Thank Yous Are Long Overdue
I'm having a pretty awesome week for various reasons and as a result I have not had much time to 'grap a cuppa' (as they say here in Blighty), sit down and think about what's going on. I am not complaining about awesome things happening, but I do appreciate having time to breathe and having time to reflect.
First, though, a big thank-you to some very generous people.
Roobeedoo and I had a quick conversation whilst at Knit Camp and it went pretty much like this:
Me: You look like you!
R: You look like you too!
Me: I have some vintage sewing patterns. You rock vintage sewing patterns. You want them?
R: OK!
Me: Cool!
R: I'll take a photo of you first before I go look at Knit Camp vendors!
Me: Ughdfsagr..
And so vintage patterns were sent north-wise and in return I received a very chic 1960s sewing pattern. Oh, and some yarn which was totally not part of the deal but who am I to complain when it's two balls of Drops Alpaca in a very fetching coral-pink-red shade. Funnily enough I have some grey Drops Alpaca in my stash and I'm sensing stripes + wristwarmers + hat ..
Earlier this year my friend Paula ran The Race For Life and I had chipped in as part of her sponsor deal. As a thank-you, Paula made me a personalised scissor fob in my favourite colours and I received my gift this week. I'm using the fob as my keyring (alongside a felted sheep - don't ask) because that way I'll get to see my gift every single day. I'm a huge fan of handmade presents.
And finally Ms Old Maiden Aunt handed me a Knit Nation goodie bag, a Sanquhar gloves kit (because I'm a big sucker for local history & knitting traditions) and her Tangled Yoke Cardigan. When I protested about the amount of gifts, she told me that she was bribing me into knitting her a Laminaria shawl. Hmm.. cunning plan, Lilith!
Now, I'm off to sit down with my new autumnal knitting project and hopefully having time to ponder various going-ons. It's been a mad week so far and it's not over yet.
Coming Up For Air
I have been so busy lately that it is a wonder that I have managed to knit a single stitch. Note to self: don't take time off just before your busiest time of year; it will come back to haunt you. I have been hung up on boring and not-so-boring work-related things, that last week's relaxing jaunt to Aberdeenshire feels like it took place last year.
But somehow I've still found time to cast on a small baby cardigan for a pregnant co-worker. I'm using oddments of Rowan Extra Fine Merino for a top-down raglan cardigan (I'm using this pattern for numbers but not for much else) and it is zipping along just fine. I have done so many top-down garments now that I find it difficult to think of something new to say, so suffice to say that I think it'll be done by the end of this week .. which is not bad going seeing how hellishly busy I am.
And when things calm down once more I will proceed with a proper autumn knit. I've been eyeing some gorgeous new autumn clothes in various shops. I'm head over heels with this little dress and I'm loving the fact that purple + moss green appear to be this season's musts. I never used to pay attention to clothes or fashion, but since I began getting into knitting/crocheting again, I'm noticing things that I never noticed before: necklines, shoulder construction, drape, fit, ease, fabric, fibre etc. And I feel silly because I used to feel that fashion was something I was expected to be interested in because of my gender - and I rejected this due to being a raging feminist - and now I stand around cooing over a neckline or colour.
If I ever start going on about shoes, shoot me.
But seeing the new autumn lines going into shops do make me yearn for a real, proper autumnal knit. I think it'll have to be purple (and not moss-green because some people claim green cardigans are all I ever knit) and be a really snuggly knit. Just a few more days and I can see the end of the tunnel.
You know, I might even have time to read. I caught up with Anne Donovan very briefly today and we had a lovely conversation about knitting and books. Although I do love knitting and yarn, nothing beats a good book. I miss my books and I want to return to my current read. It is one of those books you have to keep in touch with or it leaves you. And then my next read will be David Mitchell's new novel and I'll have words to share about the Man Booker Prize (as always).
