From Saturday.

First I got arty, then I got crafty (felted slippers for the lovely hometime), and between those two points we went out for a drive.

( The Promised LJ-Cut )

My latest enthusiasm comes courtesy of elmsley_rose.

Things you can do with hyperbolic crochet.

I, a complete failure at the maths/science stream, appear to now have a grasp of what non-Euclidean geometry means. Which means I kind of have a grasp on Euclidean geometry too. All thanks to people turning it into something I might just enjoy creating and looking at for the sheer hell of it.

I've got the catalogue, but it's all in black and white, meh. However, there's plenty of stuff online. And I have plans, people! Plans!

First step: hair scrunchie for sjkasabi...

I have started a new beanie. It's in two colours (some stranding, some intarsia). I have limited experience of stranded colour knitting and zero of intarsia so it should be fun. Possibly the wrong kind of fun, but fun all the same.

And I now consider myself to have 'started' even before I can point at something and say 'here it is in progress', because doing 10 rows and ripping back because it isn't right yet is still progress.

Earlier this week I also tentatively restarted work on the lace shawl of doooom and put the first ever fitted item of clothing I've ever worked on back into the hamper for a while, still unfinished, where it can calm down and think about what it's done. There's another knitting project I've been quietly working on but you'll know about it if and when I feel like it has succeeded.

Point is, there's movement in woolly terms at least. I was going to say 'creative' but it's all about learning techniques and following patterns. No matter how much I like what I'm doing, the level of creativity comes down to how many decisions I make within the confines of the technique/pattern I'm following. And I'm not making many decisions yet, I'm following instructions and seeing what happens.

Well that's one way of looking at it anyway. Other time I figure it's down to the fact that I am putting it together, and that's intrinsically creative.

I am loving the way I learn when I knit. The way I move from going on faith, when I do something because the author knows what they're doing but I make endless mistakes, to the point where the penny drops - usually because I've done something wrong five times in a row - and I finally understand properly how something works and what the instructions mean.

This is the point where I find I know where I am in a pattern by looking at the work rather than by constant reference to the written instructions and where I start to change things to suit my own prerences. Where I can see what I'm doing and even if it's still someone else's creativity that I'm bringing into reality, I'm really enjoying doing so and thanking them for it.

A sense of comprehension is hard to come by these days, you have no idea how good it feels when it hits. Clarity, it's beautiful.

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Yeah I should probably go to bed.

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P.S.: I'm back to add more good things to the Good Things Basket.

Here's some just about today:

Today I read a chapter of a book. And took notes, because it's that sort of book. I also took some photos of the yard, admired a honking great pot that 10B bought home for me (we <3 rubbish removal, we <3 it sooo much), and spoke to Ricky on the phone.

So, memo to self: there may be some nasty shit out there, but today was a nice day.

Today I learnt how to do a New Thing.

I have not actually done it yet, but after having read the instructions through many times and having had a few goes and still not getting it, I found a slightly different explanation. I had the 'aha' moment and I'm pretty confident I'll be able to do it now. And confident that it will be a useful thing to know in the future.

Yes, it is a knitting thing, which is why I'm not going to go on about it. Also, I was missing something screamingly obvious that I would not have missed had I the clear head that I used to have, I swear.

I'm just pleased that I've learnt something new. It feels like it's been a while.

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I think tomorrow I might put some coffee and some tea into ice cube trays. We will be having another day in the mid 40s on Saturday, so it would pay to find a civilised way to get my caffeine hit.

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And speaking of caffeine, here is an oldie but a goodie:

Cup of Brown Joy - Elemental.


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they blew right off again, poor old Micheal Finnegan, begin again!


Today I tried to tackle some repairs to my current knitting project. Did not work. In the end I frogged the entire project. Am starting again. No point proceeding when you know you can't reduce errors to the point that you can live with them. It'a a lace pattern with a thin, shiny silk/wool yarn, so nothing can be camouflaged by fuzziness.

I was fine with the decision to anti-knit the whole thing until even the anti-knitting got difficult with tangles here and there, which I guess shows my buddhist approach to anti-knitting is somewhat conditional and I'm as far from detached enlightenment as ever dear god does anyone take me seriously when I go on like this? What a scary thought.

For first aid we have applied the local Japanese place's damn fine flounder, and even a little tipple of sake, but I think more is needed.

Bugger my healthy eating plan, I want a Mars bar.

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But anyway. Bugger how I feel about it at all really. Spilt milk and all that. If it's going to happen I have to just start again.

Which is what I'm going to do now, just as soon as I've begged 10B to go to the 7-11 and fished out a Minder DVD. I need a bit of the old Terry, I do.

I need to have some success, and soon, with a few things I've been working on or I am going to get properly discouraged.

