a feeling I might love it. The SO asked if this means he should prepare himself for a spinning wheel to enter the house, and the answer was, not yet. I don't really want a wheel at this stage, although I can see myself wanting to at least try wheel spinning in the future.

I'm now looking at fibre. The sheer amount of choice out there is a little overwhelming.

Dreaming

2011-04-04T21:22:00.002+01:00

XKCD on Dreams
Swistle is talking about dreams, specifically recurring ones, and while I don't have any recurring dreams and I don't recall ever dreaming about finding extra rooms, or being in a lift (elevator, whatever) or my teeth falling out, I did have a really strange dream the other night so I'm going to write about that.

You need a little back story for this, so. There is a shop that I buy things from fairly regularly, and one of the women who works in said shop is very fun and sweet and interesting and we often chat when I go in, and it is lovely. She is quite political in a similar way to how I am, and she is a pacifist, and I think that is as much information as I feel comfortable revealing about her even though I have not identified her by name or where she works. Anyway, she's very nice and I like talking to her a lot. A lot.

So, last week I had a dream in which I found that the name that she goes by is not her real name, and I found out her real name (in my dream, I have no reason to believe that she goes by a false name in real life) and it was nothing like the name that she goes by. Also, in my dream, she was a ballet teacher, but the people to whom she was teaching ballet were the kids from Glee, and she commissioned me in the dream to knit an edging on the lace shawls that she was giving these kids to say well done for doing well in their ballet exam. Then it got weirder, because somehow (the dream was fuzzy on the details) I found out that she was also a crime lord, who operated largely via internet chat rooms, specifically video chat, and she drove a very shady looking old black van. So, to recap, this lovely, sweet person that I talk to sometimes was revealed to be actually a ballet teacher cum crime lord, and the weirdest part is that to dream-me this was not even remotely strange. Just like, oh, she's actually a crime lord who teaches ballet in her free time? Yeah, that makes sense. Okay.

I very rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are normally about very mundane things. Recently I had a dream that my friend was petting my hair and then she said, "your hair is very dry." This is how mundane my dreams are. So having a dream where someone turns out to be a ballet-crime lord is pretty intense, and that makes the fact that I just took it in my stride in the dream even weirder.

Brains are cool.

Spring

2011-03-25T09:05:00.002Z

Everyone seems to be posting about how spring has finally arrived. Giulia mentions blossoms and creative rebirth, Alicia has been cooking and crafting, and Soulemama is talking about the colours of spring.

My sign that the spring is here? Yesterday I was able to hang laundry outside, for the first time this year. I'm way more excited than I should be about this.

Yesterday

2011-03-09T12:59:00.003Z

...all my troubles seemed so far away (just kidding) (you're welcome).

So, yesterday was the 100th international women's day.

I celebrated by telling people 'happy international women's day!' and by generally being an awesome person who is also a lady. This is a particular hobby of mine.

It was also pancake day. I celebrated by making toad in the hole for supper and then scotch pancakes for desert. To make scotch pancakes I make that mixture fairly thick and drop it a tablespoon at a time to make small but thick pancakes.

We ate the pancakes while watching the ninth and tenth episodes of the fourth series of Battlestar Galactica. I really like this show, but post series three it seems like their message has just become 'Look at these women, you guys! Aren't they crazy?' Every female character is either dead or having a nervous breakdown. Or, in the case of one of the characters, she is dying and also crazy! So that's annoying. I wish that they had just stopped it at the end of series three, and blown everyone up or something. Actually, I think they peaked in series two. I wouldn't have minded series two being the end of it all. Anyway, we have ten episodes left to watch. It's become somewhat of an ordeal, but I'm looking forwards to going back and rewatching series one. I just want to know how it ends.

I hope you all had pancakes yesterday. I meant to blog about it being pancake day and international women's day while it was still international womens day and pancake day, but I was too busy making and eating pancakes and knitting and stuff. I mean to do a knitting update soon, just need to take some pictures.

I've become that student

2011-03-02T08:36:00.002Z

You know. The one that people make fun of. The earnest one who says obscure things but genuinely means them.

The one who ponders aloud whether the use of Wagner in Apocalypse Now is intended to highlight the fascist implications in the film.

Who, when asked if she likes a book she's currently reading, muses 'It's doing some interesting things with free indirect discourse.'

But there are worse students to be. And I do like my degree, and my classes. Actually, I love my classes. They're so exciting and finally most of the coasters are gone from my seminars.

I really hated Apocalypse Now, though.

Can't think why people love it so much.

I can't be the only one, can I?

Reprioritising

2011-02-27T19:48:00.002Z

Well, the reading for pleasure thing isn't exactly going to plan right now. A lot of the problem is that for my classes I'm at the stage where I'm reading two or three novels every week, plus secondary readings, plus essays, textbook chapters, literary theory - you get the picture. I love it, but it's a lot of reading. It's exhausting, and it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for reading for pleasure.

I mean, if I really truly prioritised, I could allot internet time, socialising with friends time, going-to-societies time, and watching-silly-television time to reading for pleasure instead. And when I'm really fired up about a book, like I was with Never Let Me Go, it's not at all uncommon for me to read it in an evening. But reading shouldn't be stressful. It should be the opposite of stressful.

It doesn't help that I received notice that I'd been accepted to one of my classes less than a week before the first class, so I had no chance to get ahead on the reading for that one.

Really, though, I'm making excuses. Reading for pleasure makes me feel guilt, like I'm not working hard enough. Like I shouldn't read for pleasure until I have all my reading for the semester completed. I know that's rubbish, really. But when I'm feeling guilty, it's so easy to spend hours on ravelry instead of curled up with a book.

I think I need to reprioritise. Turn off the computer more often. Read fewer blogs, maybe. Waste less time trawling around ravelry with nothing to say. Curl up with a book. Wasn't that the whole point of this thing?

Some Arbitrary Rules

2011-02-19T21:27:00.003Z

I've decided to set some arbitrary rules for myself, regarding this books and reading for pleasure thing. I love arbitrary rules, as the SO would tell you. Silly things like, go to the bathroom and do not emerge until you've finished a chapter of this book. Or, you can have a drink, but only when you reach page seventy. Or, bathroom items must all be in this corner of the bath. Or, graphic novels here, feminism books here, knitting books here. Items for making tea on the bottom shelf, lunch and supper items on the middle shelf, baking items on the top shelf. I like organising my life in arbitrary ways. I like having rules to follow.

I was dithering over whether to include books read for my classes in my sidebar, but the conclusion I've come to is this: the point is to read for pleasure. No matter how much pleasure the books I read give me, if I don't choose them myself, and if the ultimate aim in reading them is not my own pleasure, but to attain grades for a class, they don't count as reading for pleasure books. I may make an exception for books that I was planning to read this year regardless of my classes, but if I'm reading a book mainly because it's for one of my classes, it doesn't count. Maybe I'll make another gizmo thing to put those books in.

Novels count. Graphic novels count. Short story collections count. Books of essays count. Single short stories do not count. Cookbooks do not count. Knitting books that are mainly patterns do not count. Knitting books that are mostly prose or essays count. Single editions of comics do not count, but if several are collected together into a graphic novel, that does count. (See? Arbitrary.) I'm not sure whether to include plays. I think that I'll think about it if I read a play for pleasure this year. (Last time I read a play for pleasure, I was eleven. Since then, the only plays I've read have been ones that I was studying or acting in. However, I've recently acquired some tragedies, and would like to read some of them. So this might happen.)

Weeks run Saturday to Friday. The books do not have to be started and completed in the same week. The idea is to have read over 52 books for pleasure by the end of the year.

Books must be completed in order to be put in the side bar. Acceptable parts of the book to skip include introduction, foreword, after-word, particularly long or dull poems (I'm looking at you, Tolkien), particularly long or dull accounts of what happened earlier in the series (I'm looking at you, Eddings), explanatory notes and footnotes. The actual story-telling part of the book must be completed, or it doesn't count.

That said, it's okay to not finish. Life's too short to read bad books. I gave myself permission ages ago to not finish books that I wasn't enjoying, and that still stands. But unfinished books don't go in the sidebar.

If I'm going to watch a film of a book, and I'm planning to also read the book, I should read the book first. This isn't a rule, just something here to remind myself. Read the book first. Then watch the movie.

