Just arrived...

What are they queued up for?

The latest Yarn Forward magazine:


It's mine, I tell you, mine!

Yarn Forward News

I'm feeling smug - I managed to post about the latest Yarn Forward news on Ravelry before anyone else, and the news isn't yet on the Yarn Forward blog. The news came out in an email sent out to subscribers.

We’ll be sending out a pdf press release throughout the day to major knitting retailers, designers and companies. We’ll also be posting on all the big forums, blogs and anywhere else that we can to spread the good news.

Impressions - Hyperbolic Crochet Reef

I was in the South Bank yesterday, with a few spare minutes to look at the Hyperbolic Crochet exhibition. I only had time to gather impressions rather then descriptions.

The dominant impression was of the soft velvety texture of the reefs made from thick chenille yarn, which longed for me to touch and stroke them. This contrasted greatly with the hard, defined, jewel-like reef made of seed beads, shut away behind protective glass.

The one structure that stood out was a knitted sea anemone.

It got me thinking. If I was alone in a room with a net guru and the hyperbolic crochet reef, would I use it to explain the database that was ravelry? What if I was too unimportant to have a name badge, and he was too important to need one?

A million ends

I haven't been able to show my knitting, because it is for a swop. A swop with the dealine for posting at the end of May. However I chose a very pretty pattern, without reading the Ravelry comments about it. One would have warned me "there are a lot of ends to sew in".

Part one of the pattern was simple but each repeat of part two took longer then I expected, and I could only do a limited number at a time

Actually I exaggerated in the title, there aren't a million. But there are about 100, (unless I've under-estimated) and I did the 36th today.

Messy Lives

When my parents were well and healthy they did things like knit multiple ponchos for my brother's bridesmaids, and did much pruning in our garden and travelled to Machu Picchu and met princes and former ambassadors. I talked proudly to the other mums about what they were doing at playgroup when I collected children. And my friends talked about the interesting things their parents did.

And then my parents got old and ill. And when they decided to move house, I had to travel for two hours (each way) to meet the estate agent and show them round the house. And then my mother went into hospital, and the move happened around my father, and I signed the things that had to be signed, and orgainsed the storage unit. And when I mumbled about this to my friends at the school gate, a different set of friends told me about the daft things their aged parents and parents-in-law were doing, and I realised that my parents were part of a different set of parents. Some people's parents might be climbing mountains, and talked about with pride by their grown-up children. Other people's parents found climbing stairs beyond them, and their grown-up children kept quiet.

And that is today's installment of messy Tuesday.