The Knitting Revolutionary

Purpley goodness

It's been ages since I actually knitted a garment. Mostly since I started uni (over FOUR YEARS AGO, PEOPLE!) I've just knitted... shtuff. Sockies, scarflings, covers for things like phones and mp3 players - little stuff.

Well bugger that for a boring way to knit. I want cool clothes again! My wardrobe has gotten sadder and tattier and uglier as my years as a student have worn on, and it's time to do something about it.

Enter the funky purkle cardi. Lacey yumminess from elann.com, clicky clicky for the free pattern. Yummm. I'm actually not doing it a cropped length, and am instead going for something that just comes down past my hips - a much more flattering style for a pear-shaped squeak.

I'm ever so slightly concerned that the cardi as it currently exists looks small enough to fit my mother, who is somewhere between a size 6 and 8. Tiny. She gets her shoes from the kids' section. But I'm thinking that lace generally has the living crap blocked out of it, so I'm not hitting any panic buttons yet. I've never actually blocked a cardigan before. Mostly cos I've never made a cardigan before. Any tips?

I'm loving the cute sleeve detail, which involves a picot castoff. In fact, the whole experience has been quite the adventure, with the pattern being somewhat... vague. Well, it's meant to be like that, since it's a "knit-to-fit" pattern, so it says, yeah do this and sorta knit til it's big enough to reach to about heeeeeere... hehe. So, yeah. Lots of trying on a half-baked cardi, and after a few false starts on the sleeves and 2 x 6.5mm circs later (which I'll probably never use again), I was off and running.

Oh, and Delly? This is the "lace" that I was knitting while fishing the other day on WoW. 6 stitch, 10 row repeat. Very easy, very cute. The word lace does not necessarily equate with difficult or complex. Promise. I did say necessarily, didn't I? Well this is one of the easypeasy ones. :D

It's finally over

After way too many hours of unpaid work, as wives and partners of so many Australian small business owners are wont to do, I finally did my last hours today.

The business that my ex and I co-owned closed about a year ago, and it's taken me this long to get my act together and finalise all of the paperwork. What a nightmare.

It was hard doing it.I mean emotionally difficult. I suppose this was my final tie to the inlaws, although a tenuous one. I don't miss Luke - he and I are on good terms, and chat on the phone occasionally, and have made our peace with one another. Amazingly enough, we remain friends.

But his family... I miss them so much it hurts, especially my ex-muminlaw, who was like my own mum for the years I remained married to her son. Maybe taking so long to get on with it was my way of trying to hold on to that one last little tie. I did try to re-establish contact, and sent a hand-made chrissy card to her last year, and the reply was polite, but cold. She wished me luck. I suppose that's as gentle a dismissal as I could have hoped for. Asking forgiveness for hurting her baby is a lot of forgiveness to ask for; and when I take a step back from my own hurt, I can see why it has to be this way.

And so today, it's all finished. My desk is clear of bank statements, old cheque butts and random dockets and invoices. This it the last of it, off to its new home at the accountant's (who will probably be very relieved at not having to nag me any more!). Freedom!!!

cool!

...just saw an 84 year old man with spiky gel hair (his own colour, tyvm) and a t shirt which read

I dont have a job

I dont have a car

I dont have money

But, I am in a band...

Hehehehehe!!! *cacklage ensues*

Rediscovering old joys

Reading books for fun.

It sort of stopped happening after I started uni... reading stopped being about pleasure and entertainment, and became an experience of concentration, information and if it wasn't very interesting (hello textbooks) somewhat painful. Reading just wasn't on the whole a great experience any more.

Lately I've been rediscovering the old joy of losing myself in a book, for no other reason except entertainment. I love it! I have discovered a really fun, light and enjoyable trilogy, oddly enough a children's writer. I know everyone raves about JKRowling and the whole Potter thing, but I must say I found her writing style dull and clumsy, her characters shallow and unbelievable, and her females revoltingly idiotic - including Hermione who is meant to be highly intelligent, and is a whiny sycophantic pain in the arse.

On the other hand, is Jonathan Stroud, and the Bartimaeus Trilogy (find the website here). The story is good fun in itself, the characters are reasonably well developed for a young audience, and the writing style is articulate and fun (despite his over-use of footnotes, which drives me crazy but I forgave due to the large amounts of compensation found elsewhere in the book).

Bored? Give it a shot. I'm putting my copy back onto the Bookcrossing shelf in Civic Starbucks next time I'm there (give it a couple of weeks if you want to chase it down - ID is 293-4927190)

Could it be...?