And we don't want that now, do we?

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Watched an episode of 'Supernatural' tonight. dahliablue please note: suspect I will be watching more.

Also, 'Bogan Pride' on SBS. Here's the blog.

It's amazing what you discover when Quickflix fails to send you your next instalment of 'Oz' in time, thus forcing you to actually look around for an evening.

Lots of 'these' today. Heheh.

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10B came home with lots of stories to tell, mostly about really annoying people. At this point you chuckle and say 'what...10B was annoying people was he? Heheheh, quelle surprise...' and I say 'well no that's not how I meant it but yeah, actually, come to think of it, I guess he was doing that too. But not on purpose this time. And they were only annoyed because they were annoying people as in they were the sort of people who annoy everyone else by being annoyed all the time'.

So I guess he can take some comfort in the fact that if they were annoying the hell out of him, he was annoying the hell out of them right back.

Annoy is a really strange word when you type it a few times.

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I am up too late again. I must away to bed-town!

I think it's time I became competent with a camera.

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I've also realised it's time to learn to sew. As in: become less frightened of the process of building clothes.

Uh oh. And ditto spinning. And lacemaking and doodling with pencil and paper. OMFG bugger bugger bugger! I've gone from a flash of direction to the massive urge to learn and be creative in a thousand different ways and not being able to choose between them. And I've still not taken knitting to a level of satisfying proficiency. Graargh!

I just want to do everything.

I blame overtiredness and hormones.


Had a nice couple of days. Life is good right now.


And read more. I'd love to read more.

tenbears and I went a little crazy and tidied up some house yesterday. We even made a few sensible decisions about furniture placement and such. This was great, but I'm feeling it today. Am off to lie in the bath for a really long time I think.

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I do need something other than knitting and crochet in my life. Having said that, doing one or the other with an audio book isn't a bad way to spend a few hours. But it's not something I'll throw myself into the way I did when, for example, I first realised just how much satisfaction I was getting out of LJ a few years ago. (That was when I had one of those moments where you think "I could go really crazy with this...would that be a good idea or a bad idea?" Followed by "Well fuck, why not try it and see what happens?" So for a while there, I jumped right in and blogged to the nth degree and had a whale of time and got much personal satisfaction from the whole thing, on a whole bunch of levels. But the point is, that's not what's happenning with handcrafts. It's something I like as an adjunct to other things. If all I do in a day is knit, I get kind of cranky and weird.)

I've realised I don't like putting dates on when I start and finish projects, because then I find myself contemplating how much of my life has just gone into this or that little project and I spiral downhill into existential angst. I've also observed that a lot of the satisfaction I get is the challenge of learning rather than the process itself.

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I can feel one of those life stocktakes coming on.

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I have been keeping a sleep diary for my forthcoming sleep study. They give you the questionnaire with all the dates filled in for a fortnight. You just fill in the little boxes every day. This all sounds straightforward but I am somehow a day ahead. And I did start on the right day...oh well.

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But getting back to the yarn stuff that I'm totally not obsessed with, I'm amazed at how quickly one builds up a yarn stash. It's like it breeds. And I will confess that while I'm realising I don't get joy from knitting every damn day (and am making a point of not doing so because it's not really wise anyway), I really enjoy ogling my stash.

How fucked up is that? Thank god I blog under a pseudonym.

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Oh and I think I had a positive personal epiphany last night with bonus momentary sense of connection to Something Greater and no, there was no sex or masturbation involved (nor intense sublimation of same).

Memo to self: allow this to happen more often.

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Anyway, I'm off to frot some wool then go have a much needed bath. I'm a bit worried that I'm starting to become one of those recluses who smell funny.

Ravely is lethal. What could be more fun than hanging around in a large space full of people going "Yay knitting!1!!" and talking about things they're going to make and looking at nice ideas?

Certainly beats actually _doing_ anything. Like knitting, for example. Hah!

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Still pretty fucked up today.

I seem to have picked up somewhat, touchwood. Noticed improvement last night and so we seized the moment and went out for a quick and cheap dinner at the little place that caters almost exclusively to the Sri Lankan students who attend a nearby campus and live locally. We still haven't gotten round to trying the four or five other extremely cheap cafes in that neck of the woods that cater to overseas students from various nations, but I'm sure we'll get to them eventually. Overseas students, you rock my world.

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Yesterday I decided that lace knitting is stupid, pointless and ugly anyway so I stopped that silly scarf that I've started and had to undo several times already over the last several days and undid it for what I declared to be the last time and put the yarn somewhere out of sight.

