mini pears

This and another set of three mini pears went out into the world as gifts on the weekend. Unlike the small pear pendant I made for my sister for Christmas, which was a felted bead (all wool), these are knitted and stuffed in the same way as the bigger pears.

Maybe the colour will keep her warm

Last weekend Mum and I hit Queanbeyan for a special mother-daughter outing. We went to several op shops, had a leisurely lunch, and finally shopped for beads at Benedict House, a lovely 1880s building which has a cafe and several art/craft concerns. That was where we found the wooden beads standing in for buttons on this scarf. Benedict House does have a website but I can't link to it just at the moment because my browser warns me that the site appears to contain malware. Eek.

Thanks to some unsubtle recent hints I knew that Mum wanted a short cabled scarf like the several I made last year. Unfortunately she's very sensitive to wool, and I had trouble deciding what to use. I wavered between Paton's Smoothie (a sort of genteel acrylic) and Lincraft Bamboozle, a cotton/bamboo blend. The Bamboozle won for its incredible softness, though I'm not sure if it will be particularly warm. It just has a cool feeling about it. I guess it's really a summer yarn.

I also wasn't sure about the bright tomato red colour (the second photo probably gets this across better) but thought I could dye it a darker shade later, if Mum wasn't comfortable with it. Turns out she loves the colour and it will look great with a brown coat she's making for herself.

Yes you can get something for nothing - though not til next year

It's too late now to promote Free Comic Book Day (1st Saturday in May, every year). Perhaps I should be saving these photos to promote it next year, but I would be likely to forget.

So last Saturday, I put in my one day (half day really) per year of being a comic shop girl at Impact Comics. It was a huge day for the shop, with hundreds of people pouring in each hour, many of them buying as well as picking up freebies. Of course there are those a bit down on their luck who are drawn in by anything free, and some came up with creative reasons to take more than their share (four per person - each business can choose how many they wish to give away, though they are not allowed to charge for the comics produced for this day). On the other hand I saw some families expecting maybe one book per kid, so pleased and grateful and making sure to say thank you on the way out.

As usual I had a go at answering people's questions. I do know which ones are free and which ones you have to pay for, but beyond that I often have to grab one of the real staff as my knowledge has a few gaps.

Would you accept puppy kisses from this dog?

This was after our morning walk yesterday. He had it all sorted out by evening when I got home.

Must trim the hair that hangs in his eyes, though!

There ain't no genie in the bottle, or in that magazine

Wearing docs or similar flat lace-up shoes was pretty normal for us in our late teens (I was 15 in 1990). You often wore sneakers with your jeans but a plain pair of black lace-ups was a smarter look. Many girls the same age these days wear fancier shoes, even heels, to school - though I have noticed the classic lace-up school shoe seems to be making a comeback.

I often feel sad for teenage girls these days. Such tight, revealing, uncompromising fashions give them nowhere to hide. And even when they can get away with wearing a big baggy hoodie, the jeans or tracksuit pants have to be tight and low slung.

When I was passing through those ages, at first it was the late 80s and your jeans and t-shirts were both baggy and oversized. Not super attractive but very practical at an age where you are not necessarily very confident in your body. Granted, there was that white scoop neck bodysuit-with-jeans fad. (Erk. I had no interest in wearing a top with crotch fastenings.) But even those bodysuits didn't show off your bra straps like the now ubiquitous spaghetti strap tanks do.

Then in the 90s came grunge and the op shop look - anything goes, some quite ugly combinations, but certainly no need to be revealing. These fashions didn't require a big emphasis on femininity. And looking back I think that was a blessing. I was sensitive about my very small bust and I was in my early 20's before both changes in fashion, and in my own confidence, had me starting to wear more fitted clothing.

Does anyone in my age group remember it differently? I guess being a teenager always has its challenges, but it does seem the pressures on girls to be sexy (ie exposed) have increased a lot.

In this vein, The Butterfly Effect is doing wonderful work in the area of body image and self esteem for teenage girls. Taking it a bit further, if you have an appetite for some serious radical feminism - check out I Blame The Patriarchy. Twisty is brilliant, cutting and often hilarious but at first I had to take this in small doses - the truth of it all and how mired we are in it, can seriously get me down.

