Monday 31 December 2007

Finis

No, I'm afraid there are no FOs in this post.



This is my last post for 2007, and probably my last post from the UK. I'm flying home to Australia in 4 days (and due to the flight length and vagaries of timezones, will arrive in 6). My partner and I have spent the last week trying to clean out the house and get rid of various goods in a responsible manner.



I'm not quite sure why, but there seems to be far more a culture of the new in the UK than I'm used to in Australia. Maybe it's just the area we live in over here. It's quite difficult to get rid of second-hand but perfectly reasonable goods. We had to throw out more than we were comfortable with, but what can you do? We did manage to sell or give away most of our larger encumbrances and found a recycling centre for much of the rest.



Most of the stash left in boxes to sail the high seas just before Christmas. I had to inventory it and price it for insurance. Given how much I've spent on it, I'd damn well better start doing useful things with it. Hopefully I will see it again some time in March. Two pieces of knitting remain with me: the one row scarf I have been trying to knit for some time now, and a baby jacket for a friend whose baby is due any day now. (I am realistic: the jacket is sized for a 6-month-old.)



Unfortunately my hands and shoulders have been getting a cleaning workout, and knitting is not really on the agenda right now. I have an intermittently pinched nerve in my neck which started bothering me very badly a couple of months ago when I a) slipped on a nameless slippery substance on the footpath and jarred my arm and b) fell up the stairs at a client (I had only had 7 hours sleep in the previous 3 nights) a few weeks later. At the moment the last 3 fingers of right hand ache which isn't too bad: at worst I get numbness, pins and needles, my elbow aches and my shoulder aches. It gets worse when I get cold, so I'm trying to apply heat packs to it on a regular basis.



One more night in this house, and everything has to be out including us. We are staying the next two nights with some friends who put us up for the first month we were over here. The last night we are staying at the airport Hilton: I've spent so many nights in hotels of the Hilton family due to work that I've earned a couple of free nights.



I am still very ambivalent about moving back to Sydney. I've spent 2 and a half years living in London. I can't say it's where I'd choose to stay forever: between the insanely busy lifestyle and my allergy to London air it hasn't been the best time. I've learnt a lot over here, and done things I never would have thought myself capable of. I've overcome my fear of flying and can stand up in front of a client for 5 days on end either training or facilitating and enjoy it. I didn't get to explore London the way I wanted to: too much travel has meant that if I'm actually home on a weekend, that's where I want to stay.



I'll miss the cooler weather terribly. So far the weather forecast for the next week in Sydney isn't awful from my point of view, but it isn't great, either. I'm not sure what possessed us to return at this time of year.



Trying to pack up and go home has been a real pain in the arse, but one of the advantages of this is that it makes me view the long flight home and the fact of being home with more pleasure: we're so tired of packing and cleaning and making decisions that we just want it to be over.

Saturday 15 December 2007

Ravelry

I love Ravelry. I love it for lots of reasons.
1. I can look at how a pattern has turned out for different knitters in different yarns.
2. While it doesn't replace reading blogs, it allows knitting porn viewing in bulk.
3. I find people I would normally never stumble across in my usual web-crawling.
4. I find patterns I would normally never stumble across in my usual web-crawling.
5. People are actually looking at what I'm doing.

I don't know why I find that last point so exciting, but I do. I don't know many other people who knit, and it's nice to have people randomly decide that what I'm doing is interesting enough to look at.

We're busy packing the house up to move. Lots of things are in boxes to be shipped, other things are in piles to be sold or given away. I've signed a contract with my current company's Australian office, and it's all becoming real now. I'm sad about leaving, but I'm also looking forward to lots of things: Christmas, New Year, not working for a month, living in our Sydney flat again, catching up with family and friends.

Mostly I'm just desperate to stop moving at such a frantic pace. I could do with a bit of peaceful slowness.

Monday 26 November 2007

FO: Baby Kimono

kimono

I have finally finished the baby kimono: i-cord ties attached, garment machine washed and dried to prove indestructability.
Mason-Dixon baby kimono in Patons 100% Cotton DK in kiwi and orachard. 4 mm circular needle for garment, 2.5 mm dpns for i-cord. Now let's hope it still fits the poor child for whom it is intended!

Tuesday 13 November 2007

In the meantime

Before I went to India in September, I bought some yarn to make some of the new and immanent babies in my life things to wear. I swatched on planes and trains and in airports, and I knitted in Norway and after Norway.
The sum total of my efforts is a few swatches and most of a Baby Kimono from the Patons from Mason-Dixon knitting: I just have to make i-cord ties now.

baby kimono frontbaby kimono back



Knitting this was an interesting experience, and is a milestone for me: the first thing I have ever knitted with seams, or which is, in fact, a garment (I don't think hats count). I don't think I like seaming much, and I may have figured out a way to knit this pattern without seams. I'll see if I want to give it a try, but I'm not entranced by the way the neck turned out. If it fits the recipient and the recipient likes wearing it, I'll give it another go.

The recipient is my very first "other" family niece: the mothers are two of my friends, the biological father is another friend's brother. The poor little girl has more aunts than she's going to know what to do with.

