Giveaway - result

It is now past the 24th, so I declare my giveaway closed.

I am reminded of the competitions that used to be in the student newspaper when I was at University. My friend was the paper's film critic: the manager of the local cinema used to give him promotional things, like sweatshirts and LPs of film soundtracks. The competition prizes would be these promotional items, and it was fairly easy to win. Usually all you had to do was enter: they'd often be more prizes then entrants.

It is in that spirit that I bring you the winners of the giveaway. Shan will win the grand prize of the little pots, complete with something crafty to go with it. And all the other commenters - that's you, Roobeedoo - will also get a little prize. From your blogs, you seem to be mainly knitters, so it be knitting-related. And it will probably take me a couple of weeks to post them.

Bartering died out?

Does this problem sound familiar?

"A lady exchanged with a friend 18 yd Damask at 3s 6d a yard for muslin at 14d a yard. How many yd of muslin did the lady receive?"

It was in an academic journal article, entitled "Bartering problems in arithmetic books 1450-1890". This particular problem was published in 1887, and was the last one that the author of the article could find in a book.

However, make some changes and you have "A bogger exchanged 18 balls of Rowan Damask for Patons Kroy Sock yarn in colorway Muslin. How many socks could she knit?"

Ob: carved pumpkin (Part 3 and 4)

Remember that pumpkin? It's still in the garden, and still turning into a post-Halloween horror story.

Here it is on the 7th November - a week after carving:


But that isn't the end of it: on the 13th November:


PS Don't forget the giveaway at the bottom of my last post. At the moment you have a very good chance of winning.

Three years of blogging: a retrospective

My life has changed a lot in three years.

Before I started blogging, I sometimes did various journal type exercises to decide on my ideal life. Now I am moving treacle-like towards something very close to the ideas I sketched out. I don't think it was blogging that made these changes happen, but who knows?

To get to here, from there, I had to go through what I called at the time "my year of being". I'd forgotten the name until recently, but I remember realising at the end of 2004 that I simply wasn't acting on the goals that numerous journal exercises had concluded that I ought to be acting on. The Year of Being was a deliberate decision to drift: no long term plans, just to see what turned up.

What turned up was the Open University. I knew about it already, but never thought about it as a possibility for me. By chance, I found out about the T160 Woman Returners into Science, Engineering and Technology course that they were running. So I did that. And then I did the MA290 History of Maths course, and this year the AS208 History of Science. Next year, Latin will feature highly in my ratio studium.

The other major change is that I am no longer the mother of many small children. They don't quite count as a set of medium size children yet, but that is coming very soon. They still need me around, but it is mainly to be approximately here, while they go there. Somewhere I read on motherhood that "the minutes last an eternity, but the years fly by", and that is so true.

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It is traditional, on one's blogerversary, to have a giveaway. My giveaway is the first of a series, and hopefully this one will be a bit of fun. Here are five little stacking craft pots: the winner will get these, and something to go in them based on their interests, whether it is beading, sewing, knitting or something else.



What you have to do is to comment on this post with a suggestion for a change I could consider for the next three years. It could be a major one, a minor one, or somewhere in between. The winner will be picked at random on or after the 24th November. If you have a blog, it might be nice to mention this giveaway there, but certainly not a requirement. And feel free to join in even if this is your first visit here.

Which to choose first

K-thud. K-thump. The post has arrived - but what to open first?

Should I open the latest Yarn Forward? Or should I open the Bulletin of British Society for the History of Maths?

The Bulletin won out: good articles to savour for later. Some of them are on topics of particular interest, but as one of my readers is also in the BSHM, I won't tell you the contents.

Yarn Forward was the second thing to be opened. I thought last month's was fairly dire, with nothing in it which I wanted to knit. This is the opposite: several interesting things. A lot of them are really rather modern, but not one-season wonders.

I was one of Yarn Forward's first subscribers, so there will be a number of other people re-subscribing this issue. It's almost as if they saved up all the good patterns from the last two issues and put them in this to get the maximum number of re-subscribers. Or maybe they wanted to put the boring, mass-market appeal patterns last month, to attract the audience who were first seeing it in WHSmith.

How long?

A few days ago, I found some old morning pages of mine. Flicking through them, I came across my first mentions of thinking about starting a blog. I was a reader of 43 folders, and a few craft blogs. That was June 2005: my blog started three years ago on Friday.

This isn't the blogerversary post: that will come on Friday. There will also be a blogaversary giveaway.

However, that is not all. Looking round at my craft stuff, there is a lot of it. It fills all the space I am willing to allocate. Although I am not in a state of SABLE it is time for me to do something with some of it. So Friday's giveaway will be the first of a sequence, probably posted on Mondays, until the time for giveaways ends. There are no promises, let's see what happens.

Ob: carved pumpkin (Part 2)

Same pumpkin, same pile of leaves.



But what a difference a few days makes:



(Did you notice the white eyes in today's pumpkin: that's from the mould.)

Ob: carved pumpkin

It might not be elaborate, but this is my pumpkin, and I'm very pleased with it: