Now I know what people mean when they say they’re sick with excitement!
So many things happening. The Mystery Project kickstarter is being edited. I’m getting free yarn. I’m trying to put a portfolio together, and learn Arts-speak. Also, off to Belfast !! St George’s Market Lighthouse Yarns stall, here I come!
And just for a gas, willya listen to Michael D makin’ poundies of the Yanks. That man can chunder better than me Ma! Truly worthy of this appropriate little knit…
Today I got out of bed all by myself and did a reasonable day’s housework. Go me!
This is after nearly two weeks of paralysing pain. I have been bothering my doctor for months about the constant pains and aches I suffer, especially in my hands and arms. Some of it I could ascribe to getting older and being fat and unfit, but I felt there was no way I should feel as if I’ve overdone things badly at the gym following a day’s potting about the house. I’ve been tested for everything, all negative.
Finally got an appointment with a rheumatologist, who has diagnosed fibromyalgia. However, the day of the appointment, I woke up with a frozen shoulder (bursitis). I haven’t been able to drive since. I’ve had to get the Mighty Offspring to help me out of bed more than once. Topped it off by nearly collapsing in a supermarket carpark while waiting for a lift. I feel like I’ve been beaten up – on a good day.
It has left me worrying how I’m going to hold down a job if I go through periods like this. How do I get to work if I can’t drive? How do I do my job if I’m in so much pain that I can’t move, or can’t lift my arm up to write on a whiteboard? How do I do my marking and planning if I’m so exhausted I fall asleep as soon as I sit down? It’s been suggested i apply for Disabled Living Allowance, which would help with the cost of taxis, for example, but what about the rest? I could do supply, working only when I’m able, but I won’t get much repeat custom if I can’t work when I’m asked. Tutoring on the same basis is a possibility. I could do more serious design work too, set up a proper sole tradership.
And figure out what drugs are going to sort me out, if any.
Wah wah wah…
A few designs ago, I needed a stitch pattern that doesn’t curl. Those would be garter stitch, moss stitch, and ribbing. Unfortunately, none of these was going to cut the mustard for this particular pattern: it had to be something relatively smooth, non-curly, and firm.
I went on a bit of a quest and finally came across linen stitch, which worked beautifully for the purpose. In another design, I found that a cabled cast-on does a decent job of stopping a stocking-stitch hem curling, as long as the cast-on is a reasonably close fit.
This has made me wonder what other patterns might lie flat. There must be more – it’s just balancing the knits and purls. Garter, moss and rib have their place, but they also interrupt the flow of a garment. Rib pinches in the drape, moss looks like mini pompoms, and garter’s just nasty – chops off the vertical line, introduces a horizontal accordion banding.
So I’ve been looking through some stitch dictionaries. There’s some possibilities, so I think I’ll just try knocking out some swatches.
Watch this space!
On to the next!
I’m supposed to be putting designs together!
Many years ago, I watch a series of Irish language programmes on the BBC. The fact that most were filmed around Donegal was a big draw – it was fun to spot the different areas.
One episode stuck in my mind – The Thorn Tree*. It wasn’t the setting, but the story. I was aware that hawthorn trees had a special status in Ireland: an old superstition that they should never be cut down. Sometimes, they were called ‘fairy trees’. Supposedly, they were inhabited or protected by Irish fairies – the fay, sidhe, little folk, Tuatha De Danaan, lords and ladies, etc. and so forth. Irish fairies are not the twinkly, fluttering, bluebell-dwelling, granters of wishes of Victorian England. They’re a troublesome bunch of savages, to be avoided or placated. Leave a bowl of milk on your doorstep, or your cows will go dry. Dress your sons as girls till they’re four, or risk them being stolen. Never travel past a crossroads or a fairy ring or a henge by night, or be driven mad or taken in the dance. Bargains struck with them will always go wrong – for you. Their favour is as damaging as their enmity. They’ll taken you for your beauty, or your talent, or just for the music of your screams. A right shower, the lot of them. You have been warned.