Randomly, I have aquired some very sweet buttons and beads: the ceramic beads on the left were bought from Perlehuset in Bergen, and the wooden buttons on the right were bought from the shop of the Textile and Costume Museum in Barcelona (unfortunately I didn't get to visit the museum itself). No, I don't know why I have this sudden affinity with owls.


owl beads and buttons



Last weekend I had a friend staying, this week I am in Amsterdam for business. We're flying directly home to Australia, having abandoned plans to go through Canada as too expensive, and we're likely to be too exhausted to enjoy it. We're flying home on 3rd January, which is much too close. I have very mixed emotions about going home. I do want to see my family, I will enjoy living in our flat, and there are things about living in Australia that I miss. I was going to list all the things that bother me about moving back, but I thought for two seconds and realised that compared to most of the rest of the world, I live in luxury and have extraordinary choices and freedoms. I think the only thing I can legitimately complain about is that my partner and I can't get married there.

Sunday 11 November 2007

Twisted Threads

This post has also been written for a while, but was postponed for the same reason as the previous one.

I actually got to go to a fibre show!

Unfortunately I felt like shit, having come down with something deeply phlegmy which has made me lose my voice. I was determined to go, since I'd booked myself a day of annual leave, so I dragged myself out of the house and down to Ealing Common to sit on the Picadilly line for 45 minutes. When I reached Wood Green, there were friendly people in fluorescent green vests showing us where to catch either the W3 or the free shuttle bus. Now, there were enormous queues of elderly ladies at both bus stops, and I couldn't see myself determinedly taking my seat on a bus and preventing one of them from sitting down. I walked, which would have been fine if the phlegm hadn't been in residence. Fortunately the walk up the hill is rewarded by a view of London (hard to get. London is amazingly flat) and only one shuttle-bus passed me, so it was almost certainly quicker than waiting.

The show itself was mad and lovely and crawling with every type of fibre fanatic you can imagine. I bought some small leaflets and a little kit from some braiding people. I stared longingly at batik and shibori. I resisted Shilasdair yarn in both organic cotton and silk, and then went back and resisted them again at the end of the day when I still had money left. I did buy some insane knitted silk fabric (in the gum) from Texere, and I intend to play with it and dye it because I have Kool Aid and I can.

I also bought some yarn from Habu. I first heard of Habu in the context of stainless steel yarn, but I have never made it to New York. They have serious, proper, mad yarn and I love them. I bought some silk out of which to make a bag, I think, and a sample bag to play with. I love that they had sample bags, and I can imagine that I'm going to be sending them an envelope at some point with a letter which says: what is this? and can I please have some more? Although using their website I have figured out three of my 4 mystery yarns:

Clockwise from top left:
A-130 alpaca knitted yarn in 04 - Charcoal
A-110 tsumugi silk combination in 19 - pink/yellow/black
Unknown laceweight, smells as if it has wool in it
A-22 Silk Gima in 03 - Charcoal

Habu assortment


The 4 balls of silk are
A-111 tsumigi silk combination in 7 - Navy, 10 - Camel

Habu A-111


I was very systematic, and I'm pretty sure I went to each stall at least once. There were so many ideas, so many beatiful things to look at and so many lovely textures to touch. It's probably a good thing that I don't get to go to many of these, as I think the number of WIPs might grow exponentially if they were available more often.

Saturday 10 November 2007

Norwegian Fibre Adventures

I wrote this post a while ago, but I hadn't taken any relvant pictures, and work has been more than usually ridiculous. 60 hour weeks. That sort of thing.

So, fibre adventures in Norway.
I didn't get to do as much as I would have liked, but I did get to do more than I'd planned, so I can't complain.

The first fibre related thing I did was to buy some gloves. We took the ferry over from Tørvikbygd to Jondal in order to go and visit the glacier. Just outside the ferry car park there was a little charity shop (I think) full of hand-knitted and crocheted things. My hands were cold, and the fingerless gloves fit my silly little hands. Plus, they're sort of sweet, and like absolutely nothing I would ever knit.


Fingerless Norwegian gloves
Exhibit A


At the nearest town of reasonable size (Norheimsund) there was a lovely yarn shop which I spent some time in. I eventually bought this Ego Tweed yarn because it was just so lovely. I have no idea what to do with it, but that's what stash is for, isn't it? They had lots of other lovely yarns, but I have come to the realisation that moving back to Australia really means that I should be looking for cotton and silk yarns, or thinking about making bags. For all practical purposes, the number of scarves I need in Australia is zero. (Well, maybe one if I plan on taking a winter holiday in New Zealand.)

Ego Tweed



I did visit a couple of yarn shops in Bergen, but although they did have lovely yarn, there wasn't anything I needed. Plus, since we spent rather longer than intended at the place of interest mentioned below, we were rather strapped for time.