In other news, I had to ask a stranger to reach something down for me at the supermarket today. I felt pretty silly, but he was nice about it. Why are supermarket shelves so tall?!?!

Two sort of pancake related things

2011-02-15T20:48:00.004Z

1. I don't use salt in my cooking. Pretty much at all, actually. The exception is when I make toad in the hole (sausage and onion cooked in savory pancake/yorkshire pudding batter*) because I think that putting a little salt and pepper in the batter makes it less pancakey. Some people find this really weird. I have one friend who, when he comes to dinner, collects the salt from the kitchen along with his plate and cutlery. He really likes salty food and he knows that's not what I cook.

I've heard from heaps of places that a pinch of salt makes every dish better, and that salt improves the flavour and intensifies it in almost everything. I just find that I end up tasting salt rather than the food. Plus, I figure the less excess salt I have in my diet, the better. I do put salt on my chips. I eat chips with salt and mayonnaise. And I salt water to cook pasta, but I don't really season with salt.

2. I think I've figured out how to not have lumpy pancake batter. If you put your flour in the bowl, and stir in the sugar if you're making sweet pancakes, and then you put some milk and the egg in a separate bowl, or a jug, and whisk them together, and then add the wet to the dry a very little at a time, so it comes together to form kind of a dough that you then add more liquid to to make it into batter, you end up with fewer lumps. I think. It seems to be working. The only danger is if you put too much milk in the jug, you'd end up with batter that's wetter than you want, but this can be got around by putting just a little milk in the jug because you can always add more.

Oh, and a bonus third thing. I've heard that pancake day (shrove tuesday, mardi gras) isn't celebrated with the eating of pancakes outside of the UK, and I think that this is an excellent tradition that should be exported. I am very much looking forwards to it here (three weeks away, hurrah!) and I think that it should be enjoyed much more universally than that. So, March 8th, eat pancakes!

*For toad-in-the-hole batter, I use my stand-by pancake recipe, but without the sugar, and with a pinch of salt and a little pepper. I make toad in my cast iron pan, by frying onions and sausages, then adding the batter and putting the whole lot in the oven. It's good old English stodge, and it's one of my favourite meals, and I love it.

Starting again

2011-02-14T09:48:00.003Z

Today is the first day of the new semester. Working full time is put on hold for a bit, until the summer when I'll go back to it. Reading, thinking, researching, writing, note taking and discussing become my life for the next few months, and I relish it.

I love my job, but it's nice to have a break and go back to something more intellectually stimulating. I'm expecting a great pile of books to come through my door any day now, and that thought thrills me more than you could possibly imagine. Mmmmm bibliophilia.

It's funny, really. During the semester, I have more time for sewing, knitting, crafting, hanging out with people. My degree takes up time and mental energy, but some of it is low key stuff that I can do other things at the same time. I can read a novel with other people around. I can knit while reading textbooks. During the holidays, when I work full time, I have so much less energy and time to do the things I want to do. The holidays are, for me, much more taxing than when I'm not on holiday.

The reading is going well so far, by the way, I picked up a couple of other books and read them not quite in one sitting, but would have were it not for work. I'm not sure whether to include the books I read for my classes there or not. I'm tempted to classify them as 'not read for pleasure' but some of them are such great books. Any thoughts on the matter?

Reading for Pleasure

2011-02-06T11:40:00.003Z

A few months ago, a friend pointed out to me that even if one were to read a book every week, one would die before reading all the works contained in even the tiniest of bookshops. Reading at least one book each week seems like a good idea to me. I love to read, but sometimes I find myself abandoning print media in favour of messing around on the internet or watching silly films or television. I mean, I love silly films and television, but I don't love them more than I love books.

Since then, I've tried to always have a book on the go. The goal is to always be reading something. I've put a new gadget in my sidebar, listing the books I've read thus far this year. I'd like to be able to keep track of it, to remind myself not to let myself not read.

There's something immensely comforting about curling up in bed with a book. For as long as I can remember, I've had books in my bed. When the SO is away, I fill up the side of the bed where he normally sleeps with books, not consciously, but because books are so comforting to me. I take them to bed with me and there they lie, beside me. When I don't have the bed to myself, my book of the moment goes under my pillow, ready to be pulled out and read if I awaken in the early morning.

So. Always be reading. Reading for pleasure. My list of books I'd like to read in the short term includes Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, and Atlas Shrugged. I'm currently reading Consider Phlebas. I look forwards to putting these in my sidebar.

Outside/Inside

2011-02-03T22:00:00.002Z

The weather outside is horrible, howling winds and driving rain, snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures. Walking home from work earlier was an adventure in getting blown across the pavement, coming in with hair soaked even through my wool hat, getting straight into pyjamas while my outdoor gear dried near a radiator.

Inside it's warm and cosy, tucked up in the living room with battlestar galactica and some knitting. Currently on the needles is vernalis, by Wooly Wormhead, and the yarn is a one-off colour of Old Maiden Aunt's Alpaca/Merino, a much appreciated gift from the SO this solstice.

Now it's off to bed with the last 30 pages of a great book. Can't think of a better way to spend an evening when the weather outside is this horrible.

Good grief

2011-01-24T17:29:00.002Z

It feels like 2011 has hardly begun, and yet here we are, staring down Burns Night with the kind of defiance that comes with knowing that one has done very little this year and yet everything is okay.

I haven't blogged in weeks, I know. Sorry.

I've been away on holiday. I took two weeks off work and went down south to my parents' house, staying with them for a few days before flying off to stay with some dear friends in Austin, Texas. The weather was so much milder than here, and on the day I left, the sun finally came out for real. It was wonderful, just what I needed. We visited some lovely places while there, including BookWoman where I picked up Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling. I've struggled to get Octavia Butler's books here in the UK.

While over there I also visited Hill Country Weavers, a beautiful yarn store packed full of delicious yarn. As a souvenir, I bought enough Shelter in Almanac, a deep blue, to make the fabulous Juneberry shawl. I've decided it's to be my next shawl project, after which I will be making something from Victorian Lace Today, which I recieved for Christmas from my Grandparents.

I'm back in Scotland now, and very happy to be here. The weather is definitely big warm squishy shawl weather, but that's okay - it's what I'd expect at this time of the year. Back to work in a couple of days, and the next semester begins in a few weeks. I love my life.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T15:06:00.003Z

2010 has gone by so quickly. I can't believe it's 2011 already.

I saw on another blog the perfect blessing, and I don't think that I can say it better than Lilith, so "i hope that your gauge swatches never lie, your stitches are never dropped, and that you never run out of yarn in the middle of a cast-off!!"

And in the words of an old proverb that my mother sometimes says:

Here's tae us. Wha's like us. Damn few, And they're a' deid.

Joyous and blessed solstice!

2010-12-22T08:35:00.002Z

Happy solstice!

Yes, I know it was yesterday, but I spent all of yesterday working and then travelling to my parents', so didn't have access to my computer all day.

I think that solstice may be my favourite, just because of the rebirth of hope that comes with it. The days get longer from here on out! Hurrah for more daylight in my life!

Blessed be.

To Do

2010-12-18T20:23:00.002Z

There is a lot that I have to do. I have to clean the parts of my flat that are dirty, tidy the parts that are messy - and we've just had the plumber in, so it's all dirty, and it's all messy. I have to wrap presents and pack to go back to my parents' for Christmas, and finish knitting the gifts for the SO and family.

This is all complicated by the fact that I have a muscle condition that leaves me aching and exhausted. I have washing up to do, and tidying, and cleaning - we have a new bathroom floor, and it needs washing, and I have to wash the muddy footprints out of the bathtub - but all I want to do is sit down and rest. Always.

Perhaps a musical will make this easier. Somehow I doubt it.

Today

2010-12-17T21:51:00.003Z

I finished a book that I think is one of the best books I've read in a very long time. Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges. It's beautiful. Strange worlds, beautiful prose, stories that bear rereading immediately. I loved it.

And then I read the entirety of the Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood, another beautiful book.

I feel like I'm hitting my reading stride again.

Cycling

2010-12-12T13:47:00.002Z

One of my favourite parts of blogging is looking back and seeing the cycles in life. Which things have changed. Which things have stayed the same. This time last year, what was I thinking, living, writing about? It's comforting how much stays the same. Interesting how much changes.

