My cunning and devious plan for the christmas knitting season

Yesterday’s Yarn Harlot page-a-day calendar page contained a note that there were 9 weeks till christmas, which was a fairly strong hint to get on with the christmas knitting.

I know that a lot of knitters get worked up over the whole christmas knitting thing and I think that it’s brilliant that lucky people will be getting lovingly hand-knitted gifts, but this year my cunning and devious plan to deal with it is this:

I don’t think anyone is getting a knitted gift from me this christmas.

There. I said it.

Now please don’t think I’m evil, or uncaring, or a scandalous blight on the knitting world. (Well – you can think those things of me if you want – but I’d rather you didn’t)

My reasoning is this – If I want to knit something for someone, usually I just do it, regardless of whether there’s a birthday or christmas or other officially sanctioned gift-giving opportunity involved; there’s enough going on in my life for me not to want to take on the stress of knitting many gifts in time for christmas, and a lot of the smaller gifts knitters often make for christmas (like hats, cowls, mittens and scarves) just don’t make sense here since it is the middle of summer, and it’s too hot for mittens here even in winter! (and before you start, I don’t knit socks. Ever. For anyone. Not even The Man. Or my Mum.)

Although….The Boy has asked for a Sack Boy, and I have two nieces and a nephew for whom I haven’t made christmas stockings…and…

If anyone needs me, I’ll be hiding in the stash room, hyperventilating about how I’m going to get everything done now that there’s only really 8.5 weeks until christmas……..

It Gets Better

I was shocked and saddened recently to read about Tyler Clementi, an 18 year old gay man from Rutgers University in New Jersey, who died when he jumped from the George Washington bridge after his roommate secretly filmed Tyler's private life and streamed it on the internet.The statistics around all the young men and women committing suicide because of persecution related to their sexuality are staggering.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be so persecuted for something that to me seems so natural. We can no more choose our sexuality than we can choose our skin colour, or whether we like the taste of capsicums. 

Please go and read this post by the gorgeous and talented Franklin Habit on his blog, The Panopticon, discussing his experiences and the It Gets Better project. As a straight, Australian woman, I can stand on the sidelines and shout about how abhorrent anti-LGBT sentiment is to me, and I can quietly provide my support to anyone who needs it, but I can't speak from experience. Franklin can, and does, so very eloquently.

Proud

This is not the first yarn I've spun on my spinning wheel, but it is the first that I'm really proud of. It's 19.5micron merino from Highland Felting and Fibre Supplies, which I hand-dyed with Queen's food colouring before spinning. It is incredibly soft.

I'm not certain what this is going to become, but I know it is going to be something for me. I think a nice soft drapy scarf will be nice.

ps - I've been writing a long post about my spinning wheel but it isn't quite finished yet - I need to get a couple more photos. Hopefully it will be finished soon.

What?!!! No allen key?

These bookshelves (Billy, by IKEA) disappointed by not containing one single fastener that required the use of an allen key. I thought EVERYTHING at IKEA, even the swedish meatballs, required assembly using an allen key. Obviously I'm wrong (and despite the fact that the restaurant was almost full when we left the store, not one single person was eating their meal using an allen key, so I must be wrong there too!)

But, they are proving their usefulness by allowing me to turn this...

Into this...

Well, not quite.  I still have about 5 boxes of books to go, and three more 80cm wide Billy bookcases. Of course, we measured incorrectly and at least one of the bookcases, and possibly two, are not going to fit in the room. We hope the lovely people at IKEA will take them back and exchange them for other attractive and functional Scandinavian self-assembly furniture with unusual names. 

And now I can start using the emptied moving boxes to try and organise the craft room. Currently it looks like this.

...which is completely unmanagable, but at least is serving to remind me how much cool stuff I have in the stash.

One of the reasons I love my family

I had a rotten day yesterday. Crazy busy, trying to manage about 5 or 6 serious problems at once, and to top it all off, our new staff member, who has been with us for under 2 weeks, decided that it wasn't the job for him, and resigned.

I had to stay late to take care of some of the issues, and stumbled in the door at home at 9.30, tired and cold from the walk from the bus in the wind.