Could it be that attitudes are changing?

There is no doubt that times change. Everyone knows that lovely line about changing times and skirt length, hemlines rise and fall yada yada, and I love the image of this leggy thing with a galloping hemline running wildly back and forth between her knickers and her ankles, desperately chasing the ideal fashion.

But anyway...

Age and beauty. It seems that when men get older (think Harrison Ford, Sean Connery), wrinkles make them sexy and grey hair makes them distinguished. But if a woman has wrinkles and grey hair, she's not sexy or distinguished, she's just old. It's so disappointing. I watched the musical Cats for the first time about 6 months ago. And... yuck. The old male characters were revered and respected, the old female characters were despised, ostracised and at best pitied. Revolting.

So I was enormously pleased to notice that last week's local paper had this delightful cover on it:

The article went on to look at several older, highly respected and undeniably gorgeous female actors, including Helen Mirren. Go see The Queen if it's still on where you live, by the way, it was a top movie. Unfortunately I got carried away with cleaning up the other day and threw the article out, and besides the basic gist of saying how growing  older is getting less daggy and daunting for women, I can't really remember what else it said. Oops.

So yeah. I realise the apparent hypocrisy of holding feminist values true to my heart while frantically trying to lose weight. I think of it this way. Age is something I can't control, and weight is something that I can (sometimes haha). More power to me! Hehe!

A rainy Saturday morning

I'm on a diet.

Besides not actually going all psycho like people generally do on diets, I'm happy, I'm making progress, and I'm feeling pretty good. And not hungry. In fact, I get less of the 3pm/10pm munchies than I do when I'm not on a diet. Amazing how much a sense of control can improve your outlook on life.

So I go in to the place where I weigh in, and my usual girl who weighs me isn't there, it's the guy. The guy's also on this diet, and has lost an incredible amount of weight over the last 6 months, and I'm not sure if he's just trying out his new sense of self-confidence, but next week when I complain about him to his manager, he'll wish he'd tried it out on someone else.

I pulled off my leather motorbike jacket, and prepared to hop on the scales, and he stopped me. "Do you always wear all that clothing on the scales do you?" he asked.

"Well, yes", I replied, looking down at the trousers, singlet top and light jacket that I'd been wearing under my bike gear, "I make sure I wear the same shoes each week, my bike boots are in my bag ready to put on after this."

Somehow, it was the wrong answer for him. "Fine then", he replied, rolling his eyes and turning up his camp-meter a notch, "I'll play along with your little game", and proceeded to record my weight.

He raised his (was it plucked?) perfect little eyebrow when I told him I wouldn't need a plastic bag and just to throw the stuff in my backpack, and when I got my usual two packets of sugar-free lollies, he looked at me in surprise and said "you're getting two of those?"

By this time I was a little beyond disbelief, and stood amazed as he proceeded to tell me that I was "allowed" no more than 5 a day, as after this (like most things with that weird sugar replacement stuff in it) it'd have a laxative effect. I wonder if he's ever sat down and counted how many are in 2 packets - just enough for 4 a day for the whole week. Hardly excessive, and hardly an issue when they're sugarless anyway.

But on a more positive note, the diet's working. I'm to squish my little round tummy into a size 12 bridesmaid's dress in two weeks, and I've lost just over 3 kilos. I've been desperate to do something about my weight since New Year's, when I realised that I'd gained 10kg since moving to Canberra, it sort of happened slowly over the 12 months and just snuck up on me. It didn't help when I went to my nan's funeral in January, and having been told in the past that comments on my weight were unwelcome, mum decided to pass along other people's comments about my weight instead. Yay. At 62kg, I was perfectly happy with my weight, and I know that not many women can honestly say that. So I'm working on getting back to about 62kg. 3 down, 7 to go.

Meanwhile, I look forward to my weigh-in next week, and wish that all Saturday mornings could begin as today did, with a sky full of rainclouds and a friend on her way over with her yoga mat.

NOOOOO!!!

Oh fer gawd's sake.

I know how to spell. And I know how to use grammar. Most of the time I choose to bend these rules somewhat, so that I can introduce some form of life to my blog. You know. Like starting a sentence with and. Or the overuse of that little collection of full stops which means "flippy hand movements and gestures".

But... (hand gestures indicating exasperation) ...they really couldn't be serious, could they?

Actually they were serious. It really was free. And it could be YOUR'S FREE TOO!

