Category: knitting

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Monday

Already written my NaPoWriMo poem for today – and, incidentally, I seem to have resolved my issue with the keyboard. I turned it upside down and shook it vigorously for a while, watching the crud cascade out from between the keys, and although I’d already tried that method several times, it seems to have dislodged the specific bit of crud which was causing the problem and for now the problem has gone away (without my having to buy a new keyboard).

Well, all that happy news has got me started, but I don’t know where I’m going from here. Except that I’ve just discovered that I have two avatars on WordPress – possibly three, if ‘Southsea Storytellers’ also counts. Sorry, I just got distracted again, into trying to work out how the ‘community’ feature works on WordPress. I really know nothing about the software I use every day – except the bits I use every day. I’m probably using it all wrong.

But that’s how I found out about the other avatar – from the community feature. I saw a picture of my own face from 2008 in Paris, not a bad picture but terrible resolution when it was squeezed onto an avatar. I clicked on it and it took me to ‘Gravatar’ which , rather disturbingly, had a ‘Contact me’ followed by an email address I still use – fortunately, no one has bothered to contact me through that route, as far as I’m aware – or maybe they’ve all been trapped by the spam filter.

I don’t really know what I’m doing and I don’t know what to say about it. Pretty much sums up my attitude to life this morning. I don’t know why I write 500 words a day. Sometimes it works and sometimes it just goes horribly wrong. Mostly I feel better for doing it, but today it is just a massive slog.

Sunny at the moment. I’ve got no plans to go anywhere today. I might go to the knitting shop – I said that last Monday, when they opened after lockdown, then I found out that I have to make an appointment (it’s a really tiny space) and I didn’t feel like committing myself to a specific time so didn’t do it, even though I’d been waiting for it to open to get a 5.5mm circular needle, which I need for one of the jumpers I’m making (the old one is on the verge of breaking, with one of the needle ends coming away from the connecting plastic wire, if that means anything to you). But I’ve got plenty of other projects I can be getting on with, and even if I finish it I won’t want to wear it till next winter, so there’s no rush.

I just remembered I haven’t typed up the poem I wrote yesterday morning. A couple of the words were quite hard to read, I think I’ve got them now, but I’d probably better write it up soon – if I want to keep it.

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Creative Spirit

I was going to walk down to the knitting shop today, but… looking out the window, I don’t think I’ll bother. This is a bit much even for me with my oh-we-often-get-snow-flurries-at-the-beginning-of-April smugness – not that we’ve got actual snow here, just freezing rain, but still, it’s a bit much. I wasn’t planning to buy more yarn (still working my way through the stash) but could do with a 5.5mm circular needle to replace the one I’ve been using, which is on the verge of breaking, but over the weekend I’ve started two more top-down jumpers (one knitted, one crochet) to go with the two I’ve got that I can’t make progress on (one because of the needle breaking and the other because of lack of the right yarn). Three of them are knitted, the latest one (started Saturday evening, pulled down and restarted yesterday) is an experiment to see if it’s possible to use the same general top-down approach but with crochet, and if it works will use up a load of yarn which I’ve had for about a year and have tried to start various projects which I’ve later abandoned.

Do I want/need/will I wear all these jumpers? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

I was going to write about creativity – I half started yesterday, at the end of ranting about something, I can’t remember what. If I’m making something, or thinking about something to try – it doesn’t much matter what – I can sort of keep my head above water – as long as I keep my expectations low, and don’t think that what I make will be wonderful when it’s finished, of course, but when it’s done, it can be pushed to the back of a cupboard and forgotten about – or, in the case of writing, in the back of some folder on my hard drive, or shared on Facebook, or even better, Twitter, where I have 200 ‘followers’ but none who ever respond to anything I share (that’s an exaggeration, I’ve had two ‘likes’ in the last two years, both from people I used to know personally but haven’t seen in years).

