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Folding Stars

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And the new stars will go straight into a certain little box.

Danes love doing these paper stars for Christmas. You can find a tutorial on how to fold the stars here. I will doing some Danish woven Christmas hearts later this month as well.

Thank-you for your well-wishes. My left arm is not doing well and I'm thinking of getting it X-rayed if it continues being this painful. And thank you to David who helped typing the last entry (and who has hovered over me tonight).

Ouchy-boo-boo.

It's very, very cold outside. This means that the pavements are icy. By 'icy', I mean 'like an ice-skating rink' and, seeing as I'm not blessed with a fantastic sense of balance, I do not ice-skate well. This evening, I fell whilst crossing a lawn to avoid aforementioned icy pavements. I've hurt my wrist and my back. This means I probably won't be blogging (nor knitting!) for a wee while (unless, as now, I can find someone to dictate to *Dave waves hello*).

Wish me luck in preserving my sanity.

Or send snow shoes.

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Never See the End of the Road

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And so on the last day of my NaBloPoMoing, some sad news. Jørn Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House, has died. The Opera House is arguably one of the most iconic 20th century building and yet Utzon never visited it himself after falling out with its money men. He continued to design beautiful, extraordinary buildings which both incorporated and distanced themselves from Modernism (and its horrible offspring, Brutalism). Most of these buildings were never built; they proved too expensive or perhaps too startling to imagine in real life. Utzon retired from architecture in the late 1970s and became a recluse.

I cannot resist posting this youtube clip, filmed on the steps to Utzon's Opera House: "There's a battle ahead, many battles are lost / But you'll never see the end of the road / While you're travelling with me".

As for my own folly, my own indulgence of NaBloPoMo? It has been a pleasure rather than a chore to post every day. As the holiday season approaches, I will be unable to keep up my work blog ethic, but I do hope to maintain a certain sense of regularity. Thank you all for reading.

Vintage Buttons

Sometimes you get lucky. Before David's birthday dinner, we went walking around Glasgow's West End and eventually dipped into our favourite second-hand shop.

Dave spotted a tin filled with old buttons and asked the owner how much they'd be. "Oh, I have plenty more.. haven't really looked through 'em. So many, you know. Was going to throw most of them out," the owner said, in his characteristically abrupt way. And a few seconds later he emerged with three more tins and a big shopping bag.

You know what happened next.

At first I reckoned I had scored maybe 200 vintage buttons but I was way off the mark. I have tentatively sorted maybe half of the buttons (the big 'uns first!) into three boxes. The large plastic bag remains uncharted territory. You can see some of the already-paired-up buttons in the picture on the left. Judging from the style and a few Canadian(!) coins I found, the button collection appears to have been amassed between mid-1930s to late 1970s: a few buttons have a distinct late Art Deco feel to them, some are definitely made from Bakelite and some are still on the original cardboard.

An early Christmas gift from me to me. How much? You wouldn't believe me..