However. Some things are more important than lace knitting. Way, way, way more important: speak up and speak out.

Late night stitching effort at Glasgow's Tramway arts centre in preparation for Loop: International Women's Day Centenary.

I’m so excited about tomorrow! The Tramway was heaving with activity today: stitching, story-telling, music , and beautiful people creating beautiful things.

I spent most of Friday at the Tramway stitching together blanket squares. It was a hugely inspirational day.

One old lady was busy stitching together crochet squares but found time to sing us old Glasgow songs from her childhood – songs about the old Govan cinema and “oor baldy heided maister”. Women from a choir sang us Matt McGinn songs. Women from a local immigrant group came by to watch us stitch and some ended up wanting to join in despite initial shyness. Later a cellist started playing Bach.

Generations of women showed up – grandmothers with their grandchildren; mothers with their children. Many different nationalities were there. Many different parts of Scotland were represented. Even a few brave men showed up to stitch – my partner was one of them and he proved very adept with a needle and thread! I was rather proud..

However, help is still needed.

You do not have to be greatly skilled with a needle of thread. You do not even have to know how to thread a needle as plenty of of volunteers will be on hand to show you the ropes.

If you can spare thirty minutes of your day (or more!), please come down to the Tramway tomorrow between 10am and 11pm.

You won’t regret it. You will meet some truly inspirational people with wonderful stories to tell, you’ll be surrounded by beautiful art, and your help will be hugely appreciated.

I will continue to be busy these next few days, but thankfully I have a few blog posts in hand so stay tuned..

Get involved. There is still time for you to knit a square and send it in to Janssen & Jetson. If you are in Glasgow, why not volunteer? You can help stitch the blanket together, you can donate your time and ushering skills, or you can help spread the good word.

“So sudden loss causes us to look backward – but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we are doing right by our children, or our community, and whether our priorities are in order. We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame – but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others.”
- Barack Obama, Tucson Memorial Speech, 2011.

And I got a lot of knitting done during meetings, in the evenings and on my epic five-hour-long train journeys.

Harmony is working up really well. I am past the first lace chart and the rib section and well into the second lace chart. It is my sort of project, really – lace charts, fine gauge yarn and a staggering amount of knitting to be done – and I’m happy to sit knitting it.

Harmony is my only project  at the moment, though, so I will need another project to keep my sanity.  I have a gazillion ideas in my head right now (most of which involve completely  insane fair-isle, thank you Ben) but I may have to stick to summery yarns right now which limits me a bit.

I have been catching up on the Eurovision Song Contest – I was stuck on a train during the first semi-final which was heartbreaking and had to rely on text messages from Other Half (“Poland’s a pervy Hungarian animated short film”) which was fun, but Clearly Not the Real Thing. You can still catch me talking ESC on BBC World Service’s Digital Planet but for me it is now all about the second semi-final. I have high hopes after seeing energetic songs (and Belgium/Russia) making it out of the first semi-final, so I’m hoping the trend will continue with Turkey, Romania, Azerbaijan and Denmark qualifying easily with a surprise surge of love for Cyprus. I also think Armenia will do well.

Just before leaving for Yorkshire, I followed an amazing thread on MetaFiler. MeFi is a decade-old message board and one night a user posted that two friends of his had found themselves in a potentially dangerous situation – could anyone help? Newsweek has a comprehensive look at the story, but you will want to read it all unfold on the MetaFilter site. Best of the web, for sure, and proof that social networking has more to it that celebrity tweets and Farmville..

“Denmark is losing its reputation for being a good world citizen.” – Naomi Klein

Danish police arrest 150 demonstrators as world leaders arrive at Copenhagen conference. Mainstream groups such as Friends of the Earth have been barred from the conference centre (“Every delegate from the international environmental campaign group arrived at the centre this morning to find their badges were no longer valid.”). This follows the highly controversial preventive arrests by Danish police earlier this week, the arrest of a German spokesman for Climate Justice action, police raids on climate campaigners and, lest we forget, a warm welcome for President Mugabe by Danish PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

“The Copenhagen conference is fast becoming an international shambles.” – Andy Atkins

For me, I welcomed the incredulity on the BBC news readers’ faces as they interviewed a spokesperson, Henrik Suhr,  for the Danish police force, the use of “preventive arrests” and Mr Suhr’s insistence that “if you do not want to be arrested, you should not be demonstrating” (let me draw your attention to the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Rights and, in particular, Articles 19 and 20). The BBC journalists’ reaction were very different to the type of journalism I had grown used to in Denmark in the last decade or so.

And as I’m typing this, a climate deal seems increasingly unlikely.

I went to school that day. My teachers cancelled all our scheduled classes and were bust talking amongst themselves. My German teacher – the great-grandson of Paul Gauguin, by the way – sat us down to watch news reports coming in from West Germany. I still recall another teacher crying in the school yard. She was part-German. Today I suspect her German family might have fled here from the East as they never visited any of their relatives until the early 1990s.

Today it is difficult to explain what life were like before the end of the Cold War. I lived in Denmark, a small country just north of both East and West Germany. Occasionally you’d hear stories about people escaping from East Germany across the southernmost Baltic Sea to southern Denmark. Occasionally you’d also hear about people travelling the opposite direction. Swedes were paranoid about Soviet submarines and Danes were paranoid about East German spies within Danish political ranks. I was just a child when it all changed but I could definitely tell something had changed. At school they stopped teaching us how to react in event of a nuclear war, for instance.

Twenty years ago today.

I clutched my polling card, brought ID with me and walked down to the polling place fully expecting to queue for maybe five or ten minutes.  I was the only voter, of course, and in no need of  ID either. I told the poll official that this was my first Scottish election and that I was very excited. She laughed and asked if I had brought my camera as she’d be happy to take my photo. Then I walked into the wrong room through sheer excitement, but finally managed to vote.

Excitement? Quite apart from the joy I always get from seeing democracy at work, I think that yesterday marked the day when I felt I finally have a voice here in Scotland. I’m that tiny bit more Scottish now. A bit more ‘home’.

And then I visited a handknitting pirate who showed me how to needle-felt. The technique involves sharp, barbed needles  and obviously I stabbed my thigh a couple of times. I ended up with a little pin cushion which looks quite like a Microsoft icon circa 1996, but I don’t really think needle-felting is my thing.

However, then the Pirate showed me how to use a drop-spindle and – holy caramel – I was instantly hooked. I was so hooked that I immediately found a good deal on eBay UK for a drop-spindle kit complete with fibre. It’ll arrive tomorrow with any luck. Again, as with knitting, I think it is the feeling of connecting with tradition and history which hooks me.