Lovely
When I think of summer, I tend to think of long and languid days covered in a golden haze and ripe wheat fields swaying gently. Reality is very different: short bursts of humid weather, the urban jungle covered in a flimsy layer of sweat, and then rain. Except tonight has been an exceptionally lovely evening - the sort you usually only see in adverts. Our communal garden was filled with neighbours, an old man played a fiddle whilst children danced, the adults sipped Pimm's & lemonade, and all the trees were decked out with bunting. My other half had baked oatmeal and raisin cookies and I devoured a bowl of strawberries whilst being entertained by two Australians. I wish I had brought my camera but perhaps some moments are best preserved by our memories, not photographs.
(this might be a good place to direct you to my mum's local rag's summer photograph competition and my current "favourite" summer photo)
Another lovely thing occurred this week. I was looking through people's projects on Ravelry when I came across a Canadian woman. Hmm, I thought to myself, hmmm. Something about her triggered something in my old brain (it used to be an Aston Martin but now resembles a Trabant). I looked closer, sent off a tentative email and, yes, Mysterious Ravelry Woman turned out to be May. Not just any May, but the May who was my supercool Canadian penpal way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She sent me mix tapes and I could barely form a sentence in English. Sometimes the world - and the internet - is a very tiny place.
Thirdly, my wrist appears to have recovered nicely thanks to my new wrist support, so I have whizzed through the first sleeve on my 4ply cardigan and now have one of the fronts on my needles. I shall miss the FIFA World Cup and not just because it allows for so much knitting time. Although my team, Denmark, did not acquit themselves with quite as much aplomb as I had hoped (cough), I have been enjoying the Cup so far - with a few notable exceptions. And we are heading into the second week of Wimbledon too. Maybe I will get my cardigan finished this summer! I need to ponder what to knit next.. Still or Calm?
Ghosts in the Library
Mooncalf wrote a blog post today which hit home. "I have looked through my books," she wrote, "and I need to get rid of some of them."
Almost four years ago I uprooted myself from Denmark. I packed twenty-four boxes and my suitcase, and I moved across the North Sea. I moved from my own two-bedroom flat to a flat I shared with others. Most of my belongings languished in unopened boxes until Other Half and I found the apartment where we now live. Twenty-four boxes. Fifteen of the boxes were filled with books.
In my Copenhagen flat I had a wall of bookshelves and the bookshelves were packed. I had books stacked on the window sills, on top of chairs and, yes, on the floor. I had books in the attic too. In other words, I had to choose between my books: which ones were important enough to go on that journey with me; which ones could be replaced; which ones were unimportant enough to simply be given away?
I bought small stickers and started sorting my library.
Green sticker: you will come with me, you are part of me, we will never part. Yellow sticker: I need to think about us; it is complicated; will I find you again in a dusty secondhand bookshop? Red sticker: sorry but we are over; it's not you it is me; you are replaceable; what was I thinking?
I left eighty per cent of my books behind me when I moved.
Regrets? I have a few, and not too few to mention. I gave away books I never thought I would read or re-read and now I often find myself running my finger along the spines looking for that Angela Carter novel I once began but never finished. There are huge gaps where Henry James and Charles Dickens used to reside. I really regret getting rid of my literary theory course books because I had some fabulous marginal notes and now that my brain is wasting away, I would love to curl up with Plato and those marginal notes.
And do not get me started on why I brought a standard paperback edition of James Joyce's Ulysses with me, but got rid of all those Georgette Heyers I have had to re-purchase. Self-delusion, I think.
Nowadays my library has mingled with Other Half's. We have a lot of Iain Banks, Douglas Coupland and William Gibson where once I had very few or none. We are running out of shelf-space once more (I have a cunning plan called "two-books-deep shelving") and I despair at Other Half's tendency to not put books back where they belong (I try to keep our fiction books alphabetised by author and under each author by date of publication).
And I feel haunted by books past because when I am standing in front of the bookshelves, I keep looking for the books that got away.