Reading for Pleasure

2010-12-10T22:41:00.002Z

Oh, it is such a joy to be able to read for pleasure. Good bye, George Eliot, I never have to reread Adam Bede! Au revoir Mr Hardy! I can take a break from Tess of the D'Urbervilles!

I love reading, but my reading time gets swallowed up during the semester, and in the month or so immediately before it, because I have so much that I must read for classes. Now that the semester is over, I'm reading things that I want to read, rather than things that I have to read.

Currently I'm in the middle of a lovely little book lent to me by a coworker, which is called Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, and I'm in the process of reading, and savouring the first volume of Lucifer, a spin off from Gaiman's Sandman comics. Lucifer is by Mike Carey, and each issue is illustrated by a different artist.

My plans include reading classics that I want to read but haven't yet. I'd like to read Dracula, because somehow I've managed not to do that one. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier is another I've not read yet, but would like to. I'm pretty sure my parents have a copy of it in their house. If my sister has a copy of the Kite Runner - I believe she may have - I might try to read that when I go and visit, too. I've never read Watership Down, or Vanity Fair, or Dante's Inferno, or A Tale of Two Cities, either. There's a lot of the literary canon that I've not even touched. My knowledge of the Russians is shocking - I think that the only thing I've read is Lolita, which is gorgeous and beautifully written and I've read it a bunch of times, but still. It'd be nice to read Anna Karenina, or something. Oh, the other one is Madame Bovary. It was mentioned in my Victorian Lit class a lot this semester, so I'd like to read it.

There are a lot more that I'd like to read, too, but that is probably enough to be going on with.

Oh my goodness

2010-12-04T16:39:00.008Z

It's only three weeks until Christmas. Can you believe it?

I certainly can't.

My mum sent me an advent-calendar-Christmas-card this year, like she did last year. I'm not really looking towards Christmas. More towards the solstice, when days will begin to get longer again, and I'll get to see my family.

I'm in a coffee shop at the moment, away from the distractions of home (by which I mean knitting), trying to work on my essays. I'm pretty much done with my Tess of the D'Urbervilles one, just have to get Mrs Dalloway and The Shepherd's Calendar out of the way.

I love my course, but I'm looking forwards to having more time for reading for pleasure. I've got a few graphic novels that I haven't been able to read yet, including the first volume of Lucifer, a spin off from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.

Socks

2010-12-02T15:43:00.001Z

The SO has large feet and likes tall socks.

Why did I agree to knit him socks for Christmas, again?

Well, I guess winter is here

2010-12-01T10:30:00.002Z

Snow. Sigh. Here in central Scotland, we've had several inches of snow, and we're forecast more this week, heavy snow today and no sign of it letting up well into next week.

Everything has ground to a stop, more or less. The maximum temperature for today where I live is negative two. The 24 hour forecast predicts snow at every hour. Trains and buses are being cancelled everywhere. Businesses are closing early. The post hasn't been delivered in three days.

I hate the snow. I resent it. It's almost certainly preventing my family from visiting me.

I can't wait for Solstice.

Folk rhymes and fairy tales

2010-11-27T10:55:00.002Z

I have been obsessed as of late with certain things, themes that continue to crop up in my writing, both prose and poetry, and these things are, broadly, folk rhymes and fairy tales. The house that Jack built has been the primary focus of two of my creative writing assignments for university, assignments where we were allowed complete free reign. Peter and Paul, the dickie birds have been playing on my mind, and the Lion and the Unicorn has been astonishingly persistent, too.

The seven brothers, that story about the girl who has to spin nettles to weave shirts to turn her brothers from swans back into men has occupied my mind, and everywhere I look I see references and retellings of Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast.

A few nights ago, I quoted a proverb to the SO, and he asked where I'd heard it. My immediate response was, "I don't know, I've always known it." Of course I haven't always known it, there must have been a time when I heard it for the first time, but these things, the stories and songs and sayings of the people are in us, and part of us, and older than us.

Maybe that's why I'm currently obsessed with these things. They make up a large part of our cultural landscape, and they make up a huge part of my childhood, and therefore, perhaps, they make up a huge part of me.

Blergh

2010-11-25T11:21:00.003Z

The SO is ill. He has a real stinker of a cold, and it's had him in bed for the last three days. Somewhere on the boundary between cold and flu. He seems better today, which is great, because last night we were both up every few hours due to his illness, and he's currently propped up on the sofa with his computer and access to hot tea and paracetamol.

I have essays to write. I'm awaiting word on whether my idea for my victorian lit essay is too out there or not, but I'm excited to write it.

I'm very very behind on NaNoWriMo. It's just bottom of my priority list this year.

I have knitting that I need to be getting on with, but a blister on my index finger of my left hand is making it hard to bend that finger, and thus making it difficult to knit. And on Saturday, I've been volunteered to teach a stranger how to knit. Apparently left handers are considered unteachable. Bollocks to that.

Well, life chugs on.

Busy day

2010-11-07T19:54:00.002Z

This morning, I was up early and out of the house in time to catch a train at nine o'clock. I was going into Edinburgh to see my brother, who was up from London visiting for the weekend.

On the train, I knitted on my current project - a sock - which I had brought with me partially in the hope that the many pointed needles would discourage people from sitting next to me. Unfortunately the train was crowded enough that it didn't work, but I did get some good progress on it.

We went and had coffee, my brother and his fiancee and I, and then we sat in the sun in St Andrew's Square. At noon we met up with some of my friends who moved away to the outskirts of Edinburgh and the SO, and another friend of mine, and the seven of us went and had lunch together, which was lovely, I thought.

After that I had to scoot off and get back on the train back home (more knitting, hurrah!) and then I had to race home, pick up my laptop, and head straight back out again to a write in for my local sector of NaNoWriMo.

Yes, I'm doing it again, but I really feel I can manage my time effectively, and I enjoy it, and it comes below many things on my priority list - university, work, and my mental health all trump NaNo by miles in the priorities department.

Anyway, I was there for around three hours- from about four to about seven, and wrote four and a half thousand words, which I really think isn't bad going. I'd been failing to keep up, because my focus has been on university work, and when I started writing I was four days behind. Now I'm only one day behind, and I'm okay with that.

I came home after that, and snuggled up with my computer in my bedroom, and now I'm just waiting for a phonecall from my Mum.

All in all, a busy day, but an enjoyable one.

Will I be pretty?

2010-10-29T19:58:00.002+01:00

A friend linked me to this video from a poetry slam. I like it a lot.

Haruni is blocking on the dining table. Pictures when the light gets good enough to take them, I think. It was cast off on Monday, and is looking fairly nice, though I say so myself.

I also knitted a sock since Monday! Don't be impressed, though, it's just a tiny one for Lilith.

Here it is on my keyboard for scale:

Socks

2010-10-25T13:24:00.001+01:00

I just had this conversation with the SO:

Me: Would you like socks for christmas?
Him: That'd be nice.
Me: Nice, warm wooly socks.
Him: Sounds great.
Me: And I suppose that, like most men, you probably won't wear them unless they're bottle green or dark grey?
Him: (big grin) That's right. I love you.

So. Bottle green or dark grey it is.

(Five rows and a bind off on haruni. I think this one gets done today.)

Let's talk about 'the holidays'

2010-10-25T11:51:00.002+01:00

H'okay. Holiday gifts.

After last year's wonderful, fun, planned gifts that I made far enough in advance that I didn't have to worry about it at all, I am staring down this year's holiday season with dread in my heart. Already.

Those family members of mine that read my blog, your gifts are sorted. Dealt with. Don't fret.

The SO is getting socks. Our flat is cold and some warm handknit socks in DK weight wool/nylon should keep his feet good and warm. He's also getting fingerless gloves that I began mumblemumble months ago, and really ought to have finished by now.

Family members who don't read my blog, I don't know what to knit for you. I have a feeling that some of you wouldn't wear anything that I'd knitted, and I can't cope with that kind of heartache.

Not to mention that two of the men in my life have birthdays in the first half of January, so I have to think about that, now, too.

So, I'm angsting and agonising. Certain people buy themselves anything that they want, leaving nothing obvious for their families to get for them.

Then I have one knitworthy friend, and I'd like to make her something.

