Me, Right Now
In the front room, eating breakfast, still in my pjs. Magically I’m hiding most of the clutter on the sofa. The blanket my mother crocheted is draped over the corner.
Saturday September 2008, 8.12am.
1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.
5. Add it to the Pool
Yay!
I present to you...
The Slubby Cardigan:
Yarn: Hand-dyed (in Liz kitchen – thank you again Liz), handspun (rather badly, but I’m loving the slub). Fibre is Shetland from Bluefaced
Pattern: A mixture of bits from Ann Budd’s The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns and Sandi Wiseheart’s Waist Shaping Instructions and my own fixed ideas about sleeve lengths (I know most people are the opposite to me, but I can’t bear sleeves which are too long – they just get in the way).
It fits me better than anything I’ve ever made before (despite spinning the yarn ALL wrong – in dribs and drabs, as and when, rather than sitting down and getting it all done in one batch to make sure I kept it consistent)
Oh, and I wore it when I met the Yarn Harlot 
(Many thanks to E-J for the picture.)
But I am a truely fickle knitter. Already my affections have been transferred. But this time it’s different. This time it’s for real. I have found my one true love. I’m making Serrano using a baby camel/silk blend. Oh my! I keep stopping just to marvel at the way the stitches lie together. The colour is like liquid gold. It’s soft yet strong. It glides over the needles like music. I tend to be more of a product knitter (with acute startitis), but if when I finish this I turn out to have gone horribly wrong and have to rip it all out and start again, there’ll be no tears. It just means I can play with it some more.
iKnit Day
Going to London always feels a bit like going to a foreign country. The mix of extreme busy-ness and tradition shouldn’t be that different to Cambridge during the run-up to Christmas, but the sheer scale of the thing is breathtaking. For odd trips I love it, although I don’t believe I cope with living there.
Yesterday was no exception, other than that travelling without husband or children, and getting rather over-excited, silly and giggly with various friends made it feel like a journey in time back to irresponsible student days as well. I’ve already moaned about transport issues – suffice it to say that if you ever see me getting on a train with Rosie or Liz, make sure you take a different train. That’s twice the three of us have travelled together, and twice we’ve been significantly held up. (Apparently it’s all my fault as they’ve managed to travel together without event if I’m not there – certainly the rest of yesterday’s escapades would seem to confirm that.)
I simply don’t do underground trains. They are one of my worst heebie-jeebie triggers. It is a lot more fun getting the bus – the bits all fit together so much better when you see them. I’m even beginning to get a sense that London is more than an amorphous mass within the M25. But buses are far more susceptible to the foibles of the traffic.
By the time Ruth (who was less freaked than me by people saying “Oh, you must be Big Ruth” when I introduced her) and I arrived things were well under way. It was busy, but not horrendously heaving and there was masses of yarn and fibre to pet and drool over.
I was pretty good and managed to succumb only to a couple of batts from Rockpool Candy:
and some buttons for my handspun/handdyed/self-designed/handknit cardigan – but you can see that when I’ve sewn them on.
Daisy has done a good round-up of who was there – it was really good to meet up with her, especially as neither of us had had the nous to contact each other beforehand. (It turns out that she was at Greenbelt too, but again, neither of us thought to contact the other one. And Greenbelt is considerably bigger, and we never did make contact there. Sigh.)
The most surprising encounter of the day was when Kate recognised me and said Hello. I haven’t seen Kate since I was 8 months pregnant with Ruth – and that was the first time we met – at a BabyCentre meet-up. This online community thing is a wierd and wonderful world!