My partner pointed out to me that there was a advert for the Norwegian Knitting Industry Museum on our tourist map, and that it was just north of Bergen. I have no idea what possessed her to mention this, but I'm grateful that she did. We went there. They seemed rather surprised to see us, but gave us a tour anyway (I suspect they mainly cater to school groups). The flat knitting machines were cool. The circular knitting machines were cool. The drum carders were not only cool, but seriously pretty. The spinning, winding and plying machines also had a certain cool quality. There was a film about the factory's history, which indicated that they mainly manufactured men's underwear from a cotton/wool mix until they started being unable to compete with the Asia. They were saved briefly in the 70s by a fashion obsession with 'icelandic' sweaters, which they were able to make easily and fairly cheaply, but eventually had to close down. There was fine-gague knitting goodness and a lot of 19th century machinery. What more could a girl want? This girl, anyway.

Tuesday 16 October 2007

33

It's my birthday today. I've got laryngitis (proper coughing-until-you-vomit laryngitis, too), I feel like shit and I think I should probably postpone it. But hey, I'm 33 and that is a pretty number. I've always been a bit ambivalent about my birthday, although not because of getting older: so far life has only improved as it's gone on and I wouldn't go back to my twenties or (shudder) my teens if you paid me an inordinate amount of money.
Birthdays are just odd to me. My family have always been a little strange about cultural festivals: we don't celebrate mother's day or father's day, and we never really celebrated Easter (long story). From when I was quite young we decided that presents should be something you really, really want, which, given our generally expensive tastes, meant that we tended to get birthday-christmas-birthday presents. On one memorable occasion when I was still living at home, everyone I knew, including my parents, forgot my birthday. It pissed me off a bit, but at the same time made perfect sense. If I didn't invest much meaning in the day, why should anyone else?
On the other hand, my partner understands the need for rituals. She got up early and made me breakfast. She wrapped my present with the biggest, pinkest bow she could find because she knew I was feeling unwell and a bit sad.
Although I explained that what I really want this year is a contribution to my sewing machine fund, she bought me Beautiful Thing, which is a DVD I've wanted for years, and which has just been re-released. So I get to stay at home on a rainy day watching a romantic tale about teenage boys from a housing estate (I'm secretly soppy and like to watch romances).
She really is the perfect antidote to my rational, serious tendencies. I don't really know why this gem of a woman puts up with my joy-killing rationalism, but I'm doing my best to put it aside every now and then.
Yes, I am starting a sewing machine fund. We're going back to Australia in January, and I will need a sewing machine. I grew up sewing on a 1960s Singer, and then on a late-80s/early-90s Singer when the earlier one died. Although the later Singer was a bit persnickety, it would sew nearly anything, including 14 oz denim. It's still in perfect working order, but it belongs to my mother, who, as of today, is moving to another state. 14 hours drive is a little far to go to borrow the machine.
I do have a sewing-machine over here, but I'm not taking it home. It's a solid and fairly grunty little thing, but I'd like something with a little more finesse, so I'll be selling it, probably in November.

I'm using a couple of days' enforced rest to catch up on reading blog entries. There were over 200, but I'm whittling them down.

Monday 8 October 2007

Norway

I love Norway. I don't know what it is about Scandinavia, but I love it and would dearly like to live here. I'm sure there are things which would annoy me if I did live here, but this is my fantasy, so I can ignore them.

Getting here was pretty awful. When I got home from India I felt like hell. The M4 eastbound was closed, so it took me over an hour from the airport to home, and I then had to sprint off to the doctor. I rang them when the plane landed, explaining that I was landing from India and had to fly to Norway early the next morning, and needed an urgent appointment. The triage nurse rang me back and agreed that having a sinus infection would make being an air hostess miserable. I had a good laugh at that: clearly the only occupation the doctors' staff could think of when faced with my itinerary was cabin crew. I put on washing, took it to the laundromat for drying and dragged myself up our stairs to pack my bag. I felt ghastly at this point, and everything was taking me at least 3 times as long as it should have.

Somewhere around this time I realised that I had no idea where the information for our accommodation was, and it had only been sent to me in paper format. I found the telephone number of the agency, but the first website I went to gave their hours as 09:00 - 20:00 Monday to Friday. No use at 22:00 in London on a Friday night. I looked up the owner in the Norwegian phone book online, but they weren't listed. At this point I had a small meltdown. Thankfully my partner wasn't home to see me wandering around crying and being loopy. Eventually I got over this, and made a plan. I still had the address of the owner, who I knew didn't live far from the house, and there was a hotel nearby where someone might know who they were. I found another website, which gave the agency's hours as 09:00 - 20:00, 7 days a week. I rang the agency number, but the answering machine was in Norwegian or Danish, and I didn't understand. Plan A was to email the agency and then ring them from the airport to get the details. If that failed, then plan B was to drive to Strandebarm and try to find the owner. Plan C was to sleep in the local hotel overnight and try again in the morning.

Having worked out that, I collapsed on the couch for an hour and took antibiotics and Neurofen Plus. Things started to look a little better.

The taxi was booked for 5:45, which meant getting up at 4:45. I got to sleep some time after 4, after I had packed everything (including copious amounts of knitting) and printed out information for our stay. The prospect of being cut off from the internet for a week makes me a little frantic, as I usually just keep everthing online and don't worry. I actually got asked for my ticket in Hyderabad airport, and I didn't have a printout or know my flight number. Too much flying means that the desk is lucky if I turn up with my passport and know what city I'm flying to. Occasionally I get the wrong country on the first try.