For most of my life I haven’t considered myself at all ‘creative’ – except for this half-arsed idea that I might have been a ‘writer’ if I’d ever worked at it, but even then I was always conscious that I didn’t have the guts, talent or chutzpah to stick at it and make it work as a career. When I read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ last year, I came across the idea of the ‘creative spirit’ which is crushed out of young children if they don’t get the chance to use it. This resonated with me, as I thought about my fear of judgement, of what I make never being good enough, of the ludicrous hubris of ever thinking I was ‘good enough’ at anything, the ‘who do you think you are?’ arrogance of that whole idea, and the ridicule that followed from it.

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Lost Hour

On a clear, bright morning in spring, it would be good to set out on a new adventure, in search of a new life.

But today is neither clear nor bright, just dull and grey with the sound of the wind between the rooftops. And there are no new adventures in the offing, nor, most likely, any new lives to be had which are substantially different from the present one.

Just to say, that first sentence popped into my head as I sat down at the computer. I know it sounds like the start of something, but I’m buggered if I know what. Except that the first phrase – up to ‘spring’ – has a nice lilt to it, as though it could be the first line of a poem. Quite clichéd though, like all those folk songs that start on the lines of ‘One morning in May…’ but which, come to think of it, descend into tales of lust and seduction (when sung by Steeleye Span), and sometimes betrayal, revenge and horrible death.

Well, that’s got those cheery thoughts out of the way.

I put my bedside clock forward last night at bedtime, and when I woke it said 5:20, which was good because I thought I could get up at my usual time and slip quite easily into the new time frame – but in reality I ended up lying in bed anyway listening to podcasts and not getting up till seven. Then I messed about with changing the central heating clock, which was easier than I expected, but as I’ve been doing it every six months for the last four years I should have got a bit more proficient by now. The thing that still bothers me though is that there are two programmes, one for Monday-to-Friday and one for weekends, and I can’t work out how to get onto the weekend programme to change it. At the moment I have it coming on at 6:30 in the week but not till 7:00 at weekends, it took me a while to realise why it was still cold when I got up on Saturdays and Sundays. The instructions I have are on the inside cover of the little box, small print and hard to see, so I have to take it off the wall and into a well-lit area in order to read them, but even then I can’t find out what I need to know. I can override it by pushing the ‘up’ or ‘down’ buttons to adjust the thermostat, so that’s what I do in the mornings if it feels too chilly, but I would like to sort it out.

Other than that – and something falling through the basket of the dishwasher and jamming the rotating arm so that everything which should have come out clean is covered with crud which has baked on during the drying part of the cycle – there aren’t enough words left to say anything else – except I had to unravel my jumper again yesterday.

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Eating Elephants

This is what happened yesterday: it felt as though writing my 500 word post in the morning was the most significant thing I did all day. Some days are just like that. Around midday it got quite sunny, and I went out and pulled a few more bits off the old shed, in the process breaking the chisel for the second time, so that now there isn’t really enough of it left to get behind the planks and lever them off, which is what I’ve been doing up till now. It was an old chisel anyway, which I found in the shed when I was emptying it out, presumably left behind by the previous owner. After it broke I decided that was a sign that I could stop for the day – I’d been there for about an hour, I guess.

I keep picking away at it, not the most efficient way of doing it, I know, but I do as much as I can stand and then leave it in the hope that eventually it will get done (like the bookshelves which have, unsurprisingly, now filled up with clutter in the absence of me tackling them in an organised manner). The front and half a side (of the shed, that is) have now gone, leaving a shell which looks as though any self-respecting storm will blow it away, except that, remarkably for this time of year, we have had no strong winds for the last week. I’d quite like it if the back (left hand side in the photo above) could stay standing as there is no fence behind it, just a small wall, but that’s probably too much to hope for. Eventually, the new shed will go along that boundary, but I need to get rid of the old one first. In the mean time, half of the stuff that came out of it is still in the garden or the kitchen (depending on how hygienic I considered it to be) waiting for the new shed to be moved to its final position, along with the accumulating debris of the old one.