So… knitting… on Friday I had a morning to myself – my baby girl has started school:
so, rather than doing any of the housework which desperately needs doing, I sat down and finished the handspun/handdyed/self-designed/handknit/so-far-buttonless cardigan. After all, one must have handknits to wear to see The Harlot. But this left me with a quandary – I’d finished my knitting. I’d even finished my seaming. But I was going to be spending large portions of time sitting on a train. I needed knitting. As I was heading for bed it suddenly struck me that people have a habit of presenting Stephanie with washcloths representing US States. Much as I would hate anyone to confuse Great Britain with a US State, it none-the-less seemed fitting that she should have a GB washcloth… I settled down to sleep telling myself not to be such a sad attention-seeking groupie, and stop being so daft. But then in the morning I realised that I could make a chart quite easily by printing out a map of GB and using squared paper. So I started it – if nothing else it would be good train knitting.
Even with all the delays it still wasn’t finished until just as Stephanie started speaking:
This was the highlight of the day, and the reason why I’d managed to persuade the hitherto-mostly-non-knitting Big Ruth (see what I did there – I think she’s a potential convert – we’ll give her time… ) to come along to a knitting event. (It’s a bit like an SF convention – everyone in fancy dress – aka handknits, everyone getting excited about seeing celebrities – “Isn’t Laura Chau here somewhere?” “Yes, with Isolda”, but with knitting rather than aliens – although there were plenty of those too… )
Stephanie was wonderful – very entertaining and thoroughly knowledgeable about her craft. Mix that with a good sense of what is right and proper (airlines have a perfect right to dictate that knitters should put their needles away on take-off and landing) and perfectly logical consequences (but then they should also get all pens and pencils put away too) and a good dose of feminism, and you have an excellent talk. I’m not certain that as a group we really displayed the full diversity of knitters (I mainly saw white middle-class women) and I’m not entirely sure about some of what she said about alpha, beta and theta brainwaves. (Although just WHO were the Cambridge academics who don’t see that it’s practical to carry around emergency knitting – they’ve never been down the Grad Pad on knitting night!)
Of course, having finished the washcloth just as she started speaking, I didn’t have anything to knit. So I started another one (N. Wales, Kent and Aberdeen were all lacking a certain something on the original) ... and finished it as we queued to have our books signed, while Daisy held all my stuff and Liz kitchenered a sock:
Stephanie was charming and gracious when she accepted her washcloth (and made me feel about 6, but that’s because I’m not a natural groupie, and hate the whole awkwardness of the book-signing situation – I was a bit scared of being like Hugh Grant’s sister (aka Alice from the Vicar of Dibley) in the dinner party scene in “Notting Hill” ). And she took a photo of me with it – I’m checking her blog somewhat obsessively. As I write she’s not yet put up an ‘after IKnit’ post. But when Liz gave her the skein of yarn she’d dyed for her to thank her for the pleasure her blog gives us all, Stephanie recognised her name and knew exactly who she is. Now that’s exciting/freaky/cool!
There’s not a lot to say after that. We went and had a cup of tea and I had to admit to myself that the headache which had been brewing was turning into a full-blown migraine. Daisy and I did a bit more shopping/browsing. I bought buttons for the aforementioned cardigan from L Nichols – they are perfect. Then we wended our way to Victoria to find our buses. (I obviously hadn’t been listening carefully enough to the talk – I wasn’t knitting when the fight broke out just next to our bus, and I was a bit shaken.)
Oh, I forgot the fudge. A stroke of genius – there was a fudge stand there – Ruth and I consumed a whole cone before lunch. (Oooh the hedonistic delights we savour when we are free of the children for the day!)
Pooped
Proper post tomorrow, but for now:
Went to London, the Transport Gods hated me (long delay on train to London, hideous traffic on bus through London towards the iKnit do – ended up getting off partway along Oxford Street, walking to Marble Arch and getting on another one, then on bus from Victoria back to Kings Cross we were held up by a fight in/on/around a nearby car. When the train from London back to Cambridge slowed right down as we got into Hitchin I was ready to do bad things (should have been knitting… ), but it sped back up again and I did finally get home.
That was the bad bit – I’ll do the good hey-I-met-the-Harlot bit tomorrow…