Personally, I look for the practical reasons behind these old superstitions. Don’t walk under a ladder, not because it’s bad luck, but because the eejit on top of it will probably drop his hammer on your head. Black cats crossing your path are bad luck only if you trip over them, and thirteen is an unfortunate number of guests at a formal déjeuner. Now, thorn trees have been used forever as boundary markers, hedging, and so on. Great stuff for keeping the sheep contained, and keeping the grockles orff yore laaaaarnd. Funnily enough, if someone were to take an axe to your thorn tree, well, there go the sheep, and all sorts of undesirables would be turning up on your doorstep. Bailiffs and landlords, for example, or that land-grabbing fecker down the road who can now claim that the boundary marker between your farms is that tree 200 yards closer to your house than the one that’s now warming his hearth…
Anyway. The Thorn Maiden. She’s seen only briefly in the programme, a pouty, willowy nymphette with a cloud of dark hair, in wispy robes entirely unsuited to the Irish weather, waving her arms ineffectually at the gasúr chopping down the tree while whortling in a vaguely Enya-like manner. In the story, the wielder of the chopper is driven crazy by this apparition, and forced to make reparations before fleeing the country.
Umm, no. That skinny wee girleen wouldn’t scare the hens off their mash. Somehow, I’d expected to see someone like Bang, my old boarding school matron: a dour, curmudgeonly spinster in stout sensible shoes, carrying a lump of gnarly wood vainly passing itself off as a walking stick. To see Bang bearing down on you with purpose in those dragon eyes was to know true fear**.
That’s my Thorn Maiden – more thran than thorn. Now, get off my laaarrnd!
* Link to PDF about the episode. AFAIK, the video is no longer available.
** Actually, she was a lovely woman. Just scary as all get out.
Because You Can Never Have Too Much PI – pi fez!
Okay, it’s a beanie – unless you felt it into shape. And add a tassel. The numbers down the sides list π to 50 decimal places. To be specific, it starts: Π ≈ 3.14… i.e., π approximates to 3.14, etc. Cos that’s how I roll.
Fun Facts About Π:
Monday midday I got a call from the Children’s Hospital. They had an 8am Tuesday cancellation, if I could get the Mighty Offspring there fasting for his endo and biopsy. Given that his own appointment might be months off, I went for it. MIL drove down and collected us that evening, and drove us to the hospital in the morning (my car is still off the road…).
Mighty Offspring was stellar. He put on such a performance, all the staff loved him. He told jokes, explained the procedure to them, got drinks and ice lollies for the other patients after they came back from surgery. He was a bit sick and woozy after the procedure, but that passed quickly.
The worst moment for me was when he passed out when they gave him the anaesthetic. One moment he was blowing up the “balloon” like a good’un, then his little arm flopped down and his eyes closed. It felt like he’d died. I had to go outside and chain-smoke until the ward sister rang to say he was in recovery. I never want to go through that again, but I will.
The surgeon didn’t see anything on the endo, but he says that in his experience, with MO’s numbers, the biopsy usually comes back positive for coeliac disease. If that happens, he’ll need another endo in six months, to confirm that a gluten-free diet is working. If it’s not positive, the diagnosis will be latent CD, and the endo will have to be repeated in 12 months.
Either way, I’ll have to watch my only baby flop into unconsciousness again. And I’ll do it.
I got my first pattern accepted for publication!
Can’t say much about it, but it is a typically weirdy thing (see previous post) and will probably be in print in about a year’s time. I actually submitted two designs, as a matching set, but the second was a garment that had a lot more competition. There, I don’t think I’ve given too much away! I’m exploring where I can publish the second pattern. Possibly with a few mods, possibly not.
So now I’m trying to put together the most comprehensive spreadsheet of sizes in the known universe. I’ve got the Craft Yarn Council’s Standards, used by Knitty amongst others, a spreadsheet by Marnie McLean, who is one of those designers whose pieces I recognise instantly, a chart from a bra company that I can’t find online any more (why didn’t I bookmark it!), and sundry other charts for babies, children, teenagers and adults, covering heads, hands, feet, and anything else I can think of. If you’ve got a body part, I want a measurement chart for it. And no, photos are not acceptable. Yech.
