This is just a little note to say farewell for now.
Blogtoberfest has been fun and challenging and more than a little bit draining.
I need a break.
Thirty one photos below, to remind me that it's been a busy month with a significant amount of knitting, some travel and a whole lot of time with my lovely niece, Alice.
I'll be taking a fair amount of November off. At least two weeks, to work on some gifts and some behind the scenes blog stuff. But I'll be reading everyone else and hanging around the web. And of course, I'll be starting on my own project for A Long Lacy Summer. You'll be pleased to know I did eventually settle on the Icarus shawl and hope to cast on tomorrow.
So thanks for reading and being there. See you in a while.
I haven't bought a new book that wasn't a knitting or cook book in ages. I've been reading, but mainly borrowed books - most notably, Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford or the backlog of previously purchased books I've never managed to read.
But when I found myself with an hour to kill at Melbourne airport last month, I thought the time had come to dip back into new fiction and I am so glad I did. Juliet, Naked was just the right book for me at just the right moment.
I came late to Nick Hornby. I saw High Fidelity at the movies and became an instant convert. He's comedic, insightful, engaging and writes prolifically about one of my great loves, music. He's always captured that thing that is so hard to put into words, why we love music and what it's like to be music obsessed.
Here are a couple of good reviews that will tell you more than I'm going to. And a recent fantastic interview from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Essentially the book is about a couple, one half of which is utterly obsessed with a has been singer-songwriter from the 80s and what happens when that obsession causes an irreprable rift in the relationship, which was pretty clearly in its last days anyway.
I loved Nick Hornby's oh so accurate depiction of life online and most particularly, music geekery online. My first enthusiastic steps on the internet in the early 90s were driven by music. I found newgroups, fan sites and forums where people like me could obsess about the music we loved most. In the old days we had to join fan clubs with periodic newsletters, or hang out for the latest edition of Q or Rolling Stone. When the internet happened, suddenly we could connect with each other in close to real time and I loved it. And I still do.
After knitting, music sites are one of the other places you'll most likely find me. It's the best way to find out what's to be heard if you don't engage with the core of mainstream music, which I haven't for years, having long ago decided that most of the bland, meangingless stuff was no longer for me. There are exceptions of course but I've by and large left mainstream radio and music video shows long behind me.
I find when people get older and say they don't listen to music much anymore, it's because it seems that after they outgrew top 40 teenage music, they didn't know where to go next. There's a whole world out there of artists who are a lifetime away from mainstream trends and who are producing exciting, wonderful music and I add to my store of loved performers regularly. It keeps my music love alive. I cherish the long loved favourites but I adore getting to know the new artists, many of whom cite old favourites as heroes. The cycle of music goes on.
I think I was a music geek long before I knew there was such a thing. In my early 20s I would scour the liner notes of my favourite CDs, learning the names of contributing musicians. If I liked, for instance, someone who provided some cello on a song, I'd look up other albums they had contributed to and more often that not, I'd find another love.
But even earlier than that, I trace my obsession back to Abba and the way as a very small child I used to stare into the speaker grids on the little cassette player we had in the 70s to see if there were people actually inside singing to me. I'm pretty sure my mum would back up my memory that the only way to stop me being sick on car trips was to give me a cassette player, plugged into the car's cigarette lighter, and let me play Abba all the way there and all the way back. It probably drove them mad, but was better than dealing with a vomiting child.
Now in my late 30s, I'm not obsessive like I was in my 20s but then hopefully we are all not many things we used to be. I don't buy the magazines any more. I don't engage quite as intensely, but I still read and learn; I still like to know stuff.
For instance, just this afternoon I spent a bus trip home scouring set lists online from the recent Tori Amos tour so that I could make a compilation CD for my sister Fee and for Ailsa to help them catch up with the last few albums in readiness for the Australian shows. I love that stuff. I love seeing what albums are getting the most coverage. I love seeing how far back she's digging into her old material and which of the new songs are getting the most stage time, all the while imagining what Fee and Ailsa will think of those songs. I want to get the order right when I make the compilation CD. Isn't that what High Fidelity was? One long take on the virtue of mixed tapes?
So yes, Juliet, Naked felt like a book in some ways about my own experience. True, I don't live in a bleak northern English seaside town and nor do I shut out my husband with my obsession, but I am obsessive and I found his portrayal of the love of music quite evocative of some of my own experiences. And I laughed. A lot. Nick Hornby is a great, humorous writer and this book will stay with me for a long time. I hope there's a movie.
If you love Tori, here's a favourite of mine from the early 90s. Can you tell I'm getting excited about the tour? I'm so glad I have friends to go to the show with me (Sean is also coming). I'm so often alone in my love! Well except for the in the online world, where Toriphiles are legion.
For some time, my lovely husband has been hassling me for asking me for a little pouch he could keep his iphone earbuds in. I actually think he started asking before we got the iphones. But finally, I started one and tonight I sewed on the button.
It's just a simple little design I made up as I went along, although kudos to Alison of MachenMachen for a quick sketch one lunch time in a park in the city when I was wondering how I might proceed to the flap part.