Knitting In Public: True Stories
The couple approached me as I sat knitting. The woman told me that she had recently begun knitting again and that it was so nice to see a young woman knitting in public (I'm now the age when I appreciate being called a young woman). She then moved away to look at some flowers; her husband sat down on the bench next to me.
"So, do you have a special man in your life?" he wondered. I do have a very special man in my life, yes.
"Do you ever KNIT FOR HIM?" His voice grew a bit louder. I admitted that I do occasionally make something for my man.
"Do you KNIT HIM JUMPERS?" Yes, I knit my special one jumpers.
"I bet he LOVES your HANDKNITTED JUMPERS!" The man shot his wife a significant glance. "What a LUCKY MAN!"
Pause. Then his voice grew even louder.
"What about socks? Do you knit socks? Do you ever KNIT SOCKS FOR YOUR MAN?! Ach, NOTHING SAYS LOVE LIKE HANDKNITTED SOCKS!"
And that was when the woman decided she needed to go look at flowers far away from me and my knitting needles.
Frankie Says .. Gone.
This morning I packed my bag for work knowing that I'd be heading to knitting group after work. I zipped up my Frankie Says jumper on its KnitPro needles, threw in the pattern and was too lazy to fish out my sock needles. Now, my workplace is the sort of place where you can waltz in with a a project bag and no one lifts an eye brow, so I did just waltz in with my project bag, left it in a secure place and got on with work. Hours later I was leaving for knitting group, dipped in to fish out my project bag and it was .. gone. I spent thirty minutes looking into every little nook and cranny wondering if I had been absent-minded enough to leave it elsewhere. No, it was definitely gone.
I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I had forgotten the bag at home, maybe I had just imagined taking the bag with me to work and maybe it was still in Casa Bookish. I called David who looked All The Usual Places but couldn't see anything. Right, I thought, I'll take a detour home, pick up the project bag from its ingenious hiding place and then I will go to knitting group because, obviously, David would not have spotted said project bag even if it were sitting on top of the kitchen counter. I got home, started looking and, no, the knitting bag is definitely gone gone gone.
I am surprisingly upset about this loss. By "upset" I mean "holy crumpet, I'm going to burst into tears any second now and sob hysterically for thirty minutes unless something really uplifting happens in the next fifteen seconds". We are talking half-a-front of a jumper, some Rowan Summer Tweed, my precious KnitPros and the fact that some **** thought it okay to avail him/herself of my private property.
I mean, who the hell steals a half-made jumper?! Oh lowlife, may your tension become wonky, may you lose stitches and may you develop a sudden allergy to all things woolly.
(of course if the project bag suddenly reappears next time I come into work, we will pretend this little interlude never happened)
Embodied
Just a link to another weblog today, but it is a link I encourage you to click. A fellow knitter-in-Scotland, Kate, suffered a stroke some time ago and this is how she is experiencing the recovery process.
Without going into too many details, I can relate to her words and her post made me think quite unhappy thoughts about past events in my life. Then I began thinking about how we relate to our bodies, about how we define ourselves and about that strange link between our minds and bodies (a link it took me decades to accept for one reason or another). And how life is one continuous process of defining, discovering and accepting ourselves in ever-changing contexts. I know I am now very different from who I used to be but I also remain the same.
I wish you all the best, Kate, and I hope for your speedy recovery.
Reading the Past
The economic recession has claimed many victims. The first phase saw people losing jobs, companies going bankrupt and banks folding. Experts say that this first wave is over. Signs of economic growth are visible in the financial sectors. We are now living through the second phase: spending cuts have to be made. This is all very textbook Keynesian economic theory and I recommend reading up on John Maynard Keynes (quite apart from being a significant economist, Keynes was also part of the Bloomsbury group alongside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Lyndham Lewis) if most of the current financial news leaves you confused.