In the afternoon, I made some small progress on the jumper I’ve been knitting (still not sure about the design, which I keep having to re-do), then the yarn cake fell apart (as they tend to do when approaching the end) and descended into an impenetrable tangle, which I spent half the evening trying to sort out till I fell asleep over it on the sofa. I also started on a new crochet pattern for a blanket, which requires working with three cakes at once – what could possibly go wrong with that? The plan is to convert three of the many cakes I bought online last year into a blanket which will be of no use to anyone and shoved somewhere in the spare room if it ever gets completed.

Well, baby steps, hare and tortoise, eating an elephant, etc. And another 500 words bites the dust.

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Desultory Equinox

Yesterday I was thinking about Prague – in fact it has been in my mind on and off for the last few days. Often, when I was there, I used to question why I was there, and what I was doing. If I could have found a compelling reason to stay, I think I would have, but my presence always felt anomalous; I wasn’t a tourist, but nor did I ever become a resident, nor even an ‘ex-pat’, just this invisible woman who slipped around the city with no-one really noticing whether I was there or not – except possibly my landlord, when he made his monthly visits to collect the rent (in cash). In the end, coming back to be near my daughter and granddaughter and make some efforts towards selling the old house and ‘moving on with my life’ had to take priority

Those same questions keep coming up lately: Why am I here? and What am I doing? At least now I have some answers which make sense superficially: I’m just another retiree who’s decided to come and live near the sea, buy a house, make this place my home. After six years, the deeper questions don’t seem quite so compelling – I’m retired, with a comfortable pension, and the sale of a large family home enabled me to buy my little Edwardian mid-terrace outright, so why shouldn’t I be here as much as anywhere else? It’s a lot more congenial than either of the two places where I’ve spent most of my life.

This lockdown has felt harder than the one which started this time last year, but I think I’ve become ‘harder’ too, more settled with being at home on my own – most of the time. But if you asked me – if I ask myself – what I’ve been up to, what I do with my time, I’m hard pushed to come up with an answer that makes any kind of sense. I’ve got my editing job, which I’m doing two chapters at a time as the client sends them to me, and each chapter takes about an hour; I do my half hour of exercise and write my 500 words most days; I listen to the radio; crochet my blanket (which also takes about an hour each day) and mess about with other craft projects in a desultory way. Since I finished the blue fair isle jumper, I’ve picked up another top-down jumper, in different yarn on a bigger needle, which I started and abandoned about six months ago. Because it’s a ‘cake’ style yarn, with long stretches of colours blending into each other, I decided to do a design on the front with different stitches, rather than different yarns, but I’ve tried one idea, pulled it back and tried another, and that isn’t going very well either.

But this is just a temporary setback – isn’t it? Something will happen soon. That’s the way it goes, I’ll break some more bits off the old shed and keep going.

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Boring, Boring, Boring

Yesterday I experienced something I haven’t been aware of in a long time: boredom. I finished bringing my financial spreadsheet up to date, but didn’t feel as satisfied as I expected. The afternoon plays on Radio 4 and 4 Extra respectively were: the first episode of a three-part adaptation of ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ (well done, but hard to avoid the sense of impending doom) and a thirty-year-old drama about a divorced sixty-something woman with breast cancer who is reunited with an old admirer, has a mastectomy and moves to Australia (either breast cancer treatment has improved a lot since the early 1990s, or the writer didn’t have much idea of what he was writing about – no chemo or radiotherapy, just straight to the knife).

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

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Untangling

I didn’t write yesterday, and I don’t want to write today. The emotions and thoughts that swirl around in my head are probably best kept to myself. Everything is complicated and tangled up together, and if I find a way through and come out the other side, I daren’t look over my shoulder because I know it will drag me back in again.

