keep feeling fascination

Imagine my delight when I hear that knitwear is ‘in’ this season. Wow, I might accidentally be fashionable for once. No more will people laugh and scoff at the knitting habit, they will be jealous of my talent for handcrafting high fashion items, and beg me to make them stuff, and wish to learn the craft at the feet of a Mistress of the Pointy Sticks.

Imagine my hilarity when I take a quick look at some crapwalk pics of the stuff ‘They’ deem wearable:

		Oh yum, I’ve always wanted to be dressed like an ice lolly, and also Sunshine is knitted into the waistline, lovely. Also, they must have knitted this using her legs or something. Either the top’s really big or the model is the size of an Oompa Loompa.
		Hey! Dennis the Menace called, he wants his jumper back. Maybe take the dead crows off the shoulders first? kkthxbye.

So having imagined my way into a good few hearty ROFLs I have again retired from the world of high fashion. It doesn’t like me and I don’t like it.

I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Pie. (I’m such a geek.)

seams simple enough

(see what I did there? I’m so funny)

I have all my bits knitted for the Tilted Duster and have reached the seaming. And of course it’s only just occurred to me this isn’t something I’ve ever done before. Nope, never. OK once with a tiny hat I knitted about 2 years ago, but I didn’t realise there was a ‘proper’ way to do it and it looked terrible. Now it’s just occurring to me that after all my time knitting sleeves and so on, I could balls the whole thing up just by not knowing how to sew them up nicely.

So I’ve Googled and looked on Ravelry (what on earth would I do without the interweb!) as there seemed to be nothing quite clear enough in my minimal knitting book selection. Then for the last hour or so I’ve been reading this and this – and now I can’t tell if they are 2 different methods or if my eyes are just going funny, or what. Typical! It may be that I have to sleep on it and look at it all again tomorrow

Haven’t done much today except a load of housework and laundry, then sitting back and knitting/puzzling over knitting. Sunshine kept me entertained by having a crazy 10 minutes and running in through the catflap at 100mph, straight through the living room, hitting the laminate hall floor at speed and carrying on & thunk-ing into the front door, frightening herself, then turning round and haring out through the catflap again. She’s worth her weight in Whiskas, that one. I watched a load of telly though whilst I was knitting – I don’t watch that much usually, but I tend to like the meandering and vaguely educational sort of thing you get on Sunday telly.

Is it just me or is Michael Palin’s new ‘going around the new Europe’ series just a little bit below his usual standard? He doesn’t seem to have the same enthusiasm for running around finding hilarity in odd things and getting hugged by strange men called Boris. He just looks knackered the whole time, as if he can’t summon up the energy to really be that interested, and just wants to get home to England and have a nice cup of tea and a sit down. I suspect that a lot of what he’s seen is a bit draining though, there seems to be an awful lot about various places people have been tortured in and so on, so maybe it’s just him trying to give that side of things the dignity it deserves. Either way, it’s a bit of a peculiar series, though I’m enjoying it – he’s one of the only people (next down from Stephen Fry) who I would find enchanting if he was reading a cereal packet – and I’ve certainly learnt a few things.

ohhh…. pahoooie…

I’m the rubbishest blog-owner ever… haven’t updated in over a week… but then with blogs you can get the feeling sometimes you’re shouting into the smallest emptiest room in the world so I suppose that’s why there’ve been no updates. (Skip to the end for non-drunken-introspective actual craft stuff. Well it’s drunken, but it’s an update, of sorts).

And then I think – well, why am I doing this? and largely it’s because I’m trying to keep a track of my ‘crafty’ projects, so that when I’ve finished them there’s some sort of record of my achievements (I know, minor as they are).

Because I have a thing that I know about myself, in that I’m good at starting lots of things, but not so good at finishing them. And maybe the whole ’starting a blog’ thing is part of that. I realise I’ve just used the word ‘thing’ a lot, but let’s face it, my sis is here, it’s gone 3am and there has been whiskey. So don’t expect Shakespeare.

(And I have an BA (Hons – lol!) in English (& Publishing!) and let’s face it that’s useful for f**k all except making you feel paranoid about using words like ‘things’ and ’stuff’ to describe… er… ’stuff’. At least I’m not Americanising and using the word ‘bunch’ to describe anything from 2-54,000… er… ‘things’.)

I digress (no really? and your point was…?).

Anyway… what I suppose I’m getting at is:
1. I’m doing this for me, because it’s easier than writing a diary (anyway my handwriting’s shite since I started using computers a lot), I don’t analyse myself as much, and I can add pictures.
2. On the other hand it’s nice if I get the odd comment as then I feel I’m not being a total shouting-into-space numpty.
3. Umm. I dunno. There was a point 3 but I forgot it. It’s late!!

On the craft side… see, here I’m tempted to say ‘the dark side’ – crafting of any kind being more taboo than being a geek amongst most people I know (and largely for the right reasons ) because ‘crafting’ is a loaded word, makes you think of essentially middle-class women with nothing better to do with their time, doing twee cross-stitches, or knitting childrens clothes in impractical hard-to-look-after cashmere-mix wool (well, it did to me anyway). Anway, that’s a whole other subject, and one I’m sure I’ll come back to…

I finally finished a knitting needle case for a very good friend of mine, it was her birthday present and her birthday was about 2 months ago, so I feel crap it took this long. However it’s not entirely my fault, as the reason I had to pause halfway through was because my sewing machine decided to chew up all the thread into its inner workings – into the belly of the beast, if you will. So in order to make it work again I had to take it apart with a screwdriver (lots of teeny bits!) and put it back together again.

Eventually the case was made, and whilst obviously I can point out a thousand errors in its construction, the recipient seemed to like it (though it may have been relief that she finally got something!) – so that’s the main thing and it’s worth it.

I quite liked the case actually – space for needles, but also a pocket for circulars and one for odds & sods (I believe Americans call these ‘notions’). Sod’s law, isn’t it, that I didn’t get photos of possibly the most useful thing I’ve ever made… I’ll try and get some from The Recipient (I love this blog ‘code’ thing, make it sound like a John Grisham novel. If I ever stoop to the depths of Dan Brown, let me know…).

What a blimmin’ long post. I guess alcohol mixed with far too much diet coke keeps you awake and rambling far too long. I’ll save my other thoughts for another time!

ps. Whilst I couldn’t give a monkey’s for getting older on my part, and never have, why does it utterly freak me out that my wee baby sis is going to be 31 at the start of May? I’ve never felt old till she started getting older…

pps. On the other hand, the alternative to getting older is dying, so I’m kinda glad neither of us has done that. Our mum rocked and she went too soon. Not being maudlin, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles – sometimes. It should make you want to eat all cookies as fast as you can grab them.

ppps. That sounds better with the word ‘cookies’ than it does ‘biscuits’, however much you may hate ‘americanisation’. I tried it. However I spelt americanisation with an ’s’ just because I can ;D