Then I looked at a number of other lace and dropped stitch patterns thinking I could perhaps cut my losses and simply make a nice scarf with something easier. After all, the pattern I was trying, for my first ever attempt at lace knitting, is a 24 stitch, 16 line repeat pattern. To put this in perspective for those of you who know as much about this as I did three weeks ago, there are quite pretty lace patterns that repeat every 8 stiches and complete one whateveryoucallit in 10 rows.

Then we had dinner and watched Firefly.

But today I started again with the original pattern because I cannot possibly believe this could be so hard, especially since I've now gotten quite comfortable with the various stitch variations required and the general idea of following charts and noting pattern repeats. All I have to do is remember where I'm up to.

Surely I can do this.

Every second row is a row of plain old knit stitch, so to help me along I have knitted white cotton through one such row so that if I have to undo, I can go back to there and (in theory) get things sorted using the white cotton as a guide rather than undoing the whole thing. (The yarn is thin and dark so it's actually quite hard to see what's happening with each stitch, which makes fixing mistakes a bit of a doozy, hence the white thread). I'm going to do this every now and again on plain knit rows. I can remove the cotton later - very, very carefully.

I have also decided to limit how much I do at once. When I was doing lots of soduku puzzles I learnt that the longer I stare at something the dumber I get. So I'm doing one row at a time with a break at stitch #25. And mistakes will most likely be ignored on account of this being a scarf in a dark colour and therefore not something where one weird row is really going to show.

And so that I don't go completely insane, I've started another baby rug. It's the same as the one I finished recently which now seems easy as pie to me, so I can plough away at that each day when I've done enough lace and thus enjoy the zen of steady knitting and the sense of satisfaction of actually getting something done.