I like that metaphor, and here’s another one. When you have a tangled ball of yarn (which happens to me a lot), in order to untangle it you have to start with an end. Ends aren’t always easy to find, but you can make one, by choosing a thread at random and cutting it. You now have two ends, and you pick one – maybe the one that has a longer ‘tail’ – and tug gently on it. You should then see a movement of one of the threads in the tangle, so you put your thumb and finger through the gap nearest to the movement, take hold of the thread that just moved, and pull it through the gap – if you’ve got the right thread, the cut end will follow, and now the tail is a little longer, so you repeat the process and watch for the next movement. The tail gets longer, and eventually you have to start rolling it into a ball, or else it might create another tangle. But then you have to pass the whole ball through the tangled loops – you can’t just pull on it from inside the tangle any more, because the ball will just unroll. At that point, I hold the ball in my hand and slide my hand through the loops, so that they’re effectively wrapped around my wrist. In this way, I can gradually free up more of the tail – or rather, of the ever-growing ball.

Sometimes, in the middle of the tangle, you come across a knot in one of the threads. You might be able to pull it open with your finger nails, or slide a needle under one of the loops and gently pull it looser, and in that case, once you’ve made one of the knot-loops big enough to pass the ball through, you can get rid of it. If it’s in a single thread, it’s easier just to leave it there, but if it’s two (or even more) knotted together, it’s got to be dealt with. However what’s even worse is when two threads have rubbed against each other long enough to effectively become stuck together, but not actually knotted in the sense of being wrapped around each other. These can be a nightmare to prise apart. If you can work out which ends belong to which thread, sometimes it’s possible to grasp both ends of one thread in one hand, and of the other in the other hand, and tug them apart, but then they’ll both be left with a fluffy bobble attached. And of course, they might snap – or you can cut it.

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Groundhog Day All Over Again

Two days late to talk about Groundhog Day, but that’s just par for the course for me.

Groundhog Day is one of those weird North American customs – like Thanksgiving and the Superbowl – which only enter the consciousness of most of us because of the all-pervading presence of the USA in popular culture. It was first explained to me forty years ago by a young woman I worked with (I was young then too, but she was a couple of years younger still), whose father worked in the diplomatic service, so she’d lived a lot of her life hitherto abroad, including part of her childhood and adolescence in Canada. According to her, groundhogs come out of their hibernation burrows on the 2nd February, and if they see their shadows, they run back underground and hide for another six weeks (or some period like that), but if not, they stay above ground and that is the signal for spring to start. In other words, if it’s sunny on Groundhog Day, paradoxically, spring will be late.

The film of the same name was made in 1993 and starred Bill Murray as a reporter who goes to a small town to report on the behaviour of the local ground hogs, and finds himself waking up the next morning in the local hotel and living the same day over again. He finds that whatever he does that day, by the next time he wakes up, it’s all been forgotten by everyone but himself. At first he’s desperate to get away, but over time he uses this weird condition to his advantage by changing his behaviour, avoiding mistakes, learns to play the piano, woos a girl… It’s a clever gimmick, and a funny film, though ironically, it doesn’t bear watching too many times before it gets very irritating.

It’s that endless repetition that sticks in my head, and that I associate now with Groundhog Day, rather than the arrival of spring (though it was gloomy here on Tuesday, which is supposedly a good sign).

Over the last year, like many people I’ve felt stuck in some endless loop, where every day I get up and do mostly the same things, with occasional variations. The character in the film starts off cynical and bitter, but gradually uses his repeated day to learn new skills, become a better person, fall in love, pursue happiness, and in the end he gets the girl and his life moves on. But what have I learnt, how have I developed?

Well, I’m learning lots of new crochet and knitting skills. On Monday evening I started unravelling the fair isle jumper that I made too small, and yesterday I finished getting it back to the point before I separated it for the sleeves (which was a lot more complicated than you might think) and was able to start knitting it again. I guess you could say I’ve learnt patience, acceptance and perseverance, but only in that very specific context.

Still, today’s another day.

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Passing Time

Today I’m looking through my window at grey clouds and black birds (maybe jackdaws- I can’t see them clearly enough, but they’re too big to be blackbirds)  flying across them, and I truly have no idea what to write about.