The taxi arrived on time and then drove like a demon. We shut our eyes and tried not to think about it. Stanstead was surprisingly OK as we weren't in the first rush around 7, so there were no queues. The agency answered the phone and my email, and I bought some wireless time to download the details of our accommodation. Our plane wasn't at all full. Once on it, I slid into a dead sleep until we started descent into Bergen.

Once we got our car we had the challenge of driving into Bergen to find the tourist information office. We couldn't get a map of southern Norway at the airport, and Hertz gave us a spectacularly useless one. Now remember that I had had 40 mins sleep the night before and just over an hour on the plane, was suffering from a sinus infection, and was navigating from a tourist map. My partner had had two hours' sleep and was driving a manual car on the right side of the road for the first time. We got very, very stressed in Bergen. There were emergency vehicles at some point. We finally managed to park somewhere after much swearing and explosiveness. We found the tourist info. We found a place that sold very expensive knives (the other half wanted to get a Norwegian knife for her father). We found a supermarket, we found a public toilet. We tottered back to the car and tried to get out of Bergen. It wasn't easy. We went the wrong way a couple of times. Part of this was due to the fact that the detailed map of the city didn't have North pointing to the top of the page, whereas the map of the surroundings did. We then went exactly the opposite way to the direction in which I had been trying to go, and I realised that this would actually work. Two-and-a-half hours later we arrived at the house we had rented.

The house was superb. There was a combustion stove with firewood in the cellar. We drove around and looked at fjords and mirror lakes and windy roads and apple orchards. We drove up to a glacier and watched people ski down it. We fruitlessly tried to get tourist information (we were here after that magic date, 1st October, when tourist activities cease to exist). We drove into Bergen and out again without too much swearing. There was knitting (but not enough), relaxing (definitely not enough) and cooking (probably too much). We bought apples and pears from the roadside, so there was apple crumble and pear crumble. There were roasted vegetables, egg and lemon soup, sausage jumbalaya, more roasted vegetables and hot chocolate. There was a rotisserie chicken which had been soaken in brine, I think, and was the most delicious chicken I have eaten in Europe. One of my partner's colleagues heard that I was having trouble finding tapioca flour and got some for us, which was very sweet of her. I brought it on holiday and made these little cheesy buns. I made them with Jarlsberg, and as long as you knead them until the motor on the little hand-held mixer tries to give up, they are lovely and not too slimy at all. The house had a dishwasher. Lots of cooking did not require lots of arduous washing up. I think a dishwasher may be our first investment once we return to Australia. Life was good.

We sat on the verandah and looked at the fjord. We watched Battlestar Galactica on the laptop of an evening. We had some long overdue deep and meaningful conversations. Can I have a month here? Please?


Sunset view from the verandah 1

View from the verandah... more Norway photos here

In the next exciting installment I will detail the fibre and craft activities we partook of in Norway. There were two yarn shops, a bead shop and a knitting industry museum. My partner willingly watched a 20 minute video on the history of a knitting factory which primarily made underwear. Admittedly she was coming down with the flu, but it's still a noteworthy event.

Sunday 7 October 2007

India

India was exhausting. I had firmly decided to just go with the flow, but nothing particularly disturbing happened. Things just took a long time. One morning it took 1 and 1/4 hours to drive to work because the traffic was so awful: the same journey took 20 minutes the previous day. I had to leave work at 13:00 one day because 30,000 people were coming to the lake next to my hotel to throw statues in it that evening, and I would have had trouble getting to the hotel at the normal time.

The hotel was beautiful: five star Marriott with several restaurants, a pool I didn't get around to swimming in and a beautiful garden.

Avenue of torches Hyderabad Marriott Outdoor seating Hyderabad Marriott Avenue of Elephants Hyderabad Marriott

I found the line of people saying 'Good morning madam' and 'Good evening madam' out the front a little daunting, and the fact that they checked every car that came in the gates for bombs was a little disturbing. I don't cope well with servility - it doesn't sit well with my world view. The food was lovely, and I have picked up a new habit: hot chocolate with hot milk in a jug, demerara sugar and chopped dark chocolate. Put your chocolate in your tea-cup, add a little sugar, pour hot milk over it, wait a little and stir... My excuse is that the room was airconditioned to 20 degrees as a fixed temperature, which when you are not very well can seem rather cold. In general, the food was very good, and I got to eat dishes I miss, like Malai Kofta and Paneer, and discovered Dosa, which will probably be my undoing. I have to learn how to make them. Have to.

I may be the only western person from my company to go to India and, instead of getting an upset stomach, come down with a cold and a sinus infection. I felt pretty awful most evenings. Work was OK: the class were very polite and hard-working, so I was pretty happy with that, and Sudafed Max (bless the British for still stocking pseudoephedrine in pharmacies) got me through most days.