Meanwhile, the head is a-buzz with ideas. As part of an effort to be more organised and logical, I’ve created a set of folders on my laptop for calls, submissions, acceptances, random ideas, useful information, etc. Now I’ll have factor in work times to sit down and do a certain amount of work each day.
One thing the submission process taught me is that I desperately need a decent digital camera. My Fuji FinePix, crapulent thing that it was – one snap and the batteries died – has finally departed this mortal coil, and after selecting a new mobile phone specifically for its high-spec camera, the photos from it are corrupted every. single. time. I had to use the thumbnails for my submission… I do have a great selection of film SLRs, but running off an entire film for each submission, then travelling thirty miles to a developer and paying over the odds for digital copies, just to have a single photo of a sample just doesn’t jib with me. Maybe for Knitty, where I’d need to submit the photography, but otherwise? Nah.
Unfortunately, I don’t really understand digital cameras. Megapixels, CCDs, all wash over me. Apparently, for reasons that I don’t really understand, a digital camera with so many MP will produce much better photos than a camera phone with the same MP, all other things being equal. I’m reasonably good at spotting quality film cameras, but digital is still a bit of a mystery. All I really know is, the higher the MP, the bigger the resulting photo can be without degrading the quality, and digital zoom is way less important than optical zoom.
Okay, ya got me. The teacher will out. Supposing you want to print your photo at a fairly high-quality 300dpi (dots per inch = resolution = clarity), and you need a standard-sized 6″ x 4″ photo to fit in your photo frame. The formula for the minimum number of megapixels you need is
MP >= (height x dpi x length x dpi) / 1,000,000, (or (hl.dpi^2)*10^-6 if you prefer)
(6 x 300 x 4 x 300)/1,000,000
MP >= 2.16
So you need a camera with at least 2.16MP for this size of photo at this resolution. However, if you want an A4 (11.7 x 8.3) size photo – the typical size for graduation photos, for example – then the formula goes
MP >= 11.7 x 300 x 8.3 x 300 / 1,000,000
MP >= 8.7399
So realistically, you’ll need 9MP for that special day. Interestingly (well, for me anyway), if you wanted to announce the event in the newspaper, you’d need an image that’s only at 72dpi. How big an image can you send them from your 9MP camera? Well, we can work the formula backwards to get the area of the photo:
Area = (MP x 1,000,000) / (dpi x dpi)
(9 x 1,000,000) / (72 x 72)
Area = 1 736.11111…
Now, at this point, I would usually square-root the answer to give me a rough value for the height and length of the image – around 41″ x 41″, if you’re interested (I know I am) – or you could try something a bit more principled, like using paper dimensions. The A0 size (46.8″ x 33.1″) comes in about 8MP. For comparison, that’s 1 square metre, about twice the size of a full spread broadsheet newspaper like the New York Times or the Daily Telegraph. You’d need to be really proud of yourself to pay the publication rates for a pullout centerfold poster in any of those…
I’ve been thinking about my ‘voice’. That’s designing voice, what with me doing a bit of designing these days and all. Apparently it’s really important to find your design voice.
Frankly, I don’t think I’ve done enough to have a voice – 4 designs published, and maybe as many again in the creative pipeline. What do they have in common?
The planned designs include (1) babywear, (2) accessories, and (3) adult garments. (1) may include some colourwork, and challenging construction. (2) will also include some colourwork, and some lace, but otherwise quite straightforward. (3) will almost definitely be brand-name yarn, and perhaps some challenging construction. Many in categories (1) and (3) may strike some (~cough!~ boring) people as freaky, weird, or mentally unbalanced, and at least one from category (2) as mildly eccentric. But what do I know, I’m on the moon picking whootleberries.
Strange colourwork in bargain bin mystery yarn.
My voice is cracked.
thornmaiden.com 