Self-Stitched September: One
Photographic evidence
I hate knitting sleeves. Everything zips along nicely and then I get to the sleeves and my will to live dies. I think I have twigged why I hate knitting sleeves.
Look at the photo. I'm wearing a Tangled Yoke Cardigan. It was originally knitted by Ms Old Maiden Aunt but it was gifted to me earlier this year. Lilith had knitted extra long sleeves because she likes having cosy hands. Look again. The sleeve is a full inch too short for me, if not more.
I have monkey arms, in other words. I already knew I had long legs because I struggle to find trousers long enough, but I never thought about my arms being long. Still, it explains my hatred of knitting sleeves - I have to knit them extra-extra-long and I had no idea.
Oh, by the way:
'I, Karie Bookish, sign up as a participant of Self-Stitched-September. I endeavour to wear handmade item(s) of clothing/accessories/ jewellery every day for the duration of September 2010'.
Yes, Virginia, I have chosen to participate in Self-Stitched September. I might not photograph every outfit I am wearing every day, nor will I blog my outfit every day (that way madness and narcissism lie) but when I do post, I'll link to the relevant handmade items on my Rav account (or otherwise document which items I have worn). It'll be interesting, although I'm still trying to figure out why I am participating.
- I want to wear handmade items more often (although I already do this)?
- I want to mix up the handmade items I wear (more likely)?
- I cannot resist a good meme?
So, today I'm wearing the Tangled Yoke Cardigan and my Echo Flower scarf/shawl. Let Self-Stitched September commence!
Points
Firstly, the response to my Larisa scarf has taken me completely aback. The pattern has been available from a shop here in Glasgow for about a week - and so far more than fifty people have "bought" a copy (pattern comes with the purchase of a ball of Kidsilk Haze). I have received so, so many lovely, thoughtful and sweet comments from complete strangers that I don't know what to say except thank you. It's really quite startling and I feel a bit overwhelmed.
Secondly, I will be at the UK Knit Camp marketplace next Saturday (the 14th of August) in Stirling. Mostly I will be browsing and trying not to buy things, but I will also be helping out at the Old Maiden Aunt booth. I know several bloggers will be attending and I'm really looking forward to meeting many of my online friends/reads. If you recognise me, do say hello! I have very mixed emotions about attending the UK Knit Camp - it seems to have descended into chaos - but as it is one of the very few Scotland-based knitting events, I have decided to tag along. I just hope that the UK Knit Camp shenanigans will not deter people from staging further events up here. It's not Scotland's fault, I swear..
Finally, I had the pleasure of meeting Ali from Jamie Possum today. We had a great talk about sustainability, New Zealand and KnitNation. I am yet to try out her beautiful yarn, but I'm a) such a Kiwiphile and b) such a sucker for gorgeous yarn that it is just a matter of time before I succumb. I have long wanted to knit the Lorién beret and I'm quickly running out of excuses. Except that I also appear to have run out of knitting time and my stress levels are at a two-year high.
How to combat stress when my stress is knitting-related? Answers Suggestions, please.
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).
Five Years
Five years ago D. told me that he was somewhat partial to me. I replied that I enjoyed our conversations too. Then he hit me over the head with a sledgehammer (metaphorically speaking) and so five years on, we could sit down to a lovely anniversary dinner tonight.
So if you will excuse me, I will now join my Best Friend/Other Half for a quiet evening in our living room. It has been five very good years together and I'm very much looking forward to another five and then another five and..
PS. Stravaigin 2 pulled out all the stops tonight. Brownie points for the table right by the balcony, but the food was sensational. Roast sweet potato, fennel & feta stack w black olive hummus + Moroccan spiced chicken kebab, pink grapefruit & almond quinoa w harissa yoghurt & toasted flatbread + purple coconut rice parcels, peanut butter & orange ice cream w candied chilli peanuts.. One of the best meals I have ever had. Wow.
PPS. D gave me a signed first edition Alasdair Gray hardback. Goosebumps, I tell you, goosebumps.
PPPS. And I'm torn between five new knitting projects. I need someone to hold my hand and help me decide what to do next. D is surprisingly unwilling to spend several hours going back and forth between various books and stash compartments.
Sidelined
I'm shattered today after a long week, but I still limped into town for the summer John Lewis sale. I picked up a few balls of discounted Rowan Purelife Organic Wool DK. It matches some yarn I got for Christmas and I think a stranded self-designed pullover/cardigan might be on the cards this autumn. I have seen a few modern takes on a traditional Faroese cardigan and quite fancy doing my own twist.