I did have some trouble sleeping, and the last day was bad. I woke up at 04:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. I then worked a little, went to the office for a full day, came back to the hotel to finish packing and have a client teleconference, then slept from around 22:00 to 00:30. Got up, went to the airport, slept around 1 hour on the plane to Dubai and then 3 or 4 hours on the plane to London. I then had to go to a doctor, pick up some antibiotics, and pack my bags for Norway... after which I got about 40 minutes sleep before the taxi to the airport arrived...

Emirates was lovely, and on the Dubai - London leg I got a new plane with almost-flatbed seats. I asked them not to disturb me and slept like the dead for a few hours, after which I picked up a swatch I started about 5 times before getting it right. All I was trying to do was get the correct number of stitches in the correct configuration to have a pretty edge on seed stitch on both edges. The end result is below, but too little sleep made this difficult for me to figure out, clearly. Two of the crew came to talk to me about the knitting and told me how clever I was. Given my inability to achieve a pretty basic task, I felt like a fraudulent 5-year-old.

To have a nice bobbly edge on seed stitch:
Cast on an odd (divisible by 2 +1) number of stitches:
R1 *K P* ...K
R2 Sl P *K P* ...K
Repeat Row 2


One of my colleagues who has been seconded over to the company in which I was training has all her family in Hyderabad, which was why she took the opportunity when it came up. She took me fabric shopping with her mother and mother-in-law. Her mother-in-law was from a weaving family, and was able to tell me not to buy a couple of fabrics because of flaws. There were so many beautiful silks and cottons. I wish I had more time and more energy, but I got a good haul, much of which will be for presents in the future, some of which will be for me and for me alone...

India is so brightly coloured, and a large proportion of the colour comes from its women. The saris and salwar kameez come in colours I'd never consider wearing, but which look so normal in India. The way women ride side-saddle on the back of motorcyles, holding onto the shoulder of the driver, saris floating in the breeze: this still amazes me.

The tiny little yellow taxis and flatbed trucks amused me. I'm not sure what the taxis are, but the trucks seem to be Piaggio Ape. They are crammed with people and goods, and do seem like strange little bees, buzzing around a slightly altered universe.


Piaggio Ape Hyderabad

India was hot, dusty, noisy, humid, tasty and very polite.

I got a very little bit of knitting done: two swatches, one in RYC Cotton Jeans for a Baby Yoda and another in Jaeger Aqua, for either another Baby Yoda or a Baby Kimono from Mason-Dixon Knitting. Babies are afoot.

Sunday 23 September 2007

In transit

As I suspected, life has been a little insane in the last couple of weeks. I've had an average of about 5 hours' sleep a night and I'm desperate for a holiday. One more week, and I'm going to Norway to sit on the edge of a fjord (actually, I suspect I'll spend the first 3 days sleeping, waking up occasionally to murmur 'mmmm, pretty' before dropping off again).

I had a particularly stressful client engagement in Brussels, which involved 6 hours' sleep in 48 hours and falling up a set of stairs, then went to Barcelona for 5 days, three of them work. Unfortunately I caught a bad cold in Brussels, so even though I saw quite a lot of Barcelona (my poor partner joined me for the weekend and had the joy of dragging me around) all I wanted to do was sleep. However, the food was divine and... the Catalans understand coffee. Real short blacks with not a trace of bitterness and jugs of hot milk. Wheeee!

I spent the last week preparing for this week's trip to Hyderabad, India, again for work, which included getting various vaccinations, a last-minute visa application for which I hand-delivered the documents and organising some groceries for a colleage who has been seconded to the Indian office. His children miss weetabix minis and pasta, apparently.

I'm writing this from Dubai airport's Business lounge, as BA WTP cost more than Emirates Business class and Emirates doesn't involve any internal flights in India. My plane is running an hour late, but I can live with that, it just means I'll get to Hyderabad at 4 am instead of 3 am.
So far, the Emirates flight was well worth losing out on the BA miles. Seats aren't flatbeds, but you can stretch out and my gluten-free mean consisted of actual food. One of the male crew took one look at my very short bleached hair, said "Hello, friend" and flirted with me gently the entire flight (much to the confusion of the poor man next to me). I do love gay men.

Dubai lounge
Emirates Business Lounge Dubai at 11pm


Unfortunately I spoiled all this by getting a migraine a couple of hours into the flight, which I could really do without. I still feel shaky and the pain is dulled but still very present.

I am determined to do some baby knitting during our week in Norway, so, in a rather scattered way I ordered some yarns: Patons 100% cotton DK in Kiwi and Orchard, RYC Cotton Jeans in Hessian and Blue Jeans and Jaeger Aqua in Indigo, all from MCA Direct. I knitted a swatch of the Patons to play around with the pattern, ripped it out because it proved that I really can't do intarsia and knit plain one to get gauge. I then washed it and put it through the dryer: it has to survive this, as I don't believe in making mothers of small children hand wash or line dry their clothes.