Set the rest of us free

Today was a first - I wore hand knit socks all day.

I only have two pairs - two finished pairs, that is - and these were only finished last year after it was too warm for wool socks. The first pair are made from a cheap Spotlight wool/nylon blend that didn't feel particularly great on my feet the time or two I tried to wear them.

I do have sensitive feet and I have always had doubts about the 'grainy' feeling of hand knits. I should try those first ones again on a really cold day though - it's when my feet warm up that they get more sensitive and irritable.

For these socks I employed a strategy I've seen suggested here and there. I'm not sure now if I thought of it independently, probably not. The sole of the foot is knit in reverse stocking stitch, so that you wear the smooth side against the skin. You can get much the same effect wearing plain knit socks inside out - this just looks (arguably) a bit more polished.

This was the simple train knitting project during the work trip to Europe last September. I got the first sock done during the trip and the second one soon after returning. People often think my socks look small while on the needles (I have average sized feet). I remember whipping off my shoes and demonstrating the fit of the toe on a train somewhere in Norway. I think they look small because I tend to knit them at a fairly tight gauge on 2mm or 2.25 needles, another strategy to avoid the grainy feeling.

Hand knitted socks are perfect with my new Docs, a bargain on ebay recently. I finally had to admit that my beloved cherry Doc shoes that I bought so long ago (1992?) really were too small. I hadn't worn them much in years. They always needed very thin socks, but my feet have also widened quite a bit over time and they became unwearable. So I passed them on to a friend and now have these ones a size up.

I am loving wearing them to work with my dress pants, on days when I just feel a bit irritable about femininity in general. Sometimes I wonder how I became this person who wears ladylike shoes, carries a handbag and wears makeup every day (very little of it, but definitely essential). I was strongly opposed to all of these things when I was younger. I even wore flat shoes, and no makeup, to the Year 10 and Year 12 graduation formals. Now I enjoy these things - especially a variety of shoes. But I also enjoy having the option of wearing nice sensible lace-up shoes like men do.

non-alphabetical; heretical!

Aside from the fascination of rediscovering the books themselves, getting them sorted alphabetically was very satisfying. I love sorting and putting things in order, including alphabetical order. Though you might not know it to look at my generally messy living and working spaces.

The other night we were at a little party at a friend's place. We talked about how their huge DVD collection was shelved in no particular order. I wondered how they find anything; why not put them in alphabetical order by title? My friend had us all in startled laughter when she stated baldly, "I hate the alphabet!"

Hate the alphabet? How can you HATE the alphabet? It was bizarre enough that we had to investigate further. It emerged that our friend is a numbers girl (well we knew that already), a whizz even. The full alphabet, however, is a challenge to remember and doesn't come naturally. Fair enough. I know many people who've never mastered telling left from right instinctively, and that's only two items, rather than 26.

The very next day I happened across this infinite alphabet wrist tattoo. It's beautiful and I kind of wish I'd thought of it myself. It belongs to an ex-librarian, who along with the literary implications, found it very useful when faced with 'the hard parts of the alphabet'. The comments on that post indicate it's not such a rare affliction.

As well as books, we have a lot of CDs in the house, and have always kept them in alphabetical order too (with a few broad genres separated). I've always been surprised at the number of people who seem to marvel at this organisation. Honestly, how else would you do it and still be able to find anything? I do remember Rob from High Fidelity had other answers for that - chronologically by order of acquisition? That would be very interesting....

Booklust.

I have finally done the last part of book unpacking. Note: we moved in at the end of December. The books were by far the most enjoyable part of packing and unpacking for me, though there was also some challenge in working out where everything would go. I've had to split my fiction: A-K downstairs and L-Z upstairs. Other downstairs shelves include K's fiction and all sorts of non-fiction belonging to both of us. I'm intrigued to find that I have almost twice as many books in the first (less-than) half of the alphabet; and that bookshelf is overloaded in many places. I'm still not entirely sure I won't find several more L-Z boxes in a corner somewhere, as there are still lots of boxes in corners around the place.

