Category: crochet

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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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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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Any Dream Will Do

Yesterday the high temperature in Southsea was 15°C (or 59°F if you live in the USA or the twentieth century). This makes today a doubly exciting day for the weather blanket: a new colour (green) as well as the 17th of the month, which means the beginning of a new row, an extension of the border, and a new colour (lilac) in the border. The green is slightly strange, because there’s a very limited range in the green/blue range of the new yarn I’m using this year, so that will be interesting to see.

I dreamt last night and woke up at around half past six with no recollection of what I’d been dreaming about, just the knowledge that I had been dreaming, and that it might have been quite exciting. I always hope that one day I will dream the perfect plot for a novel (or even short story) and that it will still be just as good in daylight. My unfinished novel was triggered by a dream over thirty years ago, and the (sort of) finished-but-crap one I wrote in the 1970s-90s came, as far as I can remember, from a combination of a dream and a picture of hills in the bedroom of the flat I was living in at the time. Who came over that hill? That was the start, and the answer was: men on horseback, but why were they there? It took me twenty years to finish that one.

Why can’t I finish anything? I have – I think – two unfinished cardigans and another one which didn’t fit when I finished it and I was planning to pull it down and re-use the yarn, but I don’t know where it is. There may be more – there’s a square from the back of one that I started and then abandoned – I think I decided the hook was too small, and I started again with a larger hook and different yarn and I did finish that one, then unravelled some of the first one to do the variegated fair isle pattern on the jumper which I finished last week.

This morning, I thought about this and wondered: does it matter, really, that I keep starting things and not finishing them? I picked up one of the unfinished cardis in the bedroom – I’d started one sleeve, but only did a little, and I’m wondering whether it works as a waistcoat, and if so, whether it would be better with a cap sleeve (as it has on one side) or no sleeve (as it has on the other), or should I finish both sleeves? Any way would produce a garment of sorts which I might wear one day, or possibly not.

Why do I start new things? Is it because I get bored easily? Or because starting something new is always a lot more interesting and fun than finishing something else? Because I run out of ideas – that’s what normally happens with writing – or have too many new ones?

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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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Throwaway Writing

Sun shining this morning. I have been to Tesco, my least favourite of the three supermarkets within five minutes walk, but it has the right kind of cat food (unlike Sainsbury’s) and self-checkouts (unlike Co-op), reducing the need for social interaction. In general, I find the Co-op has the best stock for my needs, but some mornings that risk of social interaction is enough to drive me in the other direction.

I raised that question about controlling my thoughts a couple of weeks ago, but here is a related one which was bugging me when I woke up this morning: do thoughts control emotions, or emotions control thoughts? Which is the chicken in this arrangement, and which the egg? But this question is just as impossible to answer as the original, given all the feedbacks between the two states.

If I’ve learnt anything about this topic, I would say that trying to control emotions by thinking alone – in other words, wishing them away – is a waste of effort. The fake-it-till-you-make-it idea of slapping on a happy face and banishing all that negativity has always failed and frustrated me, but I’ve discovered from experience that there are activities that improve my mood. Finding the ones that work and can be done with the resources you already have is a great gift.

Writing can be one of those things – although sometimes the mood improvement doesn’t come until after it’s done, rather than in the process. When it’s going well, it’s the best feeling in the world, but when it’s a slog, it’s hellish. There isn’t really a basic process to follow that can make it happen if it doesn’t come spontaneously, except this sort of stream-of-consciousness brain-dumping that I do every morning, and which has yet to cohere into anything tangible. What I’m thinking of here is that I can at any moment pick up a hook and a ball of yarn and start to make something, or continue with what’s already started, and that doesn’t really require any thought. It might go wrong, and that might seem enough to induce frustration and disappointment, but somehow it doesn’t – I just unravel it and do it again differently, or put it away and do something else till I feel ready to get back to it. There’s always something I can do, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal, I can leave it and do something else.

But isn’t that what I’m doing every morning? Maybe this is my way of applying that approach to writing. Now, that’s something that I’ve just thought of in this process, that wasn’t in my head when I sat down to write, or even when I started that last paragraph. This is my throwaway writing, it doesn’t matter whether it means anything to me or anyone else – but it’s not really ‘thrown away’, I just shove the words to the back of a digital ‘folder’, it doesn’t take up any space, not even ink and paper.

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Life Writing

When I was travelling, I wrote erratically, and never felt I had very much to say. When I got back to England, and tried editing it all into a book, I realised that although I had far more material than I’d thought – more than enough for two books, even by the fourth edit – what I had wouldn’t make a coherent book. It was a series of anecdotes and reflections, some more or less interesting than others, but it had no real narrative, no dramatic tension, no resolution, no plot. It was held together only by the sequence of events and places I moved through; it was a journey, but it wasn’t a Hero’s Journey (or even a Heroine’s).

It is similar in that way to this and the other blogs and journals I’ve written down the years. I’ve wondered casually whether what I’m writing is the basis for an autobiography – or at least, memoirs – but it would be a very scrappy one, because there are large and significant portions of my life – like living in Dallas, or when I was doing my PhD – when I wrote very little, and others, like now, when little happens but I write about it quite intensively. The same happened when I was travelling – there are places I went to which, when I went through my notes and blogs, I found I’d written hardly anything about at the time, but when I was writing the first draft, it was quite recent in time, so I managed to scrape something together, often using my photos as aides memoires, and picking up additional information from the internet. Towards the end (of both the travelling and the writing) there are places (such as Kristiansund, Oslo, Hamburg and Amsterdam) that I skimmed through with very little attention and interest, but these are mainly in the still-unpublished second half, The Long Way Back.