I got gauge for Cristina Shiffman's baby kimono from
Mason-Dixon Knitting perfectly before I subjected it to the dryer, but I'll have to adjust the pattern to cope with the inevitable shrinkage. I have the yarn, the needles, the swatch and the pattern with me, but between the migraine and getting 7 hours sleep in the last 48 hours, I think casting on might be beyond me right now. Pity.

good intentions
Good intentions

I did manage to find a perfume I sort of like in duty free (Azzaro Visit), but I'll be coming back through here at the end of the week, so I'll see how I feel about wearing it for a few hours before buying it. The perfume I really liked has been discontinued (Body Shop Beleaf) and I'm looking for a replacement. Visit seems to be developing a sweeter scent with wear that isn't what I'm looking for.

Thursday 6 September 2007

Erratic Blogging Expected

I'm not home very much until mid-October, so I don't expect I'll get to blog much, nor to do much knitting or sewing. Next week I go to Switzerland on Sunday and Barcelona on Tuesday, returning late Sunday night. Then 5 days in the office and off to India on Saturday. Return on Friday evening, then off to Norway on Saturday, returning on Saturday night. I think Sunday 7th is the first day I get at home. Madness. At least the weekend in Barcelona and the week in Norway are for pleasure, not work.
sunset over Loch Harport from Carbost 1
A sunset from our Scottish holiday. Photos are in the
travel collection on Flickr.

Sunday 26 August 2007

Sunny Scotland

The week before last was insane: return from Tokyo on Saturday afternoon, spend Sunday washing clothes and dazedly trying to adjust to UK time, Monday off-site at a client, Tuesday and Wednesday desperately trying to recover from being out of office for a week and prepare for being out of office for another week, Thursday leave the house at 4:30 am to fly to Belguim for another off-site client visit, Friday leave the house at 4:30 am to go to Scotland.

Scotland was lovely. It rained for one day of the seven we were there, just enough to make us feel that we really were in Scotland, but not enough to inconvenience us. We flew into Edinburgh and lined up to pick up the car we had hired. We asked for a Ford Mondeo, and got a diesel VW Passat. No complaints there. We could quite happily own one of these cars. We called ours Viktor. It seemed solid, competent and slightly smug. It also purred.

We drove to Oban the first day, seeing a Hairy Coo on the way and managed to arrive at the Falls of Lora at exactly the right time to see the tide going out, purely by accident. Oban is a very busy little fishing village with a distillery and a 19th century folly commissioned by a philanthropist banker to keep local stonemasons in work over winter. It is also the jumping-off-point for the western islands, but we decided to drive up to Kyle of Localsh the next day instead. On the way we stopped off at the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary to amuse ourselves with seals: they have a couple of permanent residents who cannot be released back into the wild, and a couple of baby orphans which they are rearing to be released.

The drive to Kyle of Localsh is lovely: lochs and mountains abound. We were staying in a little hotel just north of Kyle of Localsh which had a pretty setting and was very comfortable, but the food didn't live up to the standard it was aiming for. What's the point of having venison if you cook it until it's fibrous? The duck came off slightly better, but only because there was plenty of fat in it.

We were going to go to Loch Ness the next day and then drive back to Skye, but on realising that the weather was sunny we went to Skye immediately on the grounds that it is often overcast and we should go while the going was good. Skye is wonderful. I could live on Skye quite happily. It has craggy mountains, it has waterfalls, it has majestic headlands, it has lochs, it has sweeping vistas and it has many, many sheep. Disconcerting sheep which wander all over the road and amble off slowly if you approach them in a car, but which run like hell if you point a camera at them.

We stayed in a self-catering caravan on the edge of a loch. We spent our evenings eating dinner and drinking wine and/or whisky while watching sunset over the loch. Even the midges were controllable. And when we scrambled down to the edge of the loch, falling over on slippery seaweed a couple of times, we found an abundance of mussels. I found them too gritty, but my other half feasted on them with great pleasure.

After a couple of days on Skye and a brief visit to Talisker we drove off to Loch Ness and Inverness via Eilean Donan. I have to say I prefer the west coast: the scenery is more spectacular and because it is more spartan, you can actually see it. The country around Loch Ness is far more lush, which means that you get glimpses rather than vistas. We then drove down to Blair Altholl where we visited Edradour distillery and stayed in a lovely B&B which had a decent mattress. This was a great thing, believe me. Good mattresses are rare.

We wandered into the town of Blair Atholl to get some dinner and some milk. On the way we saw some incredibly sweet ducklings: six of them, all skittering around after insects. I never realised how fast they can move on land when they're small. There were also six adolescent ducks which seemed to be quite suicidally stupid and insisted on sitting in the middle of the road. Presumably it was warm. Cars didn't bother them, nor did horns. People had to get out of their cars and shoo them off the road, whereupon they waddled off, grudgingly.

The next day we had a look at Pitlochry, which was far too touristy for its own good, and stopped in at Blair Athol (yes, the town has two 'l's and the distillery has one) and Aberfeldy distilleries before driving down to Edinburgh. It's a very pretty city, but in August it is also a very busy city. We did wander around the town for a while, but we decided to leave the castle as it was a) crawling with people and b) had the enormous and ugly Edinburgh tattoo scaffolding up.