I am in a whirlwind of booklust now. I want to read about 50 books 'next'. I'm amazed at the number of dusty old paperbacks that cost me a dollar or so 15 years ago, many that I haven't managed to read yet, but that I am still absolutely eager to read.

This lust never really goes away. I am always reading at least one novel which goes with me on the bus every day. I always have a pile of stuff in waiting, loans from friends, recent purchases, and older things I've pulled out of the shelves.

The current bout of booklust has also been stirred up by a couple of rounds of bookshop browsing on recent trips to Adelaide and Brisbane. I go through phases where I don't go to bookshops, new or secondhand, much, because I'm trying to read what I've already got. But I can't really resist when I'm travelling, especially when I'm with like-minded friends who point out things I wouldn't have looked at. You'd think book browsing was an essentially solitary activity, but it doesn't have to be.

I always loved books, and was provided with many books as a child, as well as lots of library access. Of course I never owned as many books as I would have liked to, though there is something magical about those old favourites and even not-at-all favourites, including some quite impenetrable books, all of which I read and reread uncountable times, just because they were there. And I still treasure all of them.

As soon as I started earning my own money I went headlong into a long, very indiscriminate book collecting phase. I bought second-hand almost exclusively; I've never gotten into the habit of buying many books new (I do occasionally like to support a favourite author though). Second-hand books were cheap and you could never have too many books in the house. I was interested in so many different things. I bought things just because I recognised the title, especially 'classics'. Because I'm a born collector and hoarder, I was drawn to collecting multiple books by the same author, often even before I had read a single book of theirs. Sometimes when I finally got around to reading one, I had to admit I didn't love that author as much as I had expected to. Nutty? Well, it was partly just the thrill of the chase.

I long ago acknowledged that I didn't have enough space for all the books (while secretly kind of liking the books-stuffed-in-every-nook-and-cranny aesthetic). It's only relatively recently that I've really been able to do any serious weeding out. I used to go in intending to make some space, spend an hour looking and come out with three books I could bear to part with.

I think I will always keep a lot of books, but I am much more willing now to read something, realise I'm not likely to read it again, and find someone or somewhere to pass it on to. I've had much more success than I expected with exchanging books for credit at a couple of my favourite second-hand bookshops. Anything they don't want goes to Lifeline or op shops.

If you were in Big W at Civic today you might have heard the Hallelujah chorus breaking out

For weeks I've been casually sauntering through Big W at lunch times, wondering if they were ever going to get new wool in for winter. (Although I don't agree that creating things with yarn is a seasonal activity, the mainstream retailers clearly do - and probably have the sales figures to back that up). Finally, today, I came across a small chaotic display of Sean Sheep yarns. 'Rockpool' 'Rockbank' (oops, thanks Karen) was the only new one I could see, a wool/soy blend which actually screams 'Felt me'! right there on the label. At first glance I don't love the colours as much as Armytage. I hope there is more of the range yet to appear, because only one of the options appears to have the long colour repeats I love, the others are either variegated or plain. It's a finer yarn too, more like an 8ply.

Still, a new feltable wool is so very welcome back in the Sean Sheep range, which didn't include anything much feltable last year.

I headed back to summer for a few days

Last Thursday we went to a wedding at Glengariff Historic Estate at Dayboro, north of Brisbane. The wedding was beautiful, the weather was beautiful, and the location was beautiful. And I always like a wedding with ceremony and reception all in the one spot.





After the wedding we only had to cross the road to reach our lovely accomodation at Dayboro Cottages and Llama walks.

This is the view that greeted us in the morning.

It was a truly beautiful place to wake up, on a warm sunny day.

We said hello to the llamas (and one maybe alpaca-cross below) and then we had to be on our way.

K had to head home but I stayed the rest of the weekend, spending time with friends and family. When I told them about the llamas, my friends insisted on continuing the theme by taking me to see the alpacas near their place.
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I thought these white ones looked a bit like sheep with stretched out necks! They were not at all shy to pose for my camera.