Spending cuts hurt. Before Christmas, many of my physicist friends were shocked when spending cuts to the tune of £115m were made in the science research sector. When I graduated from university in Denmark some seven or eight years ago, I saw what huge spending cuts will do to scientific research. It was not pretty. My then-department went from being autonomous with at least six new PhD students every year to being yoked together with five other subjects and get one PhD student every other year. The departmental restructuring made for some interesting cross-pollination, but also for disastrous academic results.
And so I learn that Kings College London may have to shut down its Palaeography department in order to meet budget targets. No restructuring, no "let us marry you to Library Science (however awkward) or maybe History or how about Archaeology?" and no shuffling the cards. I am not just saddened. I am shocked. KCL is the only place in the UK to have a Palaeography department and, I believe, even the only place in Europe.
Palaeography, the study of ancient handwriting, may sound like a very obscure subject - and really it is an obscure subject - but it is also incredibly important to scholars. Printing being a very recent invention, most available written material was done by hand and scholars need to be able to decipher handwriting. You get different writing systems (think Cuneiform), different alphabets (think how different the Phoenician alphabet looks to the Latin alphabet) and then different ways of interpreting the alphabets through writing. Pre-printing, many European kingdoms would have their own way of combining and forming letters - Johanna Drucker is particularly good on this, if you want to read more - and some handwriting is only intelligible to specialists who have studied handwriting traditions of a particular area (South Germany, for instance). So much material is now being made available by library specialists, but now I wonder who will be around to read, understand and disseminate this material.
(If I had know that Palaeography existed as a discipline when I started university, I would have ended up in a very different place to now. As is, most of my knowledge is filtered through print culture, so I apologise for any glaring mistakes)
Catching Up With Myself
Sitting comfortably? Good.
Just before Christmas our computer finally died on us. This was not totally unexpected after some emergency surgery earlier this year, but still came as a surprise as the computer had been really fine and well until we left it for a few days in order to travel to Aberdeenshire (a journey which was traumatic enough sans computer death - we were stuck on snowy roads for nearly three hours as traffic stopped moving following a black ice accident). On our return there was no response. I went out into the heavy snow to get spare parts, but spare parts did not work. We had to leave the UK knowing that our little home was without a working PC. It was not a happy thought. As you might have twigged by this very update, we have managed to bring a swanky new PC into our life and I'll end this extended metaphor before it gets out of hand.
So. Holidays, then. Aberdeenshire was snowy and cold. Denmark was surprisingly less snowy and not as cold. I had fun introducing David to Danish Christmas traditions and we all enjoyed ourselves eating far too many home-made chocolate nibbles, reading books and watching TV. On the picture on the left you can spot a bit of my parents' garden (we loved watching the variety of wildlife eating treats left for them) and also a bit of the beautifully trimmed Yule tree (spot my mum's folded stars? She's thinking of doing craft fairs next year).
We also made it to Copenhagen where the lovely Kirsten Marie graciously let us borrow her flat. This was a real treat as I usually see an insane amount of people whenever I'm in Copenhagen and do not really get to spend time in a city I called home for twelve years. Last time I saw 19 people in three days. This time we saw three people in 1-and-a half days. The rest of the time we just walked around the city, shot a few photos, walked some more, defrosted our cold bodies with super-expensive coffee (I had forgotten how expensive Denmark is!) and walked even more. Yarn shops may also have been involved, but more on that in a later post. Finally we made it out to regular blog commentator Darth Ken's flat for yummy food and great conversation. I continue to be ambivalent about my erstwhile home, but I cannot deny it was great just letting myself relax into a familiar space.
Scotland is still snowy, dammit. It is also really, really cold in our flat and I may have given in to this "heating the flat" thing because I'm almost wearing as much indoors as I am when I go outside. And we have a swanky new computer! Tomorrow's New Year's Eve (Hogmanay) and we are determined to have a very quiet night after the rather leisuredly busy Christmas.
So, tomorrow: an FO, some new yarn and a tiny bit about something else.