I have issues with socks, I think. I like bamboo needles, but 2mm bamboo sock needles are like knitting with slightly splintery feeling toothpicks.

Yes, that's as fun as it sounds.

Not to mention that I really want to get on with the owls cardigan, because I lack a sensible dark grey cardigan that will keep me warm. And I'm only six rows (and a cast off) from finishing haruni. I think I can finish that today, in between working on essays.

All this blogging these last few days. Get the feeling I'm procrastinating? Oh, Mr Dickens, you have consumed too much of my life already these past few months.

Sod it

2010-10-24T12:40:00.001+01:00

I need a day off. I'm going to spend today knitting and watching Avatar.

And you can't stop me.

*glares*

Challenge me

2010-10-24T11:22:00.003+01:00

When it comes to most things, I like to be challenged. Doing something easy often means doing something interminably dull.

This is why I like to bake vegan treats. They're more of a challenge than lacto-ovo baking.

I appreciate a place in my life for the simple, the formulaic, the easy. I do! I just don't generally want it. Give me the tough thing, the thing that makes my brain spin. That's exciting to me.

When I chose to knit Haruni (rav link), I don't mind admitting that it was primarily because some people had said that it was hard. It had made them cry, it was so hard.

Um. Yeah. I have not found it to be the tear-inducing difficulty that others led me to believe.

If there was a book called 'super hard knitting patterns that will make your brain ache', I would snap it up.

I'm currently searching for my next lace shawl pattern. I'm thinking beads. I already have the yarn picked out. I'm looking for something that will challenge me.

Perhaps I have a little bit of a problem?

Unicorns

2010-10-23T23:27:00.003+01:00

Harriet at Fugitivus (it's an awesome blog, but very feminist and not 101, so if you're not a feminist maybe start somewhere easier instead) just posted a post saying that when you're on the internet, you might as well be interacting with unicorns.

This is, broadly speaking, true. Most of the people with whom I interact online will never be anything other than words on my screen.

On the other hand, I have built strong and very deep friendships with some people via the internet, and some of those have translated to real life friendships. Some of my best friends are from the internet, and I think that these friendships can be both real and important.

On the other hand, it has not been unheard of for me to cry over cruel things that people have said on the internet.

Sometimes people are very cruel on the internet. I think that this is one of the reasons that the internet sometimes gets a bad rap.

Even my favourite musician has acted poorly on the internet. She wasn't so much protected by anonymity, but still. She yelled at a fan on her message board in a way that I'm sure she would not have done face to face.

Sometimes messages get messed up on the internet. You can't understand tone, and people can massively misconstrue each other because you don't get the part of a conversation where someone cuts someone else off mid-flow to say 'wait, wait, that's not what I meant at all'. Sometimes people think that other people are being cruel, when actually, nobody is intending to be.

Other times, people are cruel because it's easy to be mean to words on a screen. It's easy to forget that there's (normally) a person behind those words.

All in all, though, I think that interaction with people on the internet has enriched my life far more than it has been detrimental to it.

In January, I'm planning to fly to Texas again to visit a dear friend who I initially met on the internet.

I'm very excited.

She has most certainly enriched my life.

Oh, man

2010-10-21T08:05:00.002+01:00

It is eight oh five in the morning, and the fact that I am blogging now should tell you how busy I am.

I've spent the last week reading for and prepping an essay about Wordsworth's conservatism and Percy Bysshe Shelley's radicalism. I got down to the writing of it and wrote half of it yesterday. The other half should be converted from notes and scribbles into legible essay this morning.

I'm still working two days a week at the yarn store, and I love my job. It's hard work getting everything done, but I like it.

My only problem is, I have so much to do that I struggle to do anything that's just for me, for fun. I set aside two hours each week when I go to the knitting and crochet bee, but other than that, no knitting is getting done. I'm keeping up on my reading for classes, but have no time for reading for my own pleasure.

Not to mention that housework is pretty much out of the window.

Ah well. I'm happy being busy, and I love my life. I just wish I could squeeze another hour or so into the day.

Happy National Coming Out Day!

2010-10-12T19:55:00.003+01:00

It's national coming out day today, in the UK.

I don't know if it says that I'm queer in my sidebar bio, I don't think that it matters so much to me to have it there. Those who matter already know.

I wish that coming out didn't have to be a big deal. I mean, sexuality is a huge part of someone's personality, but I wish that it didn't have to be. I wish that it wasn't the case that it's always assumed that one is cisgendered and heterosexual, unless otherwise stated. I wish that people didn't have to be so anxious about coming out to those who love them. I wish that everyone's loved ones were as wonderful as mine, that love for everyone wasn't dependent on heterosexuality.

I think that today is, for some, a day to celebrate, to say 'I'm out and proud!' And I am proud, but not so much of me. I'm just living my life, as me, as honestly as I can, and I'm proud of my family, of my society, that I'm able to do that and very rarely these days face horrible comments or negativity because of it. I have never faced negativity from my family for being who I am, and I love them so much. But I think that today is also a day for taking stock of not just how far we've come, but also how far we have to go. Homosexuality is no longer illegal in this country, is no longer classified as a mental disease, an aberration. However, there are still anti-queer sentiments all around us. There are still people dying because they are the wrong sexuality. The suicide rate among LGBT teens is incredibly high.

I look forwards to a world where queer oppression is a thing of the past. Honestly, I don't think that I'll live long enough to experience that world, but I keep trying to build towards it, because I truly believe in my heart of hearts that it is not an impossibility. I believe that that world is achievable. I have hope.

Restless

2010-10-10T12:54:00.002+01:00

I feel really restless today. It's weird. Okay, it's not weird, because there are plenty of things that I could be doing, and should be doing, and know that I would actually quite like to do, but I feel unmotivated and antsy for no real reason.

I went to bed too early last night, because I was falling asleep, so I woke at half past six this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and knitted while watching series zero of battlestar galactica. I started watching it last night, but it's one big three hour long episode of harrowing bad news and big explosions, and two hours last night was more than enough, and one hour this morning finished me off for a while.

My best friend lent me Avatar: The Legend of Aang (series one) on DVD and I should watch that and give it back to her, and it's actually really good, but it's all the way in my bedroom and I'm in the living room, and did I mention that I feel unmotivated?

I should be studying, and I know this, but I feel rebellious about that because I work a few days a week and have classes and meetings and seminars and whatnot every other day of the week except Sunday, so I want to spend some time sitting around in my house in my pyjamas, doing nothing. On the other hand, I should be reading some victorian poetry, and I have some of Eliot's The Wasteland still to tackle, and there are some novels that I should get a start on (like Tess of the D'Urbevilles) and secondary reading that I should be doing, not to mention some graphic novels that are sitting, unread, on my shelf.

Goodness knows that I have plenty of knitting to do, and there's a skirt that I want to sew, but in order to sew I'd have to clear off the table, and I've already done housework this morning. I think that's maybe the problem, I tidied and vacuumed the living room, but before I could vacuum, I had to unclog the brush bit from underneath which had hair wrapped around it. It certainly made a difference, but it did mean that I've already spent hours doing housework today, and I'm really not into the idea that it's okay for Cayt to spend all of her only weekly day off doing housework but everyone else gets to spend all of their free time being actually free and never doing any housework.

I guess the point of this post is to attempt to make myself get up and actually do something, like maybe get dressed or even study, but I don't know, maybe I'll get dressed this afternoon. I'll have to be dressed by this evening because the SO is taking me out on a date to celebrate our anniversary, which was in September, but there we go, better late than never.

I think I'd like to have some lunch, and then I'll think about a little light studying. Not Eliot, though, he more than succeeded in making his work almost entirely incomprehensible, and there are more deserving writers who need my brain space.

Autumn

2010-09-28T21:41:00.002+01:00

I went back to my parents for the weekend, and when I got back to Scotland, autumn was here all at once. We've had the signs for a while, the leaves changing, having to wear long sleeves, but suddenly there's a real chill in the air, a greyness, and that smell peculiar to this time of year.

I wore woolen tights today for the first time this autumn, and was glad of them, walking to university this morning in the pouring rain. A lovely gentleman from one of my classes stopped when he saw me walking, and picked me up, and gave me a lift the rest of the way. Moments like this are so heartwarming.