Interestingly (perhaps), since I’ve had the selected photos rotating on my desktop, I’ve noticed there are also very few from the last weeks included in the sequence – not because I didn’t take any then, but because I never bothered to go through them, select them, edit for size and add them to the folder. On the other hand, there’s a preponderance of Brussels, Paris, Brittany and San Sebastian, the first places on the itinerary.

January comes to an end today. I used to hate this time of year, but that was when I set a lot of store by Christmas, and found the new year always an anticlimax. Now I find that this can be quite a hopeful time – even though it usually has the worst weather of the year, at least the light is slowly coming back. A daffodil opened in my forecourt a couple of days ago, but was immediately so battered and droopy it hardly deserved a photo. I can confirm that this has been the coldest and gloomiest beginning in the four years I’ve been crocheting weather blankets.

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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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In My Dreams

This morning, I remembered enough of a dream to make some sense of it. I was with a group of people (dream people) who were preparing and rehearsing a play. I didn’t get on with one woman in particular, who was constantly making snide remarks and putting me down (may I say, there have been many such people in my life, both men and women, but this wasn’t anyone I knew). I don’t know if this was supposed to be a professional or an amateur production, but I wasn’t being paid, I’d just been asked to do it as a favour, on the understanding that I wasn’t any good but I would do my best. I got angry with the snide woman and pointed this out to her, sticking up for myself, but I woke up before I heard her reply, woke up with a sense of anger and resentment towards this non-existent person, and lay there thinking: ‘wow, I was really pissed off, and now I’ve woken up!’

Once or twice in my life I have got really pissed off with people like that, and told them so, but it rarely improves matters, in fact it usually ends up with me in tears feeling even more resentful and humiliated. Actually, more than ‘once or twice’, a lot more, but it always makes me cringe to remember them. Mostly I just swallow it down and try not to cry, and try to avoid those situations in the future, mostly by keeping away from people. We’ll never know what might have happened with the woman in the dream, whether she would have developed a new respect for me, and I for myself – possibly, as I do seem to be much better at putting my point across and convincing people in my dreams than I am in real life.

I didn’t post yesterday because the previous evening I watched the Trump supporters marching around the Capitol in Washington on CNN, and though I wasn’t late going to bed (half past eleven, fairly normal) I did keep watching telly till that time (waiting for the police to take charge or the National Guard to show up or SOMEBDOY to take control of the situation), and then I couldn’t get to sleep and lay awake for hours. The result was that, when I finally got back to sleep, I slept in till nine, waking up feeling crap, as I always do after a really bad night, and didn’t bother with either the exercise or the writing part of my routine.

By the way, the motion sensitive light on the landing started working again after I put it back on the wall. And I unravelled the bit of my jumper I was taking about a few days ago and did it again. I showed it to my therapist yesterday but also said I will probably never wear it. I’m going to count all the things I’ve made over the last few years and don’t wear.

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Five Hundred Words

What can I say today that I haven’t said a million times before?

Every day: get up at seven (or thereabouts), feed cat and open the door for her to go out; half an hour of yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; make coffee; come up here and write 500 words; brush teeth; get dressed; have breakfast while doing su doku. That gets me to any time between 10:30 and 12:00. At one o’clock on weekdays, there’s an hour of crime-and-thrillers drama on Radio 4 extra, so I sit in my armchair in the bay window overlooking the street (but behind the hedge) and listen to that, while crocheting the previous day’s weather blanket square. At two, I may get lunch (if I haven’t had it before one), or stay where I am and listen to whatever’s on next, then at three there’s another hour of a drama serial, and at four, some days I switch over to Radio 4 and listen to what’s on there, until PM comes on at five, which I usually listen to also. At weekends the routine is slightly different, as the drama on the radio doesn’t start till three, and then there’s an hour on Radio 4 followed by another hour and a half (Saturday) or hour (Sunday, followed by Poetry Extra, which I also listen to). At six I go into the kitchen and prepare, cook and eat dinner, then around seven I usually go back in the front room, switch the telly on, and knit or crochet till around ten, when I make hot chocolate, listen to music, and carry on either knitting/crocheting or reading until bedtime (between eleven and eleven thirty).

There are variations, of course, usually involving going out to the shops in the morning. Otherwise, that’s pretty much it – but I don’t want you to think that I’m saying my life is boring, not a bit of it. I like this routine. The ‘activities’ (if you can call them that) are all – well, mostly – things I enjoy doing. It’s an undemanding life. Nobody needs me for anything, I’m not required to interact or communicate with any other human being (mostly), I can just trundle along letting each day go by, like I used to when I was travelling.

But a comment on Facebook yesterday raised the question: What is the point of any of this? The comment was made about something specific (posting pictures daily on FB) but it applies to everything, and it throws a stark light on the fact THAT MY LIFE, THE THINGS THAT I DO, ARE ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESS.

I didn’t deliberately make that phrase upper-case – I was just typing away as I usually do, looking at the keyboard instead of the screen, then looked up (because I wanted to delete something I’d written after that) and realised I must have accidentally pressed caps lock. So I’m not trying to emphasise that sentence, it just emphasised itself, which seems appropriate.

And now – oh look – 500.