Our plane home was badly delayed, and I was extremely grateful for my frequent flyer privileges with BA, which meant we could use the lounge. Lounges aren't particularly exciting except when you put them in the context of an overcrowded airport (five planes were delayed). The seats are comfortable, there's wine to drink and you can read your book in peace (Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbold Kid, a pleasantly mindless account of growing up in Des Moines in the 1950s).

We were fairly restrained with purchases on this holiday due to luggage restrictions - only one full bottle of whisky! - but I did find some yarn.

The first is two 98g skeins of purple and one 48g skein of green-blue cashmere dyed with natural dyes from Shilasdair. Do not fail to visit if you happen to find yourself on Skye. The yarn is superb (including baby camel!), they will show you their dye-pots and the setting itself is worth the trip.

shilasdair


We also dropped in at The Handspinner Having Fun in Broadford. While they did have some beatiful yarns and I coveted their handdyed mulberry silk, I ended up buying a 100g ball of a brown mystery yarn from the bargain bin. I think it's probably synthetic (it doesn't feel or smell like wool) but it feels pleasant and one of the strands is shiny so I think it will knit up well. Into what, I don't know, but I have a hankering for seed stitch.

brown mystery yarn


I have to do a great deal of washing this weekend, but this is offset by the pleasant task of reading a week's worth of knitting blog entries and catching up on what everyone else has been up to!

I've got my tickets

and I've booked my leave. I'm finally going to the Knitting and Stitching Show which I've been trying to go to for three years. The first year we were too poor and I was too disorganised, the second year we were out of the country. Hopefully I will actually get to go this time. Fibre event! Yay!

Sunday 12 August 2007

Tokyo

Tokyo was interesting. Very hot and humid, I wish I had been sent there in any other season than summer. Winter would have been lovely. Minimum temp was around 27 degrees, max up to 37.

The group I went to teach were lovely, and I got to spend some time with some Australian colleagues, one of whom I've known for years. There were issues: when do I ever get to do something that goes smoothly? but they weren't insumountable. The Japanese had trouble installing their server in the first place. While they did manage to install by the time I arrived, by the second day the performance issues were so bad that I ended up distributing a VMware image to everyone. I had been prepared for some issues, but nothing as bad as we actually saw: the specs of this server were infinitely better than the one on which I trained a similar number of people in June. We had performance issues then, but nothing like we saw this week. I wish we'd had time to reinstall: maybe it was something to do with the changes they had to make after the initial install.

The Japanese in the group managed to overcome their cultural tendency not to ask questions pretty well (the Australians had no reservations to lose). I was worried that they wouldn't ask anything, but I spent a 2-hour session with them on Wednesday evening. I always feel terrible that I don't speak any Japanese: I know how hard it must be to overcome one's fear of asking questions in a language you don't speak very well. They generally get their point across, though.

Between the server issues, prep for the course and the timezone change I didn't get much sleep. I usually adjust within about a week, but my body steadfastly refused to believe that it was in Tokyo, and I woke up at 3:30 most mornings and couldn't get back to sleep. Why it thought it was on the west coast of the USA, I'm not quite sure, since I never went to bed before 10 pm. I also woke up with a migraine on Tuesday morning: thankfully I did wake up at 3:30 and the drugs took effect by the time I left for work.

I did manage to do a tiny bit of shopping... On Wednesday evening the three Aussies and I went into Shinjuku and had a look around. We found a 100 Yen store: the equivalent of a dollar shop or a pound shop, so I bought some random things including some sweet little buttons.


teddy buttons

Must knit baby clothes...

I went back in on Friday evening because I wanted to explore a shop which sold kimono fabric. I decided that most of that was too expensive, although I think the price might have included making up into a kimono: I couldn't really tell.

I then ventured out of the station and found a little fabric shop. I aquired some quilted fabric and some embroidery templates, all packaged in this lovely if slightly inexplicable bag:

felicite bag

How could anyone resist taste of best selection especially for you? I couldn't. I'm not sure what I'll do with them just yet...
quilted fabric natural star

quilted fabric shell quilted fabric star


templates and clasps


The only yarn they had was a terrifyingly lurid range of acrylic: clearly not a knitting shop...

I then ventured somewhat further, and found a bead shop. It occured to me when I got back to the hotel and read the writing on the bag they gave me that if I had used the lift, I might have found more fabric and yarn, but I don't really mind. I got quite a decent haul anyway including a present for my MIL, who beads.

My most exciting purchase was this:

bead applier


it can be used to sew beads to fabric, so I will have to have a try. The instructions are in Japanese and pictures. Thankfully I understand the latter.

bead applier instructions


I even have some beads to try with...

Tokyo beads

The city was humming: a bit too much for me in the heat. It was still 31 degrees at 8pm.

Shinjuku sunset cloud Shinjuku street

Shinjuku Lumine steps


I went for a walk at 4:45 this morning: still opressively hot, but I wanted to see a shrine one of my colleagues had described, and said it had been open when she had turned up one morninig at 5am. Unfortunately it obviously didn't open early on Saturday, so I could only walk around the outside. My camera chose to run out of battery at this point, so I didn't get many photographs, and I should have remembered that just because my eyes adjusted to the light-levels, it didn't mean that the camera could. Humans are more adaptable than I give them credit for.