I swatched, on Tuesday, at knit night, for my Owls cardigan, and my gauge was off by miles, way too tight. I've gone up a needle size, so hopefully I'll get somewhere near. I'm planning to knit the cardigan as a sweater, and then steek it, so I steeked the swatch as a practice run. The crocheted steek is really neat, and I'm looking forwards to starting the actual sweater for real. Yes, the lace shawl is still on the needles, but I need this cardigan, so it has to be done.

Another project just waiting for me to have time for it is a skirt - I tore my favourite black skirt at my parents' house around a month ago, and my other favourite black skirt has zip issues, and my other two black skirts aren't smart enough for work, so clearly what I need is another black skirt. The fabric I have for it is actually dark grey, and in the sunlight lines in red and blue run through it. I got bright turquoise lining for it, and have the zip and the interfacing, and the pattern. All it needs now is the time to make it.

Kate is talking about NaNoWriMo already, and while I'm in the habit of doing it, I'm not sure I can fit it in this year. I have two essays due during November, and three at the beginning of December, and I'm working two or three full days each week, in addition to extra curriculars. I'd love to think that I can do NaNo on top of that, but school has to come first. I'll see how it seems to be shaping up nearer the time.

In slightly sadder news, the zip on my boots broke this afternoon, and I'm not sure it's worth getting it replaced. It would cost a third of what the boots cost when they were new, and the leather seems to be giving up now - it's broken in a lot of places. Also, after all this bother, my watch fell off my wrist when I was walking to university on Monday. I really, really don't want to buy a new one, but I suppose I could do with a watch. I guess I'll have to look around for boots for large calf measurements, too, since I do really like wearing boots. It sucks that these have broken, they're so comfortable and lovely.

What I'm doing at the moment

2010-09-16T22:07:00.002+01:00

Current lace project

That's Old Maiden Aunt's Merino/Cashmere/Nylon in Derelict Daughter. The pattern is Haruni.

That's the passages marked for discussion in one lecture. I have a comparable workload for all my classes. I'm busy, but happy. I love studying.

That's the jam that I made on Sunday. My coworker prettified it. Isn't it sweet? The jar is being used for the third time for jam - it was bought with jam in it from a farm shop, then brought up here with marmalade in it made by my mum, and now it is being reused again.

Now, bed. In the morning I have victorian poetry, romantic political writing about revolution and I have a letter to write to a special friend.

Delicious Sunday

2010-09-12T18:32:00.003+01:00

Today was a wonderful day. I went out to a flea market with a colleague who is fast becoming a friend, and her charming brother-in-law-sort-of, where she ordered six kilos of local plums that were delivered to her door this afternoon.

They fed me hearty, thick carrot and coriander soup, and we made plum and honey jam with cinnamon.

We laughed ourselves silly, got sticky and messy and had a good deal of fun. Simply a delicious Sunday, a perfect late summer day.

And this evening? Reading more of Bleak House and pasta with pesto-cream sauce for supper. Yum.

On gift knitting, and decisions

2010-09-08T12:57:00.002+01:00

I have not, historically, been necessarily an enormous fan of the winter festive season. I am most certainly not a fan of allowing it into my life earlier than around mid December. I stop going into shops and bars as soon as the songs begin. I walk past the 'seasonal' aisle in the supermarket, my nose in the air. It's not that time yet! I think. There is no reason to have it follow on directly from Hallowe'en season (which, by the way, is already underway in some shops here, Back-to-school being over and done). In some ways I love the humanity that shows up at... that time of the year. In other ways, I detest the mania that takes over the country for six or eight weeks.

However, being a crafter, and a cheapskate, I want to make gifts for people. This means starting to think about it, oh, around a month ago.

I know that there are many crafters who refuse to knit for others, and in many ways, I applaud them. I know there are many crafters who work themselves into frenzied bouts of crafting, trying their hardest to get this one sleeve done on the evening before the gift reveal, sewing up seams early on the day in question, before hurriedly wrapping a gift that will be torn open less than an hour later.

However, there are not too many people I have to consider. My friends and I don't really do gifts for each other, but have a day before we scatter back to parents' houses where we enjoy each other's company. My immediate family consists of two parents and two siblings, and there's the SO. Only five people to think about, so not too bad, and since at least one of them is too warm blooded to want knitwear, that makes four people for whom to knit or crochet this year. Add in one secret santa from a website that I visit, and one or two special people who get gifts anyway, and there aren't too many people about whom to think. Still, doesn't hurt to make a start now, right?

Also, I've come up with the (I think, anyway) genius idea of making things that I want to make anyway, but don't necessarily have a use for, and fitting them through colour and fibre choices to the recipient. For example, my weird feet mean that it's going to be a while before I'm ready to face trying to make socks for myself again, but that doesn't mean I don't want to make socks. I'll just have to make them for my loved ones! I have a cupboard full of scarves, hats and gloves, but if I come across a pattern that I really want to make, I can make some for someone else!

Hurrah! The process knitter in me wins out!

I knew today was going to be a good day

2010-08-20T18:49:00.003+01:00

I truly did know that today was going to be a good day, and I was right. What tipped me off was that I looked in the bathroom mirror this morning first thing, and thought, my goodness, who is that very attractive person in the mirror. Then I realised it was me! I love when I have these days, they are few and far between, but today I feel very beautiful, and thus very confident, and things have worked out for me.

Several good things have happened today. I had pancakes with nutella for breakfast, and man, they were awesome. I love nutella so much. Last weekend while my Dad was visiting me, we went to the fringe, and one of the best parts was having crepes with banana and nutella. I don't like raw banana, but heated with nutella in fresh crepes, it is awesome.

I went to work, which was much the same as usual, but some lovely customers came in, and nobody was too horribly rude to me, which is a good thing. Then, one of my favourite customers, a crocheter, came in, and we chatted for a little while, and then it was knocking off time for me, and we were still chatting, and she made a comment about how we should go and crochet together, so we went and had coffee together and hung out for a few hours, and talked about music and crafting and stuff. It was so cool! I am not particularly flush in the friend department - I am fairly awkward and often very shy, and have many acquaintances but few friends, so making a new acquaintance who I actually really like is awesome.

So then I came home and listened to some of the music that she recommended, and I checked my email to find that I had one from another favourite acquaintance from the campus bookshop telling me that a book I ordered had come in. I have said to her that I would take her a fairycake, so this evening, my plan is to bake and then to sit and knit and watch Avatar: The Legend of Aang, which was lent to me by my bestest friend.

In other news, I've finished my birch shawl, and need to block that, and then photograph it, and do a proper tadah! post for it. I did immediately cast on a new lace shawl, though, and I need to photograph the yarn that I bought for that and show you, because it's seriously gorgeous. The natural light is going, but hopefully I'll take some photographs on Sunday morning, my day off, and put them up here soon.

I love it when good days happen! I feel all buoyed up and bubbly inside!

Watching time tick away

2010-08-09T18:22:00.002+01:00

Well, I wish I could, but my watch is broken and it's kind of a saga and it's extremely annoying.

What happened was this. In around January of this year, I went to purgatory with my mum, and I bought a watch. I don't have a photo of the watch, but it's a nice watch. It fulfilled my needs and was inexpensive (around £15), and I was happy to have a watch.

A few months later, in around May, the battery died, and my watch became useless. It sat on my bedside table until last week, when I put it on in order to remind myself to get the battery replaced.

I spent £8 getting the battery replaced on my watch, and was super happy to have a watch that worked again! The next day, the strap broke.

It's particularly annoying because I'm super fussy about watches. I have a long list of requirements that are often hard to fulfill, and so finding an ideal watch is hard for me. Watches, for me, have to be analogue, not digital, have leather straps in a colour that's not black, brown or a light color (like white or cream), no bling, no dangly rubbish, small and neat, but not boring. I like cute and fun but not sparkly, preferably green or purple or blue, and I like rectangular or square faces more than circular.

Also, I really don't want to have to buy a new watch at this point, having just spent an extra £8 on this one. Maybe I can mend it with superglue.

Updatey-update

2010-08-03T07:45:00.003+01:00

Sorry, I seem to have taken a week and a half off there, for some reason.

I have been quite busy, though, and not just with work.

I went out with my best friend to celebrate her birthday, which was lovely. We went to see Toy Story 3, which made me cry. It's a great film, and I'd highly recommend it, but it is very sad in places.

