22:02

I'm currently reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty. The book is marred by a faint (if constant) whiff of hysteria which I'm finding rather unappealing despite the novel's veneer of congenial humour and sly take on family and academia. I am not sure I'll finish the book but I cannot really pinpoint why. Meanwhile, my thoughts go out to my friends in New Zealand. Most of my friends are North Islanders but I'm still rattled by the Christchurch earthquake. Friends of friends are still missing. I'm not a religious person, so I cannot pray, but I can at least sit here and hope for good tidings.

Finally, on a personal note, things are a bit rough at the moment for one reason or another. I'm trying to find joy in small things but even this exercise is becoming somewhat sluggish. Perhaps the long winter is getting to me. Perhaps I just need to make my peace with some relatively big chunks of my life. I don't know. Solutions/answers to the usual address, please.

Still Knitting..

At a recent knitting group, a friend worried that I would become a Sewer rather than a Knitter. Fear not. I may have spent a small fortune in a fabric shop yesterday but my first love remains knitting. And I have actually been knitting away on a couple of projects. To wit:

Addendum: Knitting as Therapy. A very good blog post about body image, self-acceptance, and knitting. Warmly recommend. I'm not the emotional sort but even I had a lump in my throat after reading this.

Clip My Wings

Pause, rewind. Sewing is a different process to knitting. So far I have traced the pattern, worked up a toile (muslin) and discovered that I need to move the bust darts higher as well as doing a FBA. It is sort of a pre-process prior to making the actual garment out of the fancy fabric. Had this been knitting, I would have swatched using the actual yarn and probably be well under way making the actual thing itself.

Different processes. It's interesting.

Anyway. Random selection of linky bits: + The George Hotel, Glasgow. If you like urban decay, faded glamour or Trainspotting (the film, not the activity) + Is Denmark Breaching Human Rights? The other reason why I left Denmark. Even if D has a so-called "correct" skin tone and is an EU citizen, he would still get so much flak. No way would I put him through that. + BBC4 - The Beauty of Books. For a programme series apparently about the materiality of books, it does boast a suspicious amount of textual critics and biblical scholars. I was not impressed but I'm not exactly a layman. You might like it? + 100 Young Adult Books For the Feminist Reader. I spot certain omissions (such as this and this) but everyone's got opinions and it's a handy list. + Are you a knitter of the literary persuasion? Why not give the Beowulf socks a go?

Finally, I've derived great enjoyment from this video tonight.. Enjoy!

Sunday Craft Thoughts

Quite apart from celebrating my ten-year blogging anniversary, I have also been celebrating my thirty-mumble-th birthday this week. Among the many excellent presents, I received The Perfect Fit: A Practical Guide to Adjusting Sewing Patterns and The Sewing Book - both of which sent my heart a-flutter. I was also lucky enough to be given a sweater amount of ruby Kidsilk Haze and a shawl amount of burgundy Faroese wool. My sewing machine also arrived this week which called for a bit of fabric shopping. I feel very consumerist right now. However, my consumerism is linked to a feeling of wanting to become less of a consumerist. My fabric purchases have been very deliberate and are linked to my desire to have an almost self-stitched capsule wardrobe. I've been reading Sewingplum's blog intently and while I'm not yet at a level where I can consider making 6 (let alone 24!) staple wardrobe pieces, I can at least become a much more thoughtful dresser - and crafter.

The photo shows two of the fabrics in my stash. The one on the left is the Liberty cotton lawn which D gave me for Christmas. Right now I feel slightly daunted by this fabric. The fabric on the right is a Joel Dewberry cotton which is earmarked for my first 'proper' sewing project: the Simplicity 2501 blouse. It's a very versatile pattern (check out this very vintage-looking version!) and one I can imagine myself making several times. You might think I am batting above my weight with this pattern. We shall see. After all, I used to be a decent dressmaker back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I'm yet to find an equally versatile pattern for the lower pattern of my body. I'm also trying to decide whether I would ever feel confident enough to wear the Ceylon dress - I'm already pretty sure the Crepe dress will be a go-to pattern: it would look equally nice in neutrals and bold prints (versatility is the key to my heart, it seems).

As I have previously mentioned, I'm going to have a real go at making clothes appropriate for warm(ish) weather which makes knitting and crochet slightly trickier. Fancy is still on my list, but it will probably be the only big knitting project I'll undertake. I'll be looking into making a couple of small shrugs - Veronique ticks my boxes but it's also knitted in KSH and two projects in KSH might be a bit much even for me. Right now, though, I am contrating on a knitted art piece I shall be exhibiting at the Glasgow Tramway art gallery next month (link NSFW due to artistic nudity). I'm behind schedule and need to press on.

Finally: thank you for all your comments recently. I'll try to get back to each and every one of you!