The yarn is Regia Design Line Kaffe Fassett. It's left over from socks I made earlier this year. I've knit it at quite a fine gauge, on 2.25/US1 needles, magic loop.
Sean's really happy with it. However, knowing it's a prototype, he was happy to offer design suggestions, mainly that it was probably a little bigger than it needed to be and I could probably take as much as a finger's width, or about ten stitches off. So I'll play around with it and make one for myself and write up what I did.
I need one fast because I'm sick to death of my earbuds rolling around in my handbag and getting caught up with pens and other stuff that floats around in my bag.
I hold this laceweight beauty in my hand like an apple. That's what it makes me think of as I focus the camera on it in the late afternoon. I am remembering a time, almost a year ago, when I bought it and paid a princely sum for it.
I think of a time, it was January this year, when I spent several weeks trying to find just the shawl for it. It was agony. I had bought this yarn, Lorna's Laces 'Helen's Lace' with the desire to make it my key project for my first summer of knitting lace. How could I not with that colour and a yarn bearing my name?
I learned from that three week debacle that placing too high expectations on a simple skein of yarn is actually a hinderance. Every shawl I tried seemed not right. Every decision turned out to be the wrong one. All because I had infused the strands with unrealistic meaning.
Yes. I paid a lot for it. Yes, it was going to be my first serious lace project (whatever that means). Yes, I had blogged about it being special and important.
I look back now and think, 'huh?' What was I on?
It's beautiful yarn. It's going to be delightful to knit it into something. I planned an Icarus shawl but tonight I find myself wondering all over again, is it the right shawl? Is there something better/different/nicer that I could make?
And I realise that a year on, I've learned nothing.
I found this jug, several years ago now, in a garage sale held by a neighbour.
He was an artist, our neighbour. We didn't really know him but he lived across the road in our old suburb. He was Eastern European, I think and the one time we went into his house, a lovingly restored old Canberra cottage, I was amazed. It was all light and colour, from the multitude of small colourful tiles in the kitchen, to splashes of stained glass windows casting rainbows onto the immaculate floorboards.
That's all I remember really. The light and the colour.
So when he held a garage sale one Saturday morning, I of course was desperate to dash across the road and join the masses. Miraculously, this jug became mine. I don't know how it was missed among the antiques and collectables he was off loading. When I asked him how he could sell so many beautiful things he said he was no longer interested in any of the objects he was selling, that he wanted to be rid of them.
I held up the weighty blue jug and he said, 'Ah, that. Yes, it's beautiful.'
'How much?' I asked.
Fifteen dollars was the price. As little as that? My face must have said it all. "Yes, he said. Just $15. A friend of mine made it. He is Danish, but lives in Australia. I hope you enjoy it."
And I always have. I love blue things. Blue glass. Blue bowls. Blue pottery. I have a small but lovely collection. And this was the piece that started it off. Now, it houses my needles, the straights I hardly ever use.
Frogging, or for the non-knitting readers, ripping out your work and ditching what seemed like a perfectly good idea at some point, is sometimes a vital act in every knitter's life.
We've all done it. If we say we haven't, we are lying. Some people do it more than others. Some people claim almost to never do it and we might even believe them, right RoseRed?
See these three balls of wound up wool?
These were rescued from a bag hanging on the back of my spare room door yesterday and unceremoniously ditched.
On the left, in Wensleydale 4ply, my third attempt at Ishbel.
The red is Drops Alpaca which was the sleeve of a Drops cardigan pattern. Have I mentioned how much I hate Drops patterns? No? They are so clumsily written up. I detested it.
Finally, Liza Souza sock yarn which had been a Crocus scarf (a crochet pattern). I began it well over a year ago and it wasn't like the pattern was awful. In fact I loved it, but it was almost completed and used barely a third of the skein. I didn't want to have 2/3 of a skein left when I could use the whole skein for something else. So Crocus went too.
And I feel so relieved. The weight of those projects was getting to me, mocking me and reminding me of failure to see something through, of yarn that was being held back.
Gone. And my stash room is, in the process of having tidied it up a bit, much better for it, too. Just as well, because I'm having a visitor next week and she'll need somewhere to sleep, won't you Dr K? Check out her post today - she's got another fun photo from the Myrtle shawl photo shoot.
When baby Alice comes to stay and I want to nurse her to sleep, I stumbled a while ago upon the perfect lullaby for her.
In the absence of anything much else to post today, I will share with you all the utterly beautiful song by English folk singer, Kate Rusby.
I've been following her since around 2000, having first heard her on a music program on Radio National. I've been enthralled by female voices forever. Can't ever get enough and Kate's voice is pure and magical all at once.
When I play the song Who Will Sing Me Lullabies, I cradle Alice in my arms and rock her and sing along quietly and sure enough, she nods off. I think she, like her mum and like me, responds well to music. Although her mum tells me that Alice often falls asleep to the Foo Fighters, so you know, she'll be diverse.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy Kate. If you ever watched the British comedy Jam and Jersusalem, she's that girl, the one who sings the theme song.