I have had friends round for dinner - I cooked spaghetti bolognese with heaps of vegetables because they are on a diet - and we played munchkin, a very silly card game.

In the last few evenings, the SO and I have cuddled up and watched Hellboy and Hellboy 2, both of which are excellent and are very close in theme to Changeling: The Lost, my RPG of choice. The troll market certainly is very like a goblin market in my changeling verse.

I've been knitting on my birch shawl, and on a pair of fingerless gloves for the SO. Having finished my pair in the course of a few days, I expected his to be quick, too, but I need to actually work on them for that to work. I've also been stitching down the back of the binding on my placemats. I got them finished except for that detail weeks ago, but it turns out, I'm not a fan of handsewing. I am a fan of the effect it gives, so I'll keep on keeping on, but it's something that I do in front of a movie or TV show. We're near the end of the third series of Star Trek: The Next Generation right now, one disc to go, so that's pretty exciting to counteract the dullness (yes, I said it, it's dull) of stitching down binding.

Ill

2010-07-24T10:03:00.003+01:00

I am ill. I hate being ill.

It is one of the many things that I cannot do in a normal and measured way. There are many things that I do to extreme measures, and being ill is one of them. Others include watching TV shows (17 hours of television in a day is just fine! I can watch a whole season of this in a day!) and baking (you're having a birthday? Let me design a cake and make jam from scratch and carve it into a masterpiece!).

So, I have this summer cold that's going around, and it's annoying because I have the regular my-face-hurts, my-nose-is-running, i-have-a-temperature-and-feel-very-cold stuff, but because I'm me, I also have the my-throat-feels-like-sandpaper, and the I-can't-stand-up-I'm-so-dizzy things going on.

Also, I only seem to manage to get ill when the SO is away, so he's off visiting friends and I should be at work but I can't stand up so that means I can't work. It also means that going to the loo is a major production because it involves staggering and holding on to furniture, which isn't fun. Oh, and I have to stay hydrated, so more staggering to get more water, and then more water means more bathroom trips.

Body, this is very inconvenient.

Remember this?

2010-07-15T11:08:00.002+01:00

Look at her now!

And there are plenty of buds for more flowers yet to come!

Introducing

2010-07-04T21:37:00.004+01:00

I'd like you to meet the newest addition to my life.

Isn't she gorgeous?

I've spent all day with her set up, sewing a little, in between wandering off and reading or playing.

She arrived last weekend, brought up by my mum, and I've already got projects underway. The coaster beneath my teacup in this picture was one of the first. I've made four coasters so far, and have plans for at least two more, I think. My current project, though, involved making these:

and then doing this:

and then this:

to make placemats to co-ordinate with the coasters. I have three of the four placemat tops pieced, and will hopefully get the fourth one done tomorrow.

Also today, I rejigged some elements on my blog, because I was bored of it as it was. I much prefer it now. Next step, making a header.

PS, Happy Fourth of July to those across the pond. Enjoy your apple pie and fireworks.

Unwell

2010-07-01T18:46:00.003+01:00

I woke up this morning feeling just horrible. I was dizzy and headachey, felt horribly confused and even when I was sitting down I felt like I was going to fall over sideways. The part that sealed the deal was when I felt a wave of nausea wash over me and had to run for the bathroom. I rang work and told them that I was very sorry but I was unwell and wouldn't be able to come in today. Then I collapsed back into bed and slept for the next five hours.

I awoke at half past one this afternoon feeling a little more human, and I'm definitely planning/hoping to be back at work tomorrow. I've spent the last couple of hours, though, reading blogs and listening to music from my bed.

I've been very interested in quilts and quilting recently, and so a few quilting/sewing blogs have been added to my google reader and to my sidebar.

The Visit

2010-06-29T07:53:00.003+01:00

I'm drinking Lady Grey tea in my pyjamas, and thinking about my mum's recent visit. It was wonderful to see her. We did heaps of drinking tea, tidying, hanging out and just being.

She brought me a Busy Lizzie, who is now on my living room windowsill, and doing very nicely. She's going to be pink.

She also brought me another new arrival, who I think deserves her own introduction post, after I take some glamour shots of her. Hopefully I'll get that done soon. For now, I have to run to work. It's a hard life.

Mope

2010-06-24T20:50:00.001+01:00

At the end of the road on which I live, there is a car. It's normally parked there, and is almost always parked there, where I walk past it, in the mornings as I walk to work.

This car has the same make and model as my dad's car, it's the same colour. The number plate is almost identical - this one has a C where my dad's has an E, but aside from that, it's the same.

And every time I see it in the mornings, this insane bubble rises up in me - my dad's come to visit me! My dad's decided to surprise me!

Never mind that this would be totally out of character for my dad. Never mind that if he did this on a day when I'm working, I would still have to work. I get this crazy hope-bubble every time I see it, and then it pops, and I carry on walking to work.

I feel mopey and clingy at the moment. I think I'm allowed to feel like this sometimes. I'm really glad that my mum's coming to visit me soon.

An Adventure

2010-06-21T18:07:00.001+01:00

Well! Today I accidentally had a little adventure. It began at lunch time, when I walked the fifteen minute walk home from work for lunch rather than buying it in town. While at home, I managed to leave my keys on the sofa, which was very useful when I had to go back to work and just picked up my bag and left.

I was halfway home when I realised that my keys were inside my flat and I was outside my flat. To make matters worse, the SO is in Edinburgh this week. Joy. And to make matters even worse, my phone was in my flat, and anyway, it was out of charge.

I ended up going to a friend's house and phoning my letting agent, who let me borrow the office keys to get in. I need to take the office keys back tonight, but for now I'm letting my feet rest. I'll go out in a few minutes, probably, but man, I could have done without that adventure after a long day at work.

Check it out! PIE!

2010-06-20T11:25:00.002+01:00

I do love my pan of faery slaying.

(Sorry I haven't been blogging much recently, my energy is going mostly to work rather than to the fun projects that I want to be doing.)

A Day Off!

2010-06-18T10:33:00.002+01:00

I have a day off work! It feels like years and years since I had a day off, and now I have one!

I think that I will mostly spend today in my pyjamas, knitting and crocheting, working on this:

and on a bag made from this.

I am over halfway through the birch shawl now. This afternoon, I plan to watch some Star Trek with the SO. Maybe a little light shopping will be done.

Hurrah! A day off!

Just because

2010-06-14T18:38:00.002+01:00

Today, because it was Monday, and because I was working all day, and because I had an hour long lunch, and because I burned my finger and so I couldn't make my lunch, and because I felt like it, I took myself out to lunch.

I didn't go anywhere fancy, just to a coffee shop for some coffee and a panini and a piece of carrot cake, which was nice, and I had lunch on my own and really enjoyed it. I hadn't realised that I like going out to lunch with myself, before, but now that I know, maybe I'll do it a little more often.

After I ate lunch, I went to the library and browsed for a while, enjoying soaking in the quietness. I love my job, but it can be very tiring.

Phew

2010-06-05T20:29:00.002+01:00

It's been a while, huh, blog?

I went to see my parents a couple of weeks ago, which was lovely. I spent a week hanging out with my mamma and dad, and managing to just relax. My mum's garden looks amazing, and her blog has some great pictures of really gorgeous flowers.

It's a good job that I took that time to chill out and recharge my batteries, because as soon as I got back it was straight into working five days a week. I'm really loving my job, and being out of the house so much is nice, if exhausting. I'm fairly sure that working those five days of the week allows me to be more productive housework-wise the other two. I still wish that the SO would do more housework, but I'm less inclined to just let things pile up, I think. There's a slim possibility of my mum coming to visit at the end of this month, and I'd like her to see the flat at its best, neat and tidy. With all the clutter around it looks really poky, and it's really not as small as it seems.

I'm still working on the birch shawl, and intended to take a photo to put up here but I phoned my parents and talked to my dad instead and so the light was gone by the time I could have taken it. Hopefully tomorrow I will get one. I also completed a pretty cool project while I was at my parents, so I'll photo that and talk about it soon.

As of right now, I've got the flat to myself. It's totally cool, I can play my angry girl music (Ani DiFranco, I'm on a huge kick at the moment) and hang out on my own and enjoy it. There's nobody to make the tea, though, which is a bit of a downside. Also, there's no food in the house and it's raining outside, and I have to cook supper at some point. Oh well, the solitude is totally worth it.

