Dotty
Friday afternoon I packed my tote bag and headed out for my favourite spot in the local park: underneath the trees where the sparrowhawks hang out and close to the little corner which houses several foxes. I sat there with my knitting and then I had a visitor.
Pioneers
This photo was taken in 1839 making it one of the earliest known self-portraits in the history of photography. I have looked at it often. He feels so alive, so human. It is a far cry from the stilted portraits which were to follow in the decades to come.
I was reminded of this when I came across First Sounds, a website set up "to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time."
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded phonautograms around 1860 and although the sound is distorted, it makes for facinating listening material. Scott's recordings predates Thomas Edison's far more famous recordings by some seventeen years, although there is arguably a significant difference in sound quality.
Last year the re-discovery of a young girl singing Au Clair de la Lune - a recording made by Scott in 1860 - made the headlines. Thanks to Mefi I just realised that experts are now thinking that Au Clair de la Lune was being played at twice the speed and the actual singer is Scott himself. While somewhat less romantic than a young girl's voice being heard after 150 years, it made me think of how inventors and pioneers are often left on their own as they try to make their ideas reality.
Girlfriend in a Coma
Kraków is not a great place to shop if you are into your crafts. I managed to track down a couple of pasmanteria (I have no idea how to pluralise the word - it means "haberdashery") on Ul. Karmelicka, but the best one I found was on the corner of Ul. Królewska and Aleja Juliusza Słowackiego. I had to pass through a room of children's clothes and another filled with children's shoes before hitting the tiny pasmanteria.
I bought a few buttons using a lot of sign language, pointing at my cardigan's buttons and speaking a hybrid between Russian, German and the few Polish words I knew. I wish I had known that the Polish word for "buttons" is guziki.
Dave has uploaded a few Kraków photos, by the way.
I'm now on my third day of resting after our little Polish adventure. I do not mention my health very often, but I wasn't amused that I had to take painkillers yesterday just to get out of bed. I think today will be yet another slow day, but hopefully that means I will be back to normal tomorrow. Sometimes I really do regard my body as my enemy.
And thank you so, so much for the extraordinary response to my Heritage shawl.
Monday Morning
All photos by Other Half who gleefully went out to play in the snow take photographs before he had had breakfast.
Into the Woods
Yes, I know I said stuff about knitting with grey wool. The phrases "never again", "not in the winter months" and "I need colour!!!!!" may have passed my lips.
But I've changed my mind.
The pattern is Norwegian Woods by Sivia Harding. Earlier this year I knitted a few repeats of it in the gawjuss Old Maiden Aunt silk/merino yarn I have stashed away. I was flippant, made a few too many mistakes and ripped it all out. Now I'm knitting the shawl in Snældan's 1-ply wool (Faroese wool mixed with a touch of Falkland Islands wool - and spun on the Faroe Islands!). I'll blog more about the shawl as it progresses.
As you can see from the photo, it is snowing in Glasgow today. South-east England has had a couple of inches of snow and they are panicking. Silly people (sayeth this Scandinavian gal) For once I don't mind the snow so much and it made for a great photo opportunity this morning. Right now I'm still seeing ginormous snowflakes hurling towards the ground.
A couple of links (because my links folder is bursting at its seams).
+ I really want this t-shirt.
+ Is there anything Barack Obama cannot do? Well, I'm not too hot on his poetry. Dare I say it? I write better poetry than him? I do.
+ Great photos of London from above (thanks, Molly)
+ A bit more heavy-going than I usually get here: We Who Are Left Behind: Poetry as Testimony in Derrida and Celan.
+ Amazing Flickr photo-stream: Lars Daniel. He makes me miss Copenhagen even more.
+ Type as Image. It does wot it sez on teh tin.
Have a lovely day - with or without snow.
On the Town
Oh, my Glasgow. She is pretty even if we do not see the sun all that often and it rains a great deal. She is pretty.
We went into town today, to the Lighthouse (not as in Virginia Woolf, but as in The Lighthouse, the Scottish centre for architecture, design and urbanity).
Other Half wanted to see the Donna Wilson exhibition as he went to art school with her. We also fancied some free books.
In the end, we got away with eleven free books on a number of topics: food design, twentieth century architecture, re-imagining Scottish cities etc. Some very cool, interesting and useful stuff. I somehow also managed to buy a book on the Wiener Werkstätte because I'm a sucker for early twentieth-century design. Ahh..
Che Camille is not far from The Lighthouse. I like the place a lot and right now it feels like one of Glasgow's best-kept secrets. It won't stay that way. The boutique/design workshop takes up most of the upper floor of one of the many Victorian buildings lining the shopping street - and getting up there to see what they have done with the space would be enough of a reason, but they are also featuring fabulous, quirky clothes/furniture from young designers. I cannot afford anything (except tiny handknits which I obviously prefer to create myself), but I do surreptitiously feed off the fantastic sense of synergy created by its owner, Camille.
Tomorrow Other Half and I will be off to Che Camille's Clothes Swap/Customise Yr Clothes workshop. Should be fun.
(this is the staircase in the Lighthouse Tower. pretty, no?)
Thank you for your advice on what to do when the knitting mojo just isn't there. I have finished one sleeve of my grey jumper and will embark on the other tonight. I just think I hate knitting sleeves, to be honest. Then I'll be knitting the collar which is the bit which really interests me with this jumper.
I have two different types of collars in mind. One is an asymmetrical bow-like construct (vaguely reminiscent of half-a-fan neckwarmer (thank you, mooncalf, for the lovely example) for which I have no pattern plus I'll have to turn the construction around ninety degrees. I'm either going mad or am stretching my knitting abilities. Possibly both). The other idea revolves around a tube-like construct which I could attach with buttons. The latter is not half as elegant as the former but will not involve me trying to reverse engineer an unknown pattern and then turn it on its side.
Le sigh.
Next time I'm making a jumper, I'll use a pattern.
Do You Believe In Faeries?
If you are familiar with the history of photography or an Arthur Conan Doyle
aficionado, you might recognise this photograph. It is one of the five Cottingley Faeries photographs.
In the early 19th century, photography was regarded as an instrument of truth. The camera couldn't lie. When Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths took the first two Cottingley photographs in 1917, their photographs were taken as proof that faeries existed. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a noted Spiritualist, approached the girls a few years later, gave them a new camera and asked them to take more photos of the faeries. The girls obliged.
Nowadays it is difficult to understand how anybody could be hoodwinked by the photographs. The faeries look like cut-outs and the lighting is noticably "off". Quite apart from the Arthur Conan Doyle connection (and the inevitable "How could the creator of the world's most famous detective be fooled by this?!" question), these photos were arguably some of the first to trouble photography's truth claim.
Elsie and Frances denied faking the faeries for most of their lives, but eventually owed up in the 1980s when both were dying. I was reminded of the Cottingley photographs when I was watching BBC's Antique Roadshow this past Sunday. Frances' daughter and grand-daughter showed up with the original photographs and the camera which Conan Doyle had given the girls. What struck me was not so much the estimated value of the photographs and the camera, but rather how the Cottingley incident had impacted an entire family. Frances' daughter, now an elderly lady, visibly struggled to admit her mother had deceived an entire world. When asked, both the daughter and grand-daughter maintained the fifth and final photograph was genuine - but the grand-daughter looked as though she was protecting her own mother from an unbearable truth.
Photography has changed so much since two girls went down to the bottom of their garden and found faeries. Ellie pointed me towards a series of images from Google Earth which are staggeringly beautiful (particularly the one with the elephants). Make sure to explore the linked images to Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Everest.