Three jumpers in potentia

Last week I was browsing ebay, as I sometimes do when bored out of my skull. Clicking 'watch' on shoes and clothes and yarn I like but will probably never come back and buy. If I wanted it that much I'd bid on it right there and then, wouldn't I? I clicked through to my watch list and spotted something I'd put on there months ago from a yarn store, now on sale. So I got over 2000 metres of cherry red Aran weight Araucania Nature Wool for about thirty quid. Then Mara and I went into our local yarn store and, oh look they're having a sale here too, and so I got 12 balls of black Rowan Classic Cashsoft Aran and 9 of maroon Rowan Classic Extra Fine Merino DK too. Oops. The cash card breathed in sharply, but it coped.

I have an ancient black hooded cardigan I was planning on knitting a replacement for, but there isn't really enough of the black for that so my new hoodie will be BRIGHT CHERRY RED and I think I will knit myself a sexy jumper by Ysolda Teague which has been queued for ages from the black. As for the maroon... inspiration will strike no doubt but it's beautifully soft and squishy and a very 'me' colour (and machine washable!).

It's funny, this yarn purchase has pulled me out of a knitting slump. I have things to knit, things I want to knit, things I want to own and therefore need to knit, but there was nothing exciting me. But buying yet more yarn I don't really need has given me a spark. Why does that happen? Is it some symptom of the materialistic culture I've internalised?

Sigh...

This makes me sad ...

Particularly the bit

Unmarried and a virgin at 30, Proctor has struggled with her sexual identity since puberty, believing her same-sex thoughts are a sin. Last year, she says, she was masturbating almost daily, sometimes twice a day. To rehabilitate herself, she became an active member of Dirty Girls Ministries and started driving two hours to attend a 12-step program for sex addicts called Heart to Heart.

One day maybe we'll live in a world where people aren't made to feel crushing self revulsion for just being who they are. I live in hope.

Disappointment

Well my skirt's not going great. :(

I have a little pouchy belly ...

**Intermission for the purposes of clarification - I'm not saying I'm fat at all. If I said that several of my friends would lock me in a box and force feed me pies. But a little belly is an inescapable feature of my figure. That is all.**

... and the muslin of my skirt is really doing unflattering things with that belly and I cannot see a way to solve the problem. Now I'm stuck a little because there seem to be two options here:

1) A-line skirts are fundamentally not going to work well on me. I need to give up and find another shape for my skirts.
2) There is some miraculous pattern magic way to fix this that I just happen to not know.

But as I don't really have any A-line skirts in my wardrobe I can't prove or disprove 1) and the basic problem with 2) is I don't know whether there's something I don't know! ARGH!

It's disheartening because I was so fired up and buzzing with ideas and this was going to be my perfect skirt (yeah that should have been my warning sign there - perfect? ha!) and going to be the basis for more skirt shaped fun in the future. And now it's made me feel crappy. Boo.

So what's with this blogging malarky?

Here I am with this shiny new blog and having a great time talking to myself and a few passers by (and one or two friends who are willing to read my gabblings) and I occasionally have to ask myself

What on earth is the point?

I enjoy writing, so I guess that's a reason.  My creativity does seem to seep out of me in little unfocussed spurts; a bit of blog writing here, half a poem there, a knitted jumper, a sewn bag, a crap drawing of Thor, a necklace and a weed ridden garden. If only I could focus I'd be like some kind of creativity god wizard thing. Or not. 

I am really enjoying this though, the gods only understand why. I thought I didn't care whether anyone read it but my mild (ahem) obsession with the stat page suggests otherwise. Maybe all art only really becomes complete when there's an audience? Art...?! This? Pah *cackle*

So, gentle reader, do you blog? Why the feck do you do it? Egomania? Promoting a business? Because it's more socially acceptable than muttering to oneself?

Some inspiration

I love the fresh young leaves of Lady's Mantle. The way water hangs on them, the way they're so neatly pleated from the centre, even the colour of them is just fantastic. Looking at some the other day I pondered whether it would be possible to make anything of similar form by knitting or sewing fabric. The outer edge is much longer than a simple circle of its radius because of all the pleats so I imagine if you were sewing you'd make pleated wedge shapes and then join them up, but the centre would be difficult to keep neat, if not impossible, with all those seams coming together. It might be easier to create that extra volume in a knitted fabric but then you'd probably need some sort of support to keep the shape, although I suppose you could make the knitted fabric so dense it was very stiff. With individual stitches I'd imagine you could build them up in a way that mimics the arrangement of cells.

Am I going to do it? Hell no. You think I have time for that with all the blogging and computer gaming I do?

Sometimes I wonder, just for a moment, whether my priorities aren't a little skew whiff.

(Also, that would require mad crafting skillz which I clearly lack.)

Wind in my sails

Well, I'm well and truly out of the doldrums. Since that whingy post I have cast on three items; a pair of plain socks in a funky coloured yarn, a squishy purple toy for a friend who's expecting (shh it's a secret - the toy not the baby) and the lacy jumper Cherie Amour from Knitty in a blue through purple squishy acrylic (yay for machine washable yarn!) although I only got two rows of the latter done before realising I'd twisted as I joined the round and had to frog. Doh!

I also pulled out my sewing pattern and fabric only to find that my blouse really wasn't going to come out of the silk I had. So I zig-zagged the raw edges of my back-up plan red cotton and washed that, so I'm ready to go on cutting the pieces out. Stop me or I'll burn out.

Now I have some delicious purple silk which is hanging around with nothing to be...

Oh and now I remember what I was supposed to be doing with this time! I'm giving a talk to my local Pagan Moot on the Basic of Heathenry next Monday and have I planned? Have I feck.