Yesterday's protest made the BBC's news frontpage. Of course the laughing knitters are not mentioned, but we are there between the lines. I can tell we are. I have spent the day in bed with a hot water bottle and podcasts (currently these) with an occasional nap thrown in for good measure. I have been knackered for a few days, but today it just caught up with me. Hopefully a day's rest coupled with cold meds will have sorted me out. Cross fingers.
Achoo.
It is not often that people are praying for my soul when I'm at knitting group. Tonight was certainly different. We got caught up in evangelical Christians protesting the play Jesus Queen of Heaven outside Glasgow's Tron Theatre which involved the press and some (rather bored) policemen. As odd as the praying thing was, it did not compare to walking outside and seeing some very offensive anti-gay posters and billboards being held up by Respectable Citizens. Such people seek confrontation and thrive upon attention. I was not willing to give them any satisfaction and I resorted to quietly shaking my head at the candle-holding and chanting men and women as I made my way home. The twentieth century is slipping away before our eyes: one of its greatest intellectuals, Claude Levi-Strauss has died. I always assumed that he had passed away before I began studying critical theory, although I cannot tell you why, but instead Levi-Strauss lived to the ripe old age of 100. Rest in peace, you structuralist giant.
Spending quality time with one of my favourite people is always such a pleasure.
Old Maiden Aunt's Lilith is currently test-knitting the Adeline Coat for the a black pepper design studio and I adore the cable detailing. I'm not one to wear copious amounts of cabling (again, body issues) but I know beautiful design when I see it. I also loved how the pattern was working up in the now discontinued Rowan Harris Tweed. The finished jacket is going to be stunning.
Lilith and I were discussing many things and not all were knitting-related. We talked about body perceptions (going back to this post, of course), feminism, how language usage shape our world (without even mentioning the good old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis!) because apparently I act differently when speaking Danish than when I speak English, and, oh, our shared love of early 20th C country house mysteries.
But unsurprisingly we also talked knitting.
To the left, you see David's sweater in its incomplete state. I am almost done with the body and am thanking the heavens above that David is on the skinny indie boy side of things. Knitting stocking stitch in the round can be fun but .. it can also get really tedious. I'm currently pondering doing a gansey-inspired yoke but let's see how I feel. I'm also tempted to incorporate some elements from the classic Danish SNS sweater.
To the right, you see something I uncovered in my stash. A full cone of 2-ply baby alpaca. A full cone of orange 2-ply baby alpaca. I know the yarn will not block out particularly crispy, so instead of a shawl I am considering doing a shrug or a very light cardigan/pullover. Lilith suggested maybe an orange baby alpaca incarnation of Buttercup? It'd be drapey and very lightweight. Any suggestions? I'm really eager to start knitting this beautiful yarn that I had almost forgotten..
My autumn/winter mitts have been blocked and subsequently worn for several days with much pride. It is a stash-busting project too as I used partial skeins of Lett-Lopi and New Lanark DK I had left over from previous projects. What is not to love?
Taking a decent photo of them, however, proved too much for my photography skills, and it wasn't until this afternoon that Official Photographer went for a walk in the rain with the camera, that an in-focus photo appeared.
The pattern is free, but be warned that it needs to be tweaked in order to work. As written, the thumb increases do not match up with the colourwork and if i were to knit these again, I would go down a needle size as the mitts are a smidgen too wide across my hands despite going with the smallest size. On the positive side I can fit a pair of gloves underneath these for extra warmth.
Now to something completely different.
I first read Schrödinger's Rapist - or a Guy's Guide to approaching Strange Women Without Being Maced a couple of weeks ago and it has been on my mind ever since. In a strange way, the blog entry manages to explain exactly what it feels like being a woman and make me aware that this is how it feels for me. Honestly, I do not think about my body or my gender most of the time. My body is just there as a vehicle for my brain and, well, I have never felt like I was part of any Special Sisterhood. And yet, that blog entry made me finally acknowledge to myself that being a woman is not like being a man. I'm in my early thirties and I finally admitted this to myself.
Deep down, though, I must have known and sought to protect myself. During most of my twenties I hid in baggy black clothes. At one point I even preferred being severely overweight to having a healthy weight and receiving attention. Today I wonder why, although I have some residual fear of walking on my own in remote places and I never go outside at night unless someone is with me. For someone who is not all that aware of her own body (and, believe me, having a body never ceases to confound and surprise me .. especially after I have walked into yet another door or stumbled), I do seem to be aware of the dangers connected to having one.
After reading the initial blog entry, I wound up reading the long Metafilter thread/response. Nattie's response was particularly thought-provoking and I found myself nodding to several points she made - and surprising myself by being able to nod. I need to think a lot more about this and work out my own response. Somehow this feels like an awakening.
"It is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where Tree huggers and Whale huggers in their weirdness are acceptable... while no one embraces the last speakers of a language." -Werner Herzog
Found here which looks at whether we should preserve languages and whether a world with monolithic language usage would be a bad thing? More on this later.
Mooncalf left an astute comment on my last entry wherein I had a mini-rant about Danish lifestyle blogs being smug and self-satisfied. She linked two blog entries, both of which reacts to the Martha Stewart-ness of some blogs. I really enjoyed reading the entries and I have taken some of their points to heart. I think it is important to remember that all blogs are edited in one way or another. We all have messy tables, bad days, sweaters that do not fit, unread books and frozen pizzas. I tend to shy away from confessional blogging (and I'm also notoriously private for someone who has blogged continuously for almost nine years), but I do attempt to create a fairly realistic picture of my life whilst leaving out things I would feel uncomfortable sharing.
So, bearing all this in mind, please ask me a question.
And, going back to the idea of language, notions of identity etc etc, I found this little tidbit in one of my commonplace books:
"As there is no selfhood without some other, a national canon -- whether attached to land or language -- is constituted in such a way that its identity has both intra- and intercultural aspects. In other words, it is mediated by the memory of the other and its development always involves at least two cultures. The court of Louis XIV, English Classicism, or the Weimar Klassik defined itself with reference to Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Thus, it is possible to argue that national canons reveal an interacting with other creeds. They are intercultural manifestations, conflictual as well as mutually complementary, configurations that are, in relation to each other, not only powerfully reciprocal but also strongly oppositional." -Mihály Szegedy-Maszák
I think that pretty much reveals my stance on whether we should preserve* languages or not.
(* I'm not of a prescriptive bend, mind.)
I don't know if I am being particularly bitchy today, but when I came across the following pattern note on Ravelry, I stopped in my tracks:
When I’m knitting a Jared Flood pattern, I feel like he’s making love to me. When I finish a Jared Flood pattern, I feel like I just gave birth to his child.
I feel this quote is almost worthy of a lolcat picture - you know the "U R DOING IT WRONG" type - because either I'm not knitting the right kind of patterns or the quoted knitter has not been involved in the right kind of love-making. Also, I know that seaming stuff is seen as a painful process but it is as painful as child birth? Really? And, finally, I just find the pattern note a touch on the creepy side of things.
But I do think I am in a bitchy mood today. I spent my lunch catching up with blogs and after a few reads I decided I had had enough of self-congratulatory, self-satisfied glimpses of homemade organic bread, tidy houses with expensive Scandinavian design furniture and delicate beige sweaters paraded on a series of identikit children who are all doing so incredibly well at school.
I think tonight I'll need to crash a lot of cars on the Xbox 360 whilst eating chocolate. And possibly knit a couple of more rows on David's sweater (I'm hoping stocking stitch will make me go completely zen).
I'll leave you with one of the greatest Halloween costumes I've seen for a long, long time.. and a slightly bitchy link: Regretsy.