Hazy

2010-05-16T17:40:00.003+01:00

Today is a hazy day, lazy and long and peaceful. The SO and I were meant to be socialising with friends this evening, but we're both so tired that we ended up crying off, and I'm glad we did. I've been sitting and playing on my computer, reading and listening to music all day. Suddenly, I look at the clock and realise that it's after five o'clock, and I've just had a lovely lazy day and accomplished nothing more substantial than buying breakfast cereal at the supermarket.

I'm still working on my birch shawl, having briefly broken up with the love-me-knot socks owing to the bad fit over my high arches and insteps. The colour, trance, is just gorgeous, and I can completely forgive the shedding. I wear mostly black, and knitting with kidsilk haze makes it look like I have a teal cat.

I'm about to hit the end of one of the balls, and Birch is supposed to use three, which would put me about a third of the way through. According to my calculations, though, I've completed 135 out of 435 pattern repeats, putting me only around 31% of the way through. Close, but a little worrying, I hope that I don't run out of yarn before the end. I haven't taken into account the extra little bit on the side that is just less than a pattern repeat, so I'm not sure stitch-for-stitch how far through I am. When I finish the next pattern repeat I'll have finished 36%, so I suppose running out during this repeat is about right. Thinking about it, I also had to discard my first cast on edge and cast on again, so I will have lost a little length in that. I'm almost sure it'll be fine, and if it's not, I'm fairly sure I can get more in the same dye lot.

I'm not the only person who calculates these sorts of things, am I? I like to track things, work out percentages. Sometimes, even when I'm really enjoying a book, I'll calculate the percentage of the way through that I am. I just like to know, it's not that I'm looking forwards to the end. I suppose it's partly that I want to know that I'm making progress.

My trip back to my parents is approaching, and I'm getting more and more excited about the prospect of a holiday. My Birch will be coming with me, of course, I'll be working on it on the train.

Out of my hands

2010-05-13T16:41:00.002+01:00

Today I finished citations and handed in two essays with a total word count of 4750 words. Phew! I spent the last three days working on them, hard, surrounded by books and with notes and paper everywhere. I even turned off my phone - although a phone call to the house phone from my mamma on Monday evening was lovely and very welcome.

They were handed in this afternoon, and are now out of my hands. It feel so odd to know that these two courses are done. I've only been in classes for ten weeks! That's hardly any time at all, and when my last exam is done on Wednesday, that'll be university over for three and a half months. I know I'm not the only one who would welcome longer teaching periods and shorter holidays.

I'm hoping to work a lot this summer. I love my job, it's really awesome, and last summer I had a little bit of a problem with remembering to leave the house. Hopefully, having a job will bring more structure to my summer.

First, though, I'm looking forwards to going on holiday. I'm going to be visiting my parents, which I'm really looking forwards to, some time to relax, hang out with my parents and my little sister, play with the cat and give the SO some time to himself without me.

It's odd; my parents get cooler and cooler the older I get...

News

2010-05-10T08:46:00.002+01:00

I'm writing this from bed, and the SO is sleeping beside me. He's been a little down recently, and very tired - I think he has a little burnout from how fast the semester has gone. I'm certain that we're both ready to have a little break over the summer, anyway.

I'm in the midst of essays - I have two due in on Thursday, and am alternating between them. Some of the essay questions are fairly tough, but I'm enjoying it anyway. Still not a fan of Beckett, though, although I might be inclined to change my mind if I saw his work done well rather than reading it.

Things have just been moving along here, with work and gaming, and the end of the semester. I wrapped up the first story arc in my Changeling: the Lost campaign, which was a lot of fun, and am set to begin the next one this week. I've also been making plans for things that I want to read over the summer.

On Friday, while I was at work, I was worrying about laundry - it seems to have taken over a good part of my life - and wishing I had put some out to dry, since it was a great drying day. When I got home from work, I discovered that the SO had done and hung out three loads, because he wanted to do something nice for me.

I think this one's a keeper.

Ballot

2010-05-06T12:30:00.003+01:00

On my way home from work today, I stopped in and voted. It was super quick, and very easy, and I don't really get why people would avoid doing so. I think it's so important to exercise ones democratic rights. So long as we exercise them, there's no excuse for anyone to take them away from us.

Update

2010-05-04T20:47:00.003+01:00

Apparently my mum gets worried when I go too long without blogging, so I thought I'd better update. Not a lot is going on, to be honest. I got a politics essay back today, and was thrilled to see that I'd got a first for it. That puts me on track to get a first for this unit, as long as my exam goes well. It's making me worry that I ought to be doing a degree in English and Politics, rather than just English as I am now. I still have the option to change, but not for long, and it worries me.

I'm in the process of choosing modules for next year, and am particularly looking forwards to Modernism and Modernity. It means getting another pile of books to read over the summer in preparation.

This evening I made toad in the hole in my cast iron frying pan - a birthday present from my parents on my last birthday - and it turned out really well. I fried onion and sausage together, then poured batter over it - I used my pancake batter, minus the sugar - and put the whole thing in the oven for 20 minutes at 180*c.

Unfortunately, I burned my finger on the pan handle, so I've been keeping it in cold water for the last hour or so. It still feels burny and painful, so I'm going to keep putting it in cold water until it feels less hot. The supper was still really good, though, definitely one to repeat.

I've also just finished rereading The Lies of Locke Lamora for about the fourth time. It's a great book if I'm not looking for anything too heavy, and want something fun but not too insubstantial. I'm also enjoying Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell at the moment, which is great fun.

The current story arc of the Changeling campaign that I'm running is coming to an end, which is good since I'm about to lose one of my players - we only had him for a year on exchange, and he's off back to his university in the States next week. The players have been a pleasure to play with, very inventive and characterful, and I adore the world and characters that I've created. It's set in London, and really getting to know my NPCs has been a great pleasure. My favourite character that I've created is probably Will, the Lord of Earth, who is a very enthusiastic, very messy classics professor, who wears cardigans with leather elbows. He's great fun.

Earth

2010-04-22T12:38:00.003+01:00

Happy Earth Day!

Isn't it weird that the earth gets one day? Anyway, anything that promotes awareness of being more eco-friendly is good, I think.

I was reminded that it's earth day by Swistle, who is doing a giveaway in celebration of earth day. Some of the things that she talks about, I already do. I use reusable bags rather than plastic, I use reusable menstrual products (a mooncup UK, and I love it, and I think it's awesome, and I use cloth pads for backup), and I use handkerchiefs instead of tissues most of the time. I make the effort that I can be bothered to make, really. I also gave my sister cloth pads for a birthday present last year.

Anyway, Swistle is having a giveaway in celebration of earth day, but because of postage costs, it's only open to US/canada residents. I totally get this, but I wanted to be able to share the love of reusable products with the rest of the world, so I'm doing a smaller (much, much smaller) giveaway of my own: one winner will get three (3) cloth menstrual pads, from my favourite UK pad maker, Luna Wolf. She's also got a sale on right now, so if you've been meaning to try cloth, go look! The giveaway is for one pantiliner, one medium 9 inch pad, and one long 10 1/4 inch pad, in different floral colours. I am willing to ship anywhere in the world for anyone who wants these, and if nobody does, I can keep them for me! Muahahaha!

To enter, leave a comment before 6pm BST Sunday, 25th April. I'll pick the winner by random number generator. Happy Earth Day!

UPDATE: Vicky of Luna Wolf has sent a picture of the precise pads in the offer. Enjoy!

UPDATE 2: The giveaway is now closed! Thanks to all that entered. The winner is...

...Melanie! Melanie, I will be emailing you to get your address.

Homemade

2010-04-21T14:22:00.000+01:00

I think that some things are just plain better when they're made by hand, at home, rather than pulled off a shelf at a supermarket. Cake, for example. There is, in my opinion, nothing comparable between a cake that I pick up at Tesc0 and a cake that I whip up at home. The time scale is, perhaps, comparable, considering I live not five minutes walk from the nearest supermarket, but given 15 minutes, I'll throw together a sponge pudding and have it hot and ready when whoever I sent out to buy cream returns. I like knowing exactly what went into these things, I like knowing that I used fresh ingredients and that what we're eating is food, not a sponge coated in sugar. I try not to get too self-righteous, and I don't do it for everything (Ha! Not by a long shot!) but some things, I like to make myself.