When I got inside, The Boy was really excited and told me that he had made something to cheer me up after my bad day. I walked into the games room to find this:  

It's a Doctor and TARDIS made from Lego. Some artistic licence, and some forced by the available Lego pieces, but just gorgeous nonetheless, and just perfect to cheer me up after a nasty day.

Have I ever told you I love my family?

We've moved in but I still can't find my swift and ball-winder!

We have successfully moved into the new house (thanks to the 4 burly blokes from the moving company who spent about 6 hours cheerfully and expertly moving all of our stuff 110m up the street) and have unpacked all the essentials, so it's starting to feel a bit like home. We've reached that limbo point where we need to do some big stuff like getting the Salvo's to come and get the furniture we no longer need and buying bookcases to go in the spot currently being occupied by unwanted furniture before we can realistically unpack any more boxes.With the next two weekends totally booked up, it looks like we're going to be in limbo for a while yet. That's frustrating, but we're just going to have to live with it.

Most of my knitting lately has been for a swap project so I can't show it yet. I've finished all the knitting for the swap and while some of the work (which involved some techniques new to me) didn't end up as precise as I would have liked, I'm pretty happy with the end result. 

Since I finished the swap knitting on Tuesday night, I've started on two new things. The first is a hyperbolic crochet bath scrubbie, which I'm trying out because my old plastic net scrubbie reached the end of it's unnatural life and the new one I bought at the supermarket was really rough and scratchy. The idea for a crocheted one started out when I was crocheting flowers for the knitted garden for I Knit Brisbane and thought that if you just kept going with the hyperbolic crochet you'd end up with a sort of squiggly ball which would work really well as a body puff/scrubbie. 

I think it's turning out okay, but it is taking forever as I'm not good with the crochet and I'm slow. I'm not even sure if I'm doing it right as I'm using a technique partly from half-remembered lessons from my sister and partly gleaned from the internet, but I'm definitely making fabric and it looks like it will serve it's purpose and ultimately that's all that matters, right?

The other project is a scarf for Mum. She rang a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could make her one of the "fine, narrow scarves" she's been seeing around lately. Since I was up to my eyebrows in swap knitting at that time, and now there's not too much left of winter, I've decided to make a simple scarf now and plan something more complex for next winter. It's a One Row Lace Scarf in Arucania Ranco Solid. So far it's 19cm long.I had to hand-wind the ball from the skein as I have no idea where my swift and ball-winder ended up in the move!

I'm sorry for the blurry photos, but I still haven't gotten myself sorted with the proper camera after the move so these were taken with my crappy mobile phone camera.

I'm hoping to get the guest/craft room more organised over the next week or so, and then I will post pictures of my new domain. It looks like a yarn shop exploded in there at the moment!

Has anyone seen my life? Oh yeah, I packed it in a box...

We move into our new house on Tuesday. That's providing there are no issues with settlement on Monday, but I've been as much of a control freak as I can and chased everyone up on this side and I think everything is now actually out of my control now.

Virtually everything is in boxes or bags or suitcases or plastic crates and everything else will be following suit tomorrow. I'm pretty sure my sanity is packed along with them. At least I hope it is, because I sure as hell can't find it anymore.

I know just about everyone says this when they move, but I had no idea we had so much stuff.

I have finished the knitting on my Citron, but there are six balls of yarn in it and the yarn was full of knots so there are about four million ends to sew in. I've put it aside for the moment and I'm working on several pairs of Saartjes Booties for all the babies who are due among my workmates at the moment. I also finished a little baby knitted t-shirt that was sitting almost finished in the UFO pile. No photos yet as I can't find the camera. It's probably in the box with my sanity.

I've signed up for my first swap, for Christmas in July with Brisbane Stich 'n Bitch. I hope that I'll be able to have something nice completed even with next week being totally messed around with moving. I'm nervous but I'm sure I can make something passable, and make up any shortfalls with chocolate!

We had a trivia night for the choir tonight. My team won best decorated table (we were black and white and had streamers, tablecloths, stuffed animals and everything) and we also won the quiz. It was a fun night.

To make it all a bit bizarre, some local students were filming a scene for a short film just outside where we were having the quiz, and they asked us all to be extras in a party scene.. It was meant to be a scene at a "teenage" party so everyone over 30 and everyone under 12 had to stand up the back, probably so they could keep us out of focus. Somehow I don't think this is going to be my ticket to stardom!