Swings & Roundabouts

This was supposed to be my first step into autumn knitting. "Grab some lovely yellow yarn (sure to brighten up the dreich days of Scotland) and whip up some quick wrist warmers". That was my plan last night and I felt quite pleased with myself when I found a very suitable pattern on Ravelry. Except I have now spent more time rewriting the pattern than I would have spent designing and writing my own pattern. Sometimes you get what you pay for with free patterns:

• spelling mistakes to the point of rendering the pattern incomprehensible
• using wrong terminology to explain specific actions (CB4/C4B clearly means something different to the designer than it does to me)
• Instructions that look like short row instructions - except there are no short rows in the pattern
• And if you follow the pattern you end up with a fingerless glove which looks very weird on my hand (the thumb goes where?)

Maybe I am the odd one as a handful of people have knitted these gloves and they all loooove the pattern? Or maybe they are best friends with the designer? I'm in a very cynical mood today. The lone glove is going to the frog pond to die and I am going to find a tried-and-tested pattern (at least 100 projects) for my autumn knitting.

Grumble.

But lovely, lovely things happen too. Look what landed on my doorstep yesterday!

Ms Mooncalf had run out of wool for a current project and I just happened to have ½ a ball of the right yarn in the right colour.

One swap later and I have the pincushion I so desperately need for my dress-making adventures - handmade and in my favourite colours! - and she even included some gorgeous coasters too. Bless her, Casa Bookish is not a household that uses coasters but I shall think of a way to put them to good use.

Thank you very much, dear swap partner!

Some Thoughts About Yarn

A long time ago I wrote about books. I remember one specific thing I wrote: how I built my library on the ideas of possibility and potential. My books were purchased because I wanted the possibility of spending a heady afternoon with lord Byron or a quiet, thoughtful evening with AS Byatt. Often I wanted the potential read more than I wanted the actual read. I think the same thing goes for yarn. The other evening I saw a moth fly out of the yarn cupboard. A tiny, beige creature of winged doom. I opened a bag and saw another moth perched on a ball of yarn. Gasp, splutter, this-only-happens-to-others, and I flung the offending bag into the freezer. I subsequently started rummaging through my other bags and only spotted one other bag with potential destruction (i.e. one very dead little beige monster). A bit of a wake-up call. This does not just happen to other knitters.

Luckily our local supermarket has a deal on plastic containers with lids. I bought three huge ones and started to re-pack all my yarn. It was time for another wake-up call. Three containers only scratched the surface of my yarn stash. I need eight more containers if I need to keep all of my yarn safe from moths (or the scourge of Glasgow tenements, carpet beetles). Eight. Eight.

I had to sit down on the (yarn-covered) floor for a moment. Deep breath.

The thing is, I have some lovely yarn in my stash that I cannot wait to knit. I have earmarked some of it for projects: Flyte, Shirley, Acer, Snapdragon, Miette, Still, Topstykke, and - oh - those thirty odd shawls I need to design. You know.

But the majority of the yarn is there because of the possible, potential projects. What to make with my three hanks of Noro Cashmere Island? Or the two hanks of Sirritogv Colour? Or the yak laceweight? The mountain of Kidsilk Haze? Often I think I want the potential knit more than I want the actual finished object.

When I moved across the North Sea, I had to get rid of most of my books. I marked them with tiny stickers. Red: We’re through. Yellow: we need to talk. Green: we’ll be together forever. Eventually I got rid of the reds and yellows (freecycle was useful). It felt like such a relief. A millstone removed. But six years later, I can still see the gaps, the ghosts. I still reach for books I no longer own.

I wonder how I will deal with my yarn stash in years to come.

The Week That Was

Last weekend I took part in a crochet workshop taught by designer and author Carol Meldrum. Carol was running a class called "Love Wool? Love Crochet!" to celebrate Wool Week 2011 and to promote her new book, Love Crochet. I wasn't able to stay for the entire workshop, but I have been bitten by the crochet bug ever since. Following Carol's pattern (from an old Rowan magazine), I made a necklace from some mercerised cotton and a leather string. It was super-easy and very quick. I think it took me about an hour from the initial idea to the finished object. The leather string's a bit too skinny, but I'm still quite pleased with the result.

My partner snapped a photo of me wearing the necklace that very evening. I do apologise for lack of make-up/styling and the crap indoors lightning, but you can clearly see how smug I am about my lovely new accessory.

In other crafting news, I have purchased some black corduroy and I am very excited about making another skirt. I have a very, very specific idea for this skirt. I'll need to try my idea first, though, as it could be a complete disaster. I tried googling my idea but everything I find is twee crap. I am many things, but I am not twee.

This week I have been grabbling with Apple as someone in Canada has set up an account using my email address as her AppleID. Personally I would have thought that Apple have checked that her email was her own, but apparently not. I am currently on my fourth (rather terse) email to Customer Support. I am not impressed. Definitely not impressed.