I have so many ideas. So very few of them ever become reality. It is frustrating.
Via my friend Angela: Women's Costumes in Movies. A fantastic blog entry about fashion, clothes, and old-school film stars.
Love Spreads
Life is good when the sun is out and you have the day to yourself.
The postman brought me the Spring/Summer edition of the Rowan International newsletter and I read it whilst surrounded by buttercups, daisies and playful squirrels. Later, when the sun disappeared, I went to the local Polish deli for rye-bread, tuna pate and buttermilk. It made for a delicious late lunch. I also found two beautiful tweed skirts in a charity shop along with an old, old knitting magazine. Total cost: £3. Yes, it has been one of those days today. One to savour.
I need a tiny pick-me-up, actually, because I have been struggling with wrist-pain following yesterday's knitting group. The old ice pack came out again as did the pain killers. I have been able to crochet without too much bother, so I am wondering if the small knitting needles are exacerbating whatever is wrong with my wrist - I am using 2.5mm and 3mm. Presumably it would do my wrist good if I swapped my usual Continental style for the English style, but as I am working with cotton, I am worried about any change in tension.
ANYWAY. Today has been a lovely day.
And that is even before I mention that a girl in winter has given me a pat on the blogging shoulder. Basically, it is one of those spread-the-love things where someone says "I love reading your blog, have this virtual plaque, think of ten random facts about yourself, and then mention ten blogs you love reading."
I'll give you six factoids, though, because I'm really dull.
1. I have two of my own designs on the needles at the moment. One is a sock pattern and the other one is a beaded scarf. I plan on releasing the patterns.
2. I think in colour and suspect a mild form of synaesthesia.
3. I cannot wear high heels thanks to hypermobile feet. Well, okay, I can, but I'll be limping the next day. I have inlays for my (flat) shoes which ensure my feet are kept steady throughout the day. Thankfully I don't need to wear the inlays constantly. My podiatrist once told me that had I been born in Russia, I would have been part of the State Circus. Thanks.
4. I identify as a Secular Humanist which sometimes makes people think I'm a big fan of Richard Dawkins. I am not. He veers far too close to fundamentalism for my taste and I find him decidedly off-putting.
5. When I say that my style is "vintage-inspired casual", I really mean "perpetually student-ish". I still get asked for student ID in shops despite being in my mid-30s.
6. I once appeared on a Danish quiz show and then travelled around New Zealand on my winnings.
Now imagine the next sentence in big pink sans-serif letters across the bust of a Photoshopped Hollywood Starlet:
Ten Fabulous Bloggers You Need to Add To Your Feed Reader Right Now:
- Drop Stitches, Not Bombs - clever and stylish Italian woman knitting her way across Europe (although mainly UK-based)
- Bellsknit - Bells in Australia has a way with words, yarn and food. Gorgeous photography and great sense of humour too.
- Thrums - a recent find. New York-based woman who reads, knits and observes people.
- A Friend to Knit With - the photography is just stunning
- Feather & Fan - the brilliant Orata's blog filled with her own designs and travels.
- Ms KnitWit - I really like how she captures the extraordinary in ordinary life in her photos. Also: smart, funny and crafty.
- Roobeedoo - Someone else who has been transplanted to a life in Scotland. She's a reader, a crafter and very human.
- Academia Nuts- I'm privileged to call her a friend. You should see her knitting projects too.
- Anarkistens (ægte) Kogebog - Danish food blog. The funniest blog I've read in a long time. And she's all about using 12thC recipe books in her kitchen. Respekt dér.
- Petra O - a Swedish craft blog which is hugely inspirational with its beautiful photography and distinct style.
I Need Distractions
My great-grandmother's bedspread/blanket arrived today.
Every single square was knitted individually in moss-stitch and then sewn together before she picked up stitches, knitted an edge, cast off, and crocheted a decorative edge. (So much work. I can deal with the huge amounts of mustard yellow in the spread, in other words.) I wonder if I should drape it over our sofa.. We live in a rented flat, so some of the furniture is not exactly to our taste (particularly the pink-yellow chintz sofa).
Thank you for the comments on Becoming Less than a Magpie. After writing it, I went straight to Ravelry and started weeding out my queue. It has gone from 247 patterns queued to 77 projects queued. It feels very liberating. I know the new autumn/winter collections will be hitting the web soon, so I am prepared to see my queue get a bit longer, but I am keeping the following self-imposed rules in mind:
- Will it flatter my figure?