Yasukuni Shrine entrance dawn Hanzomon streetscape dawn ginko sillhouette
ginko tree flower shop access cover

I then packed and got ready, leaving at 7:30. I'm not quite sure why, but I thought that there were 4.5 hours between 7:30 and 11:00, not 3.5. By the time the taxi arrived at the TCAT to catch the bus it was already 8:00 and I should have been at the airport... There was an accident on the motorway, so I didn't get to the check-in line until 9:30... a little nerve-wracking. I am getting better these days: I've finally convinced myself that worrying and getting agitated doesn't get me anywhere any quicker, so after the initial shock of realisation I was OK and slept most of the bus trip. The worst thing that happens is that the company has to buy me another airline ticket, which they wouldn't have to do if they were less cheap and bought me fully flexible return ticket in the first place.

I'm writing this on the plane, and I've got about 5 hours of a 12-hour flight to go. I got some more sleep at about the right time UK-wise, so I'll see how this timezone change goes. Hopefully better than the last.

The main issue with Tokyo was trying not to offend people. The culture is different enough that this was a constant worry to me. I blew my nose in the classroom, and realised my mistake as soon as I heard giggling. Thankfully my respiratory allergies were absolutely fine and I didn't need to blow my nose after the first day: proving to me again that living in London is not good for me.

My skin allergies went slightly beserk, but I think this is a combination of the heat and humidity, and whatever the hotel washed the sheets with.

This time next week I will be on holiday in Scotland! Yay! Unfortunately I have to do a day trip to Brussels the day before I go on holiday - work rang me up and insisted that I do it, even though I don't know enough about what they want me to talk about. The joys...


Wednesday 8 August 2007

Ravelry

I am on Ravelry as fluffygeek. Of course I get my invite the week I am in Tokyo for training and everything goes wrong. As if I needed more distractions! Still, it gives me something to keep me awake while I'm waiting for 16 GB files to copy...

Saturday 28 July 2007

protecting the toys

As partners of those who buy portable electronic gadgets must know, it is important to protect the toys. They're sensitive to dust and knocks and scratches and a whole host of other ills. And they're damned expensive.

Earlier this year I ran up the following bag for a PSP. Said PSP already lives in a hard case, but the case has open sections which, I have been informed, let grit in. This cannot be. Enter a garish bag constructed out of sample squares of fleece and a ribbon left over from a Georg Jensen present. The materials used can be explained by the fact that I ran it up in a hurry the night before I left for a two week business trip.

toy bag 1

The household then acquired a DS Lite. It acquired a hard case, with similar open sections. It's taken me a couple of months but...
knitpicks memories swatchKnitpicks Memories in Redwood knitted on the Bond (previously shown on 19 05 2007)
toy bag 2 - feltedfelted
toy bag 2 - foldedfolded
toy bag 2 - cordgiven a cord
toy bag 2 - sewnsewn up the base and sides
toy bag 2 - in useand put to use
toy bag 2 - corner detailcan you tell the light was fading? Detail by lamplight.
The twisted cord was made using a couple of metres of yarn, a doorknob, a ball-wider with the cone removed and the brief participation of my patient partner:

  • double the yarn
  • hook the middle around a doorknob so that you have two ends each of doubled yarn
  • start twisting manually
  • realise it's going to take several millenia
  • investigate the ball-winder, remove its cone, stick the yarn ends through the convenient slits in the bit that goes around, tie ends under base
  • turn the wrong way for a while, swear and turn the other way
  • at the point at which the cord doubles up on itself twistily if you walk toward the doorknob, yell for your partner
  • ask her to unhook the yarn from the doorknob
  • grab the yarn at its approximimate midpoint and then hand the free end to your partner to hold with the other end
  • massage the yarn by smoothing it from the free ends your partner is holding towards the folded end you have until all the little twisty bits give up and you have a nice flat cord
  • tie an overhand knot in the free ends and snip the ends to even them up

Gosh. It's an FO.

Thursday 26 July 2007

Evil blogger is messing with my HTML

Blogger is evil. It keeps on messing with my html and screwing up my spacing. It took me something like 7 tries to get my last post to look almost viewable.
In an html editor, line endings have no meaning. Blogger must learn this.

(Is is just me, or am I beginning to sound like a dalek?)

must...make use of...sun

I was at home and awake when we got our late afternoon sliver of sun, and did my best to make use of it.Clapotis is unblocked and the ends haven't been woven in, but the knitting is done:

unblocked clapotis

unblocked clapotis detail purl side

unblocked clapotis detail knit side

It's not my favourite clapotis, but it's my first decent-sized piece of knitting, so I'm pleased.

The one row scarf grows every now and then
one row scarf - basking in late evening sun1one row scarf - basking in late evening sun2

We have achieved proto-socks:

freedom spirit 514 nature
first socks - proto socks
first socks - toe detail

Did I say the Addi's were nice? The Addi's are really, really nice.