I have to say that even if lace knitting works out to be too fucking hard, it really makes you focus on exactly how a stitch works. I had never really thought so much about the intricacies of it all. I'd only ever thought about what I had to do, not about what I was trying to achieve, what the end product of any stitch or stitch combination should actually look like. So even if I end up ripping the damn thing to shreds and firebombing the publishers of the pattern book that says lace knitting is much easier than you think and terrorising knitting authors everywhere as part of a worldwide campaign for the supremacy of machine produced woven fabric, it won't all be for nothing. At the very least I will know exactly what it is I seek to wipe from the face of the living earth for the good of all things that live upon its bounty.

~~~

Now I feel like going shopping for more supplies because I have beanies and soft toys and other good things to make in between rows of lace knitting hell but alas, that may have to wait for another day.

I am so sick of pills, potions, interactions and side effects. I'm really sick of pacing and monitoring and grading activity and excercising self-discipline. And I'm even more sick of discovering, time and time again, that if I don't pay heed to these things I get very sick indeed.

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In other news, I'm trying to knit a lacy scarf. Bit of a learning curve, I must say. I realised very quickly that being on this learning curve while using the actual 2-ply, dark blue, silk/wool mix that I bought for the project was only ever going to end in tears, so I'm doing a practice run in bright yellow 8-ply wool first. This has proven to be a very sensible idea because although I'm progressing in leaps and bounds I'm still falling over quite a bit.

I have realised that I understand patterns better visually. Give me a written list of instructions and I lose count and mess up. Give me a chart and I'll still mess up every now and again but I'll progress a lot faster in between mistakes and understand my mistakes a lot quicker too.

And I'm half wondering if I shouldn't do the actual scarf in a lighter colour just to make it easier on myself. The lacy effect would be more apparent in a lighter colour too.

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So I'm knitting this baby blanket. The book cover shows it in detail.

And I have once again found myself halfway and wanting to undo it and start again. Last time I undid it because the tension was way too loose, this time the tension is way too tight.

I am not someone who's ever gone beyond small, beginner level projects. I learnt to knit at Mum's knee like everyone does (or did, I guess, I feel very sorry for people who don't get that experience), but that only meant learning the knit and purl stitch and doing a couple of scarves. I never tried anything bigger than that. Mum always claimed she wasn't much of knitter but in my eyes she was pretty bloody good. I think she was comparing herself to the generation of women before her who were legends of knitwear, so I guess in that sense she was right. As knitting has become progressively less important the overall skill level has dropped.

But anyway, point is I'm doing this rug precisely becuase it's something that forces me to watch the tension, an essential element of good knitting that I've never had to deal with. When looking around for beginning projects I found many things that seem to work on the theory that tension is something you can pick up later -they focus only on getting simple things done fast. The result of this approach is a world oversupply of lumpy mittens and beanies that give knitting a bad name and kind of guarantee it goes way out of fashion again.

This is all by way of justifying the hell out of the fact that I'm probably about to undo the whole thing again. *sigh* I would have finished it by now if it were a lumpy pattern requiring 'homespun' lumpy wool. Or if I'd simply done a better job.

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Oh and I have a query for the real knitters out there: can you please take a squizz at the first link, the one to the pattern I'm doing, and tell me you think the amount of yarn they recommend is realistic. If I used that amount of yarn, I think I'd have a nice welted hanky. I am using a different yarn - 4 ply 100% wool rather than cotton, but I can't imagine that would make a difference. Thanks.

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In other news, last week the blossom burst with its customary bang. I guess that's why they call it spring.

Today is a couch day. Getting out of bed was really hard and I'm not sure, but I'm a little worried that I'm having a bit of a health thing, and my GP seemed to think so too when we spoke last night.

I've spent most of the day waiting for doctors to phone me. I'm still waiting. I also updated my medications list and writing that 'Dear Nurses, please don't treat me like shit' letter which was not on Dave because last time it was done by some weird, archaic method involving "pen" and "paper". Still need to print them off. Am hoping this flurry of preparedness is entirely unnecessary.

(Gastic stuff, in case you were wondering.)

Hopefully easing but it's taking a toll on the rest of me. At worst, my gastro will want to have a proper look, not a procedure I find daunting in itself, but it's a lot of fuss and bother. Hopefully my body won't feel too bashed around for too long, if I'm really lucky they'll establish that I'm anemic. This would be good, because anemia is treatable whereas if it's just my regular CFS lack of stamina and overreaction to exertion and stress, I'm screwed.

Updating documents like that is kind of saddening. I imagine it's a bit like doing your will. None of us really like to think we're mortal, I certainly don't.

Addit.: The specialist did what specialists do best, which is be totally unfazed no matter what you tell them. No drama, just pathology vampires descending tomorrow and I will see him on Friday. So. I guess I am having a Health Thing, in that I feel crap and things do need to be looked at, but I can stay right here for now, which is all I want really.

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On the plus side, 10B and Ro are preparing a base for a wood fired oven we're building in the back yard. When I say 'we' I mean The Usual Gang Of Suspects. Except me, really. I'll just lie around and say yay a lot.

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We're not mental so stop saying that. ;)

I've had a strange couple of days, health's been very weird. Not great, kind of weird then kind of better, maybe, sorta. State of mind is peculiar and unpredictable. My beloved 10B has been an absolute trooper as always and even helped me tidy my desk when I had a major meltdown because it was all too hard, bless him.

Things seem to be settling now though.

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A week or so ago I finished another project (embroidery - I'm now half way through the SCA-acceptable towels for camping). I'm pleased if only because all my life I've been hopeless at actually finishing things. Unfortunately I'm not 100% pleased with the towel itself, so the feeling's not as wizzo as it could be. The next projects are towel #3 and a crocheted something for that art meme thing.

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The only reading I'm doing at the moment is a PG Wodehouse at bedtime. And the odd short story. I've done no more accounting homework and am convinced I'm missing something vital.

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Been watching a lot more telly than usual, and finding it to be a most rewarding activity.

10B has got me hooked on Trailer Park Boys. It's Canadian. It's very good. You should watch it.

I've also been heartily enjoying The Thunderbirds (TV series), and I mean _really_ enjoying it. 10B picked up a DVD for me months ago and I figured I'd look at it one night and just have a bit of a laugh at how hokey it all was, but instead I had a bit of a look, laughed and kept watching it and loving every minute and wanting to watch more (rare for me - even if I love a TV show I usually only want to watch one or two episodes in a sitting) and now I'm about to order the rest from ezydvd.com.au because I want them all, now. I want to sit in the living room for the rest of my life eating chocolate and saying "yes m'lady" and "F.A.B" and stuff, and making whirring hydraulic noises whenever they use hydraulics, which is all the time, and wondering about their sexuality and why one of them is made to live in space, and singing along to the theme song. And also I think I'll make some Thunderbird userpics, just as soon as I can get screenshots and gifs worked out.

And I'd just like to say I hope Battlestar Galactica finds Earth and soon. It's all getting a bit claustrophobic, you know? And aren't they running out of humans yet?

Incidentally, has anyone else ever watched any of The Upright Citizen's Brigade? Anyone? Just wondering...

*sticks head in bucket of truth and screams*

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Garden's looking good - photos as soon as the sunflowers come out.

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This morning I arose with a great desire to recobooborate the layout of this here journal thing. I got over it, but not until I'd fiddled just enough to accidentally remove my site meter. *sigh* I hate it when I get inspired.

FWIW, I wanted to switch to the S2 "expressive" layout - that's the one with the urban landscapes across the top, although there's a truckload of options to choose from and you can do a lot of customising. I want to create my own landscape from one of several images I've got in my head. I'm still thinking I'll do it at some point, but only when I can come up with something that is uncluttered and low contrast.

My current layout is very plain. I went to a lot of trouble to get it the right sort of plain, but gee, a header of my very own...a Melbourne panorama or something...

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