Struggling to find anything of significance in my life at the moment – and I don’t mean that in a bad way, because I like a peaceful life – I remember about the fair-isle jumper I was knitting, which I think I’ve mentioned before, and may even have posted a picture of. Well, the news on that is that I’ve given up on it – probably temporarily, but who knows – because I tried it on and realised that it is going to be too small to be comfortable (yes, I should have checked earlier, but I was having fun developing the pattern). The best I can do with it is unravel it all the way back to where the sleeves join the body and keep on increasing the stitches for a bit longer , until it will comfortably accommodate my ever-expanding bulk. I can’t remember exactly when I made this discovery, but it was at least ten days ago, because I knew about it before my therapy session last week. In the mean time I have started and abandoned a couple of small things trying out different stitches, and also started a crochet cardigan using some yarn which I bought a couple of years ago for making blankets and never used. Again, I’m making up the pattern as I go along, basically the same as the cardigan I finished just before Christmas, but with brighter colours in a chunky yarn. However, I’m not sure whether that is going to work out either, because the weight of the yarn makes it less flexible, and if not, I might return to the original plan and make a blanket instead.

You might wonder what is the point of going into such detail about this, but I’ve already pointed out that I can’t think of anything interesting to write, and also I was trying to draw a lesson from it – that when you enjoy the process of doing something, it doesn’t really matter so much if you’re not happy with the end result and either abandon it or go back and try again – well, at least, not if you’re in the happy position of having an abundance of materials (especially if they can be re-used) and time, as I am. I don’t get stressed over crochet and knitting projects – even when they don’t work out – as I did with the bookshelves, for example.

Also, I’ve brought my accounts up to date till the end of December, and in checking my Lulu (self-publishing) account, I’ve found that I sold three copies of my books last year that I didn’t know about (four in total, but I knew about the first one). The money hasn’t appeared in my account yet because the total hasn’t reached the magic $5 required.

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Mind Full of…

The question I posed was: ‘Do I control my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?’ and the answer is fairly obvious – my thoughts define me, determine my experiences and control my life: I am my own story. How could it be otherwise? I think, therefore I am – how could I know I was alive if I didn’t think it? Although, of course, I only think that was the question – I may have misremembered it. I could go back and check, but I’m choosing to trust my memory on this occasion.

The ‘I’ who is typing this and the ‘me’ I’m describing are the same person, that goes without saying, indicated by use of the first person singular pronouns. Why did I say that? I have no idea. My thoughts are the outcome of genetic predispositions, my life experiences and external conditions, and they feed back on themselves and go round and round and make me who I am.

But can I control them? To some extent, I suppose I do – I can decide to concentrate on one particular subject or activity – like cooking a meal, for example, which involves performing a set of tasks. But even as I’m performing them, my thoughts don’t necessarily stay in one place –while I’m chopping an onion or stirring a pan, my thoughts can be anywhere – possibly planning the next task, but in my case, more likely thinking of something completely different.

Consider what my thoughts have been doing since I started writing this – reading the titles of a pile of DVDs which I found in the study yesterday and put on my desk; considering watching Gosford Park because I haven’t seen it in years and can’t remember anything about it except that I enjoyed it and it has an exceptional cast; trying to remember the surname of the actor named Tim who was in The Shawshank Redemption, knowing it’s not Burton (he’s a director) although I always get confused between them, wondering whether they’ve ever worked together, reading on the back of the box that it’s Tim Robbins and thinking ‘oh yes, of course!’, noticing how young he looks in the picture, and also how young Morgan Freeman looks, and wondering what Tim Robbins has done since. Then picking up a book of Victorian needlepoint patterns based on William Morris designs, and thinking how lovely they are, wondering if I could somehow incorporate them into my knitting, or if I should take up needlepoint again, and whether I should try to visit William Morris’s house at Kelmscott when things open up again, because I’ve never been there…

A gull flies right to left across a grey patch of cloud outside my window and catches my eye, leading it towards a plane crossing the other way, much higher, across the distant blue.

There’s a much misused and misunderstood concept called ‘mindfulness’, which derives from Zen Buddhism, and means focussing completely in the present moment. I’ve been trying to learn it for sixteen years.