Clown bottoms, confidence, and books

To return to one of my (very few) topics of recent months, Demelza has now posted a whole set of great photos of 'An ode to the pleasures of minor encounters' - now you can see the piece from all angles. Love it.

And now, the story of the little prototypes that didn't. Before the pumpkins, I had an idea of making felted soup mugs for the exhibition - something like this in shape (scroll down to the big photo). These purple ones are unfinished - I was planning to attached the handle with a button, like this jug from years ago. But after several iterations to tweak the shape, I decided the fabric was too floppy. I moved on to different wool (not in this photo), but didn't like the colour combination as much, and at that point I ran out of steam... the pumpkins seemed like a better bet. I'd like to have carried this off, but let's just say it needed more development time than I had available.


No. To be honest I also lost confidence in my idea - particularly its appropriateness for the event in question, but also whether what I was trying to do would make any sense to others. The exhibition was very much conceived to be about functional vessels, and mainly for pottery. I do like the idea of trying to mimic pottery with felt (without dismissing textiles entirely, hence the button), but I'm not sure this was the right outlet.

And to return to one of last night's subjects, Shaun's comment, as well as being a good suggestion, which I also don't plan to do (ha!) reminded me that I used to keep a sort of lazy book journal. It was just a word document where, as I finished each book, I would put down a few brief thoughts. I would also add any quotes that I was sufficiently enamoured with to write down.

Reading is a constant pleasure in my life and I wasn't willing to turn it into a chore (or associate a chore with it) so I never made myself write much about each book. And even so, it did become a chore and I always seemed to have a backlog of books waiting to be added to the list. I stopped bothering a few years ago, not long after I got into the habit of using Librarything just to to list each book as I read it. That was because I wanted the widget that you see on the right hand side there. I don't know if anyone tends to look at it, but if you ever find yourself reading something around the same time as me, I'd love to talk books! Since late last year, I've mainly been cycling between two excellent series, Stephen King's Dark Tower, which I have been meaning to dive into for ages, and Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love series.

So anyway, my old book journal tells me that I first read American Gods in 2003. Ten years ago! Maybe I can let myself off the hook for my poor memory of it.