- Will it work with existing items in my wardrobe?
- Do I already have similar objects in my wardrobe?
- Will I get any use out of it?
In other words, I will assess concrete things like gauge and shape as well as abstract things like style and wearability. Also, I will no longer be queueing fifteen patterns when one well-chosen pattern suffices.
Style is quite abstract, isn't it? I am not fashionable (although for one brief month back in 1995 I was outrageously trendy) but I do think a lot about style. Being Danish I have grown up with a certain Nordic aesthetic - you might best know it from countless IKEA catalogues. Scandinavians like their simple lines, plenty of light and very little nonsense to their architecture/furniture/designs. A typical Danish knitting design would be something along the lines of Topstykke, Duet or Granite. Plain knitting with a little twist. On the other hand I have never been a very good Dane and I turned into an bit of an Anglophile when I was very young, cue the love of tweedy things with cables and fair-isle (or, in other words, everything Rowan). Add to that, an uncompromising love of Modernist art and design (and that pesky Scandinavian mid-century modern influence) and that is pretty much where "my style" is at.
See why my queue has shrunk so much? Yeah.
Now I'm off to wave a tiny Danish paper flag about. The Danish football team is playing their first World Cup match today and I'm slightly worried as they are meeting one of the top contenders, Holland. It is going to be tense and I still cannot knit.
Injury Time
I thought the tragedy should be captured in majestic black/white and adorned with a Photoshop effect. Yes, it is my left wrist. No, I cannot knit. Yes, I'm icing it and am booking a doctor's appointment today. And I'm typing this entry with my right hand only which means blogging is really slow and annoying.
Instead I'm reading and I'm very glad that I got the new Scarlett Thomas book out of the library instead of paying real money. I will tell you why when I can touch-type again.
Update: "bruised tendon" and I "need to watch the activity level". My doctor muttered something about I should have gone to A&E back when my injury first happened. Cough.
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.
Time-Travelling
First, a link: this Cat & Girl comic strip made me chuckle quietly. Grrl travels fifteen years forward to meet her future self. 1990s Grrl is underwhelmed by 2010 Grrl. And I chuckled quietly because I saw myself.
Having said that, I am mostly the same person I was fifteen years ago. I am older with a few new scars and bruises. I am also a bit wiser, less sociable, and more forgiving. I like the same things I did fifteen years ago (books, computer games, cake, my bed, old Hollywood musicals, vintage clothes, typography, Eurovision, and dogs) but I have added new things (my gawjuss Scottish boyfriend, yarn, coffee, philosophy, and matching colours). I think my 1995-self and my 2010-incarnation would get along just fine, although I bet my 1995-self would be appalled at my hairstyle (I just had my hair cut this past week and I am appalled).
In fact, almost fifteen years ago I made a deal with a good friend (who I miss dearly over here in Scotland). She would cook me a fancy three-course dinner if I wrote a book. Now it could not be just any old book - it had to be a special kind of book. My friend did not expect me to write an academic treatise nor did she want me to write a big literary sensation. She wanted me to write a frothy piece of Regency Romance.
I have read a lot of RRs - they are my comfort foods, my security blankets. I grew up in a household devoted to the weeklies' feuilletons, our local library's stash of Jalna-like books and, of course, Barbara Cartland (who I blame for my youthful infatuation with Lord Byron). Later I discovered Georgette Heyer who may be frothy but never nauseating (unlike Cartland). Today I go through phases: I may read a lot of RRs over a few weeks but then several years pass before my next RR frenzy. These phases usually coincide with stress, feeling homesick or going through a rough patch. Comfort foods and security blankets, indeed.
Could I write a passable RR? I think I could come up with a suitable plot involving, say, a Scottish laird's daughter who is sent to London for the season - on the way she meets a dashing highwayman who happens to be a notorious rake settling a wager. Add a couple of dogs, a duel, a dollop of gambling debt and a waltz at Almack's and I think we have a winner. Now all I have to do is write the darn thing and that fancy three-course dinner will be mine, MINE!
.. My younger self would be tempted, my 2010 self will probably just make the three-course dinner and skip all the writing.
In other time-travel-related news, Doctor Who made me cry this week with an episode about Vincent van Gogh, of all people. Your mileage may vary - the episode has divided fans in various online fora - but I took a great deal from it about beauty, art and life.
Completely unrelated: Congratulations are due to SoCherry who is on her way to becoming an honest woman and to Paula who ran a charity race today. Two of my best friends here in Scotland and they keep on amazing me.