*snicker*

Oh... just as an aside, I know the word is "snigger". These days I don't write it like that though, because it seems that profanity filters screen it out, because it happens to be a rather offensive word with an s tacked on to the front of it. So now I write "snicker". It's close enough.

Where was I? Your's. Wow. Whoever proof reads this stuff needs their arse kicked. Other than that, the little free promotional mag for an Australian craft store wasn't too bad (should I name them and help promote them? Or remain silent, and help them cover their shame?).

It's got a couple of free patterns in it, nothing you can't find on Knitty anyhow, you know, chunky jumpers, plain shawls, beanies and stuff. A really cool idea of backing your knitted cushions with felt or polar fleece. Sweet. And the rest of the mag seemed to be grammatically correct enough to satisfy my inner grammar avenger.

Ah, what the hell. I'll dob em in, since overall I rather liked the mag, including their cute little discount vouchers on the back page. Mostly I liked the fact that I could have a stickbeak through it and see what they've got for sale at the moment, as I don't often get into the store to look in person, and when I do I always buy silly cute things that I don't actually need. Hehe. You can sign up for it on their website, www.lincraft.com.au

Get your's today! Free! Really!!!

Colourful stuff from your resident golden-oldy

So I'm sitting at work yesterday, and someone's put the radio station on to the oldy type station, playing cute old songs like Mr Sandman. And it was sort of nice and I'm thinking hey, they're old songs but they're still fun to listen to, and after all half the patients here are seniors anyhow.

And then they played Age of Reason. Um... I had that album in highschool... *aaargh!*

Anyway, I've been playing with overdyeing. I had all this old Cleckheaton Tapestry stuff that I got for $1 a ball from Spotlite ages ago, and while I liked the colours then, they sort of un-grew on me. So out came the paints and buckets, and I played a bit with overdyeing. I like the pink, but the green is nothing short of amazing. Niiiiice!

The original colour is the one on the left. And, hating skeining and winding as I do, I just chucked the balls of wool into the dyepot and squished them enthusiastically to get the dye all the way through. Heh! Et voila... they took hardly any time to dry in the hot Canberra sun while still wound into their balls. *grin* Laziness must actually be the mother of invention. Necessity didn't even get a look in.

Shtuff and Fings

...so I continue to chase jobs and put in applications.

Experience? Nope, got none. But on the upside I'm having a fantastic time playing with wool and dyes and playing waaay too much WoW. Hm. Maybe the ridiculous amount of game money I have to "farm" in order to buy a cool flying gryphon isn't so unreachable after all. Muhaha!

I've been a more social little bunny lately. I actually remembered the spinning guild's night of fun this fornight, so nicked of with the boy's car and hoiked my wheel in the back, and badaboom! "I'll probably only swing by for an hour or two" I told him as I took off, and wandered on home about 3 1/2 hours later. Ooh what fun! I had lots of wool dyeing to show off, and the lovely gals there suggested that I dye a heap up for the guild exhibition. Fancy that!

Which brings me to my point. Oh boy! I actually have something to say today! Which is lovely, because the blog has been sadly neglected, mostly because I haven't had anything of much import to impart. (Woot! I'm on FIRE today!)

Anyway, for the first time in ages, I'm spinning again. I haven't really done any spinning of significance since I landed in Canberra about 15 months ago. No real reason except that I haven't really felt like it, and I've had other things that I wanted to do more. And the whole point of it is to enjoy oneself after all. So I go through knitting phases, dyeing, spinning, cross stitch, whatever. At the moment it's dyeing. But there's not a whole lot of intrinsic reward in it - I enjoy it only to a certain degree, most of the fun lies in the fact that I'm able to sell it and make myself a little bit of pocket money.

So the whole thing is - community shtuff. I found that when I started going to SSK, I knitted more. Now that I'm here and I don't go to many SnB days (dont ask) I don't knit as much. But going along to the spinning nights, I'm feeling the urge to pull out my wheel. Many of the knitting podcasts I've been listening to ask the question: what do you get out of your stich n bitch meetings? Why do you do it, and what makes them so compelling?

For me, it's mostly one thing, and that's inspiration. There's the social aspect as well, but it's more about the creative exchange of a group of fibre artists for me. It's so encouraging to spend time with talented people who are also generous with their time and experience, which pretty much sums up most of the people in the groups that I hang with. It's hard not to be moved and inspired when surrounded with such beauty. So a big happy thank you to all my stitchin' bitches, and see you at the next SnB!