Category: crochet

Posted on

Jigsaws

Said a painter called Vincent Van Gogh,
‘My surname sounds just like a cough!
It causes such trouble,
because foreigners struggle,
and some of them don’t even know.’

Linda Rushby, 21 June 2020

Well, I’ve got that off my chest.

Very late this morning. I woke about the usual time but haven’t been able to get anything in gear so far.

Lay in bed thinking; ‘Why do I bother to do anything?’ Exercise, meditation, shower, blog… nothing particularly unpleasant about any of them, all likely to make me feel better, if anything, but I couldn’t be arsed. Who knows, let alone cares, if I don’t do those things? Only me. I am in sole control of how I start my Sunday morning – any morning – the only obligations are the ones I left off the list: feed cat and open the door to let her out, and even if I missed those for once, there wouldn’t be any sanctions, but I would feel pretty mean.

The sun is shining – once those things are completed (and I’m currently on the last one), I can sit outside and eat breakfast, and then the day is my own. Any day is my own. What shall I do with this one?

I need a new project – all the ones currently on the go are beginning to bore me. Maybe this passion for crochet is waning, and I need to find a new one. Current best guess is jigsaws – I started one on Friday. Some weeks ago, when lockdown was well bedded in and I was responding by frivolous online shopping, I ordered three jigsaws from ads on Facebook, none of which have yet turned up. Having cleared the kitchen table of the card-making/paper-crafting stuff which had been there since the beginning of March, I thought that maybe if I started doing one of the many jigsaws I’ve acquired in the past and never done, that would speed them on their way. I chose the most recent one, which is of Van Gogh’s painting of the café terrace at night – which is what inspired me to pen the limerick above,

Of course, I could also put my energies into something practical and useful, like tidying the study. I started on that yesterday – emptied a whole box of old photos and albums and stuck them on a shelf, then put the box in the recycling bin – which sounds good, but I only put that particular box in here last week some time, prior to that it had spent some time in the hall, after I took it out of the Chinese cabinet in the front room so I could clear away some of the bags of yarn and half finished crochet projects. Okay, slow progress, but it is progress.

Yesterday I ordered a replacement stylus for my turntable. When that comes, I can start playing my old records again, maybe transfer them to the PC. There’s a project. Hope they’re not too damaged.

I could even sort them into alphabetical order.

Posted on

Happy Days (Part 2)

In some ways these last few days have been quite idyllic. Wake up in sunshine, morning routine, breakfast in the garden – with su doku – blends effortlessly into sitting in the garden and crocheting, which blends into an afternoon of listening to the radio and crocheting, preparing dinner, eating dinner (sometimes in the garden), and watching telly for a couple of hours and crocheting, then listening to music and crocheting till it’s time for bed. Okay, yesterday I went to the shop, but that’s become more of a regular variation on the routine, rather than a major disruption.

These are the kind of summer days it’s easy to fantasise about in the winter, or on any cold, rainy or generally stressful days at any time of year, so I’m deliberately appreciating them and not taking them for granted.

The obsession with crochet could, of course, be something else, like reading, writing, su doku, gardening, cooking, weaving, cross-stitching, tapestry, jigsaws, drawing, painting, decorating, tidying… Why don’t I pour my heart and soul into any of those? It can be done, but at the moment I don’t feel drawn in any of those directions.

Is it because I find it easy? But that’s just practice. It doesn’t always work out. I’ve learnt to let it go, pull it down and try again, put it on one side and try something else, or shove it to the back of the cupboard and forget about it.

I guess that’s what I do with my writing as well – shove it to the back of the electronic cupboard and forget about it. And this morning it’s not working at all. The words don’t want to come. I am looking at specks of dust on my computer, looking out the window at the street (which still seems remarkably empty). Wandering round my head to see if I can pick up any scraps of thought that might be worth recording.

Emptying your head of thoughts is not a bad thing – I spend ten minutes every morning trying to do just that.

I’ve just remembered a moment from last night, just before midnight. I’d been sitting up too late crocheting and listening to music, and when I went into the kitchen, I remembered I’d left the door open for Miko, and she was still outside, so I stepped out into the garden. Despite the neighbours’ fairy lights and the still-illuminated windows, there was mystery out there, no moon (it’s too new) but a few stars in the stillness of the night air. I called her name, and heard her scraping the gravel before I saw her. It could have been any animal sound, but she came to me and jumped up into the patch of light on the steps and ran into the house. I thought of owls (though I hear none here in the town) and night and summer, and the cool air and the mysterious life of cats, and thought about a poem but it didn’t come.  