This week Something Very Good happened. Denmark finally decided that they had had enough of xenophobic party Danish People's Party being the kingmaker in Danish politics. Cue Denmark's first female prime minister.  The DPP played a part in me deciding to leave Denmark and when I heard they were not longer the power behind the throne, I shed a small tear. I cannot begin to express my relief - although I think it will take a lot of time to undo their damage (Denmark has some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe and you encounter casual racism everywhere).

The Danish essayist Carsten Jensen wrote an excellent column (google translate + tweaked quickly by me). I do not agree with everything he wrote, but this passage really struck a nerve.

Something went terribly wrong in Denmark during the past decade. We did not just damage the foreigners who found themselves among us, whether they were refugees or immigrants and their descendants. We did not just damage the countries whose domestic problems became ours thanks to reckless wars.We also did moral damage to ourselves, and the marginal, ambiguous election victory of the Left shows a lack of willingness to confront ourselves - something which we must inevitably must do, if we are to forge ahead and not only think about growth, but also morality and humanity. We have toyed with callousness too long, and this has left an unhealthy cynicism within us.

Here is to better times.

Reading 2011: Emma Donoghue - Room

For years I used to live inside my head. I think it is an occupational hazard if you are within academia: you get used to silently arguing with yourself; to constantly question and explore your own thoughts. My head was (and is) the biggest place I have ever lived. I do not think of myself as an author, but I do think of myself as a writer. My words and thoughts are the most tangible things I possess. Words matter. And I think that is why Emma Donoghue's Room makes me so damn angry.

A brief synopsis: Room is the story of a young girl who is kidnapped by a loner and kept in a tiny room in his back-garden. She gives birth to a boy and raises him within the small room where they are at the mercy of the loner. The story echoes recent real-life crime cases - Josef Fritzl and his daughter, Natascha Kampusch, and Jaycee Lee Dugard - but is a work of fiction detailing life within confinement and subsequent events. Room has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and has won many major literary awards.

The subject matter is not the problem. Although it would be easy to step into "misery literature" territory, Room sidesteps this neatly by leaving out most of the actual abuse. Indeed, Donoghue is not preoccupied by the grisly details (which may disappoint some readers, I am sure) but instead she wants to explore how human beings respond to extraordinary situations and to each other. She employs the five-year-old boy, Jack, as the narrator of the story - undoubtedly to defamiliarise to an already unreal scenario.

And Jack as the narrator is the problem with Room.

I can understand the lure of using Jack as the narrator as it avoids a lot of sticky situations for Donoghue as a writer (as discussed above) but Jack the five-year-old narrator is wildly inconsistent. He uses abstract concepts like "sarcasm" in context and says "hippopotami" with correct declension - but Donoghue also has him saying "I finded him" and "I knowed." So, the five year old kid can wield correct Greek grammar, but not use standard English strong verbs?

Russian literary critics used to differ between fabula and syuzhet: fabula is what happens; syuzhet is how it is told. Emma Donoghue has a firm grasp on the fabula part of her story, but Jack-as-narrator is a structural (syuzhet) problem that messes up Room in a very big way. It is not just that his language usage is woefully all-over-the-place but the pacing is off, any characterisation is by necessity very flat, and the internal logic has extremely big flaws.

And, so yes, reading Room made me angry.

I thought it was awful.

I have been reading a lot lately, but I don't write much about the books I read for some reason. As always, feel free to catch up with my reads on GoodReads - the widget is to the right.

Words to the Wise

Do something different, yet authentic. Confound expectations - including your own.

Strive, seek, and do not yield (and thank years of poetry reading for always putting words in your head and disguising them as your own truth). 

Wear black for a day.

Sing to yourself as you are walking up the path.

Count the gulls circling over the rooftops.

Think hard.

Embrace becoming, not being.

It is a journey, after all.

And be thankful for thankfulness never goes out of fashion.

FO: Klimt Skirt

I could get addicted to making my own clothes. This green corduroy skirt is ridiculously Just What I Like & Cannot Find in Stores, that I cannot believe I did not do this dress-making lark years ago.

One pattern from a Danish sewing magazine One and a half yards of green corduroy One yard of green poly lining One invisible zip One spool of green poly thread Selection of Liberty fabric scraps & vintage buttons

One happy seamstress & wearer.

I altered the pattern (of course I did). The appliqué was done different to the pattern suggestion, I added lining and did away with the slightly clumsy bias binding around the waist.

Klimt? Why not. In fact, look at Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" and tell me that you cannot see it. Just me? Okay then..

And I'm wearing my own handmade St. James sweater with this skirt. Oh, wardrobe love.

In other crafty news, I spent the morning trying to decipher a crochet pattern written in Afrikaans using a Dutch crochet glossary, Google Translate and reverse engineering from photo. Adventurous! After an hour and six rounds, friends kindly pointed me to an online English translation of the pattern.. and I felt a bit silly.

Finally, a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to one of the loveliest people I have ever met, Paula. This little video is for you..