I still run out for bread when I want it, even when I have beer in the house, and I have no interest in brewing my own vinegar (or whatever the process of making vinegar is called) or fermenting my own beer. I'm way more inclined to buy pasta - fresh or dried - from the supermarket than I am to knead an egg with flour by hand for however many hours it takes to make pasta from scratch, and I crack open a jar of prepared pasta sauce from time to time.

Some things I'd like to make from scratch, but use so rarely that I don't think that there would be much point. I'd like to make mayonnaise from scratch at some point, but we just don't use it. Making pesto from scratch would almost certainly be less expensive than buying it, but I'm the only one who uses it, and only in my pesto-cream pasta sauce, and I'm not convinced that it would be better.

I like to make my own jewellery, but then, I hardly ever wear it anyway. I don't use hats or scarves that I haven't made myself, and I'd like to make more of the garments that I wear. I have little interest in making my own shampoo, or moisturiser, and my approach to skincare is to wash my face with water and ignore it. Building electronics from scratch is interesting, but not a path that I'm inclined towards at the moment. A shoe making course would be really cool, but I think that my little sister might be more suited to it than me.

I've seen a lot of reasons for making and using handmade things, such as their uniqueness, and the fact that you can get a perfect fit. I like the process of making things, knowing that one stitch at a time, I'm creating something new. By measuring and adding ingredients carefully, stirring myself, I'm saving money and I'm enjoying the process of looking after those around me. I'm glad that I have the time and the ability to do these things, and the money to finance my crafty hobbies.

What about you? What things do you make from scratch, and why? What isn't worth making? I think it's such a personal thing, I'm interested to know how others feel about it.

Oh, dear

2010-04-19T08:40:00.001+01:00

This is how banal my life is: I just checked the weather forecast, so I could plan when to do my next load of laundry.

Ah, well, needs to be done, I suppose.

Still, my peers are sleeping off hangovers and stressing over essay deadlines, I'm planning loads of laundry days in advance.

"That's gay"

2010-04-18T15:13:00.000+01:00

Hey, people. When you use the word 'gay' in a negative way, you are tapping into the assumption that everyone knows it's bad to be gay. If you don't actually think it's bad to be gay, don't use this word in this way, okay? It just makes you look thoughtless and intolerant. If you do think it's bad to be gay, just don't come near me, okay?

Okay.

Love

2010-04-15T18:24:00.001+01:00

I love my job.

Rowan have just released a new range of their yarn, a wool/cotton blend with colours by Amy Butler. It's called Belle Organic, and the colours are just yummy. There are rich, saturated purples, bright, zingy greens and deep blues. The yarn feels like it would be a dream to knit or crochet with, it's so soft, and, unlike some other yarns from Rowan, isn't underspun. I'm itching to take some home with me to play with!

I spent yesterday morning unpacking, arranging and setting out the yarn, and it was blissful. I can't wait to see garments made from it.

I bought some yarn to make a Birch shawl (Ravelry link). I haven't given up on the socks, it's just... they're doing my head in! I need a break from the socks. I've fallen out of love with them a little since they needed the heels ripped out so many times. Oddly enough, I choose to hate the socks, rather than my weirdly shaped feet, for this.

The shawl is going to be big, and I've got a gorgeous greeny blue colour of kidsilk haze for it. The yarn is expensive, but I hope it's going to be worth it.

Conclusions

2010-04-13T18:57:00.000+01:00

I think that I have come to a conclusion regarding the hugmetight, and that is that I will have to write my own pattern. I think I will make it in purple, I think a deep aubergine sort of colour could be really nice, and I think I want to use a lace pattern. Nothing too fine, but maybe just some eyelets in a nice pattern to make it a little lighter and more interesting. I'm still thinking about it.

I felt ill this morning, but then looked at the sheer volume of notes that I take during politics lectures and decided it wasn't worth it to miss the lecture and spend a day in bed. I took some paracetamol and went in, but as soon as I got home I went to bed with my computer. I'm hoping I'll be better tomorrow, as I'm working.

By the by, I got a job in a yarn store. It's a little like a junkie working in a crack factory, but it's a good job. I didn't want to make a fuss on here, but I'm pretty happy.

My camera batteries went dead while I was taking a photo to illustrate how many notes I take during lectures, so there will be no more pictures until May, probably, when I go and visit my parents.

This weekend we had glorious weather, and I realised how banal my life is, as I got five loads of laundry done in three days and felt fulfilled and accomplished and like I had really accomplished something. I am not sure why laundry becomes the bane of so many womens lives in a way that it doesn't seem to for men. It's just never ending!

Sigh

2010-04-11T19:05:00.000+01:00

Yes, I know, days of multiple blog posts interspersed with days of silence is a bad way to run a blog, but it's how I roll and that's simply that. It is a disorganised mind, after all.

Sigh of relief: I have just realised that I have no essays due in for another month, so that gives me plenty of time to work on my Angels in America one. I am planning something around queer theory and intersectionality with femininst lit crit, focus on the camp.

Sigh of frustration: I wish that the departments would talk to each other more, because it's annoying to have to format essays entirely differently according to which department is going to be marking them. One wants wide right margins, the other wide left margins. One wants paragraphs to be separated by line breaks, the other by indentation. One wants citations Harvard, the other footnotes. One wants bibliography cited with the year of publication after the author surname, the other after the publisher. One wants it on double sided paper, the other on single. One wants one hard copy, the other two. Some consistency would be appreciated.

Sigh of contentment: I have a nice busy week ahead of me, but no scary looming deadlines. I might even get to go to pagan society tomorrow evening, and I can let myself buy the next Sandman comic. I buy them from the on-campus bookstore rather than Amazon because the customer service there is really good and I like the conversation I get with my comic books. All in all, I'm feeling pretty good about my life right now.

Hugmetight

2010-04-11T13:24:00.000+01:00

When I was little and doing ballet, my Nana knit me a series of hugmetights, ballet cardigans in shades of pink that I could wear over my leotard during ballet class. They were wrap-over cardigans, with a hole at one side of the waist for a tie to go through, and they tied in a bow at the back.

I want to knit myself a grownup version of a hugmetight, maybe not in pink but sized up so that I can wear it now. I like cardigans a lot, and wear them a lot, but I only have one that I made myself, and I think that my next knitting project should be a cardigan (once I finish these blasted socks, for which I'm doing the heel for the third time), and I'd like it to be a hugmetight. Otis from knitty is not quite right. This is the sort of thing that I had as a child, but I don't want it exactly like that, and I don't have a 34 inch chest. I don't know how I want it different, only that I want a hugmetight, but not just a little girls one sized up, and not like Otis. Maybe I could make something like Otis, but do the ties the way I want them? I don't know. The search continues.

Well

2010-04-11T12:27:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I managed to start my essay, do a little shopping, wash up, do two loads of laundry, change my sheets and cook some stuff. I feel like I accomplished a lot when I write it all out like that, but I also spent a lot of time looking after the SO, who is ill and keeps snuffling pitifully in my direction.

Today is the last day to get my essay finished, and while I'm certain it will be done, I have a lot else to do as well, so my system is to write a paragraph, which is 300 words, each hour, during the second half of the hour. The first half I'm using to read, do laundry, look after the SO, eat, get drinks and whatever else I need to do today. At this rate, the essay will be done by 6 pm this evening.

Update, 17:15: Essay is DONE.

Lists

2010-04-10T10:48:00.000+01:00

I have an essay due in on Monday, with heaps of work still to do on it.
My bathroom needs cleaning.
The hall and living room need vacuuming.
There is a mountain of washing up to be done.
There is a load of laundry in the machine, and another on the line. There is plenty of sun but no wind to speak of.
My entire flat needs a good tidying.
I want to change my bed and wash the linen.
Groceries need buying, as I am down to one onion and a tin of sweetcorn by way of vegetables, and we're out of bread. Although we do have beer.
The oven and the kitchen floor need cleaning.
I have a sock on the needles, and am being impatient towards that because I want to start my granny blanket.

What am I doing? Blogging, and messing about on the internet.

Hey, self control! I could do with some of you today, please!