Posted on

Happy Days

I promise no politics today, not even by implication.

I’ve just been to Sainsbury’s. It was open this week (see last week), but there are orange barricades all along the edge of the pavement. There is a small gap, and it doesn’t go round the corner, so it’s open at the junction. Presumably there’s some highway work planned, but it does seem perverse that pedestrians are being funnelled along a narrow strip of pavement. The other shops on that stretch of road (barbers etc) are closed anyway, but it must be affecting that branch of Sainsbury’s.

I mentioned a while back that I’d lost my credit card, the one that gives me 1% cashback in the supermarkets. I eventually got round to ordering a replacement, and it came a few days ago, but after last week’s trip to Tesco where I spent over £50, and worked out on the way home that having to use the other card (which gives me 0.5% on everything) had cost me 28p. Today I had my new card, signed it before I left the house, then remembered in the shop that I needed to activate it online before first use. I tried doing it via the phone app, standing in a quiet aisle (they’re all quiet at 8.30 in the morning, but occasionally you see another person), but it didn’t give me that option, so I tried using the card anyway, and it was rejected. This time it cost me 18p. Sounds petty, but I bet it’s added up over the last month or however long it’s been. If you average those two shops to about £46 (which is actually a bit higher than usual, because sometimes I can do contactless), that’s 23p/shop, or over 6 weeks, or £1.38.

First world problems.

Yesterday, after blogging, I had breakfast outside in the sun, stayed outside and crocheted. When even I felt it was getting a bit uncomfortable in the sun, I got my camping chair and put it in the shade by the fence. I stopped for a while and did a bit of weeding, then went back to sitting, crocheting, and listening to the neighbours’ music coming from their kitchen. Then in the afternoon I sat indoors and listened to 4 extra and carried on with my crochet till I’d turned my octagon into a square, and at about 5 o’clock I went and cooked my dinner. I could even tell you what that was, but I won’t.

It was a good day. I also did a load of washing. I wonder why I write about these minutiae of my life, of no conceivable interest to anyone. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel and this will all be useful atmosphere – or maybe not. I have a sort of idea for how I could write a novel that would incorporate some stuff from my blog, but don’t know how I’d end it.

Sometimes my thoughts lead to interesting stuff, but not today, it appears.

Posted on

Squaring the Dodecagram

Time is strange these days. It feels like ages since I started the project I’m going to write about, but I checked out the photos on my camera, and the ones of the first attempts were dated the 9th, 10th and 12th of May, which is only a fortnight ago.

I bought this beautiful varicoloured cotton knitting yarn online, and got obsessed with it, buying up different colour combinations with no clear idea what to do with them. I crocheted two shawls, then decided I would make myself a beach cover-up/summer top. The idea I had was that the front would have a starburst pattern in the middle, which I would gradually extend outwards, then at some point I would square it off and do rows along the top and bottom to the right length. It all seemed fairly straightforward, but I thought it would be fun.

I started from the middle with an ‘icicle’ design from a book of crochet stitches, a hexagon which grew into a six pointed star. Then, still working in the round, added stitches into the space between the points, and turned those into additional points, while still extending the original six points, so I ended up with a 12 pointed star (dodecagram).

That’s when it started to get interesting.

My plan was to keep extending the star until it was wide enough from point to point to go across my body and then ‘square it off’, filling in the spaces between the points. Except… For a start, once the points got to a certain size, I couldn’t get them to lie flat. Also, if I wanted to keep working in a circle, the points would keep growing while I was also trying to fill in the gaps. I could complete the star to the desired size and then fill in all the spaces individually, but that would disrupt the sequence of colours and besides, that wasn’t what I was trying to do. So I pulled it down by a few lines. Then tried something else. Then realised I needed to go back further, so undid what I’d just redone, plus some more. And so on. Every day I give up, put it away, get up the next morning, pull down what I’ve done, and try something else.

Then I started thinking more about the geometry. If I just filled in the spaces between the points, I would end up with a 12-sided polygon – a dodecagon. After a couple of days puzzling over this, I realised I should think of it in groups of three points. If I identified four main points and laid them out like the points of the compass, the next step should be to merge the pairs of points between them. If I could flatten them out, I would have a diamond shape in the centre and then four triangles round the corners.

Don’t know if this counts as ‘creativity’ sparked by the lockdown. It’s pretty pointless. But I’m enjoying myself.