Decennium

February 2001 I sat down and started a blog - I'm actually a bit hazy on the exact details of where and when - and somehow I've now blogged for an entire decade. Selected highlights (and low points)

2001: I began blogging (using my own software). I subsequently moved my blog to diaryland where I met DiscoDave, now my Other Half (although that happened much later). I also began meeting up with Copenhagen-based bloggers. We weren't all that many in those days and could fit our Xmas party into a small flat.

2002-4: I moved the blog to blogspot. My blogging became less about my hazy university social life and more about academia and books. A lot about books.

2004- 2006: I bough my own domain, bookish.dk, and turned my blog into a fullblown litblog. Heady days with publishers emailing me with lovely offers, getting linked by major US & UK newspapers, appearing on the radio and all that. I also gained a bonafide stalker in the process who had to be cautioned by Copenhagen police whilst I hid in my best friend's flat. That wasn't fun nor heady.

2007: My webhosting company pulled the plug on bookish.dk for no apparent reason (this happened to several other bloggers too). I set up this very blog instead after mulling over it for a few months. I missed writing way too much.

2008-?: Lit-blogging gave way to personal blogging gave way to craft-blogging. As a result I now show my face on the blog (and if you are a bit savvy, you can find my full name too). Blogging is now so mainstream that most of my offline friends are linkable. Social networking has become very intertwined with blogging and it is sometimes difficult to know when my blogging starts and ends (for more thoughts on this, I recommend reading Stuart's take).

Simply put: I cannot imagine the last decade without blogging and bloggers. Over the past ten years I have met a huge amount of clever, funny, witty people (and my boyfriend) through blogging. Some of you I have later met offline; some of you remain online friends. I won't do a rollcall because I will miss out too many people - and some of them have left the blogosphere too - but thank you to each and every one of you. It has been a real blast.

Can I make a simple request? If you happen to read this, would you leave a comment? You can say something about how you feel about blogging, if you blog (why (not)?), what your favourite blogs are .. anything goes. I would just like to hear from you - even you, dear lurking blog reader!

And here's to ten more years.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Today I wore my February Lady Sweater for the first time in months and I was reminded of a recent conversation with knitting friends. Last I went to my regular knitting group, most of us were working on cardigans or sweaters/jumpers knitted flat. This gave us pause for thought because the past few years we have all been very busy knitting top-down cardigans and jumpers/sweaters these past few years. So why have many of us suddenly gone back to the dreaded seamed cardigans where you cannot try on the garment as you are knitting and there is so much post-knitting finishing to do?

My February Lady Sweater has not aged well. I knitted it out of New Lanark Aran which is a sturdy no-frills yarn with good memory, but even the yarn's good memory has not preventing the cardigan from sagging under its own weight. The garterstitch yoke has stretched which means baggy underarms and a cardigan that is too long in the body. Yes, my FLS has been washed and dried (several times) but the yoke does not spring back into shape.

Out of curiosity I then tried on my other top-down garments. My red cardigan also suffers from the 'saggy yoke leads to sad cardigan' syndrome as does my beloved handspun garterstitch yoke cardigan although I have not worn it as often as either my grey or red cardigan and so it still maintains some shape. I've worn Liesl maybe five times so it still looks brand new, but Milbrook looks a bit tired even if the yarn itself is very light-weight. My only top-down garment which still looks fit for fight? Forecast. Maybe the cables keep it in shape?

Question: how has your seamless, top-down cardigan or jumper/sweater weathered being used over, say, one or two years? Has your project kept its general shape or has it turned into a sad, saggy unflattering lump like my once much-loved FLS? I'm particularly curious about the cardigans that were all the rage maybe one or two years ago - the 'three buttons at the top' cardigans. You know, FLS, Moch cardigan, Amelia, Tea Leaves, Tappan Zee etc.

Maybe I have been unlucky and maybe my knitting friends have been unlucky - or maybe top-down seamless knitting needs to be thought about more carefully?What's your take on seams vs no-seams?

In other crafty news, I have finally made a decision on which sewing machine to purchase. I have gone for JL300C which is a re-branded Janome. Essentially it is the Janome DC3050 without the 20 decorative stitches I didn't want or need - and it's £30 less too. I'm getting it next week and I am ridiculously excited. I should probably send D. into town to pick it up or I may be tempted into buying some of the new Joel Dewberry cottons: some of his prints are quite Art Noveau, others rather Art Deco, and I'm weak in the presence of references to early 20th C visual design.

I'm currently knitting: nothing! It's true! I need to cast on for an art piece I'm exhibiting next month. I just need to shake off this lethargy of mine. I'm currently reading: Zadie Smith - On Beauty. Again with the lethargy, though, as I'm only twenty pages into a book I ought to be flying through..

Pssst.. title.