Patience is a Virtue

Unfortunately, not one that I possess in any significant quantity. When I've thought of something - or, even worse, decided on something - I want it NOW. Not tomorrow or a couple of days time, but instantly. The current postal strikes are testing my limits - having ordered the fragrance oils I wanted, they were despatched yesterday, but really I have no idea when I'll get them.

I think when I was younger, my impatience wasn't such an issue, as I pretty much only had myself to please. If I wanted to do something, I got up and did it. Having a husband ought to affect that. Having children does affect that totally. Everything depends on their schedule, and has to fit in with their schedule, or else the world as we know it will end.

This week, the schedule is light, as it's half-term. We have a dental checkup this afternoon, friends coming to play tomorrow, my sister visiting on Thursday and taking my DD away with her on Friday for the weekend. However, I am finding that I still need patience - because I can't get on with some of the things I want to get on with, as the kids insist on trivial things like meals and clean clothes; and also, patience because DS is being Demonspawn this week. We're not quite at the stage where we need Supernanny or Nanny 911 (in fact, we already use many of their methods) but it feels like it's getting close .....


In spite of the offspring, I managed to complete
the pink baby cardigan referred to here. It's the second time I've knitted this pattern - the first time was for my Auntie Celeste's Texan grandbaby, but I picked a pretty yarn that didn't show the pattern detail.








And thanks to some help from my fellow Ravellers, the baby hoodie is going fine too - in attaching to the neckline, I needed to work some increases, but picked the wrong increase. Now I have learned to do the KFB (knit front and back) increase - yaaaay, me.


In other news, I seem to be being sucked back into the teaching side of TABI. They are short on teachers right now, and I seem to have time to spare. I only have time to spare because housework is so low on my list of priorities - life is far too short to waste on something so repetitively futile. In fact, I would recommend children and pets as THE way to illustrate the absolute pointlessness of housework - with monotonous regularity, no sooner has the floor been mopped (sometimes it hasn't even dried completely) than either the dog has left a trail of pawprints, or, more likely, DS has spilled his juice ....again. Or I vacuum, only for DD to decide that she simply must make something that uses glitter .....and then she sneezes. I think you take my point. Besides, aren't dust bunnies a lifeform ?

Christmas Plans

So I need to get all my ducks in a row - if I don't want my Xmas gifts to look like something from Blue Peter, I need to plan now, and get making right after that. For the last few years, we have given largely crafted presents, owing to poverty. So far, we have done jams, chutneys, a selection of fudge, soaps, a selection of Czech biscuits from my Babicka's recipes (sorry, have no idea how to do the thingy above the 'c'). All seemed to have been received with enthusiasm.

First on my list is my soaps. I asked for suggestions of Xmassy fragrances from my friends, and have pretty much decided on frankincense & myrrh (professional soapers get really bored with this one, but it's new to me), evergreen/pine, orange & cinnamon, and either mint or maybe a mulled wine fragrance, which I shall get from Jo at Sensory Perfection. The F&M and orange & cinnamon will be orangey colored - I'll use non-refined palm oil for them; evergreen I shall color with French Argiletz clay, and the mint one I shall experiment with titanium dioxide. I may repeat the layered Turkish Delight soap I made last year - colored with pink clay and French Argiletz clay.

If I'd known chemistry could be this exciting and interesting, I might have stuck with it at school ....'you mean you add these crystals and it then heats up on its own ??'.....'and it can do this to you if you get it on your skin ??' (I can't bring myself to post pics, just Google 'caustic soda burns')

And while I'm in soapmaking mode, I shall probably sneak in a batch of lavender (the alkanet root to color it is steeping as we speak), as I've been requested for some, and a batch of my personal favorite, Vanilla & Chocolate (which contains plenty of decadent cocoa butter, and real cocoa). I'm not usually a vanilla fan, but there's something about this I really like. I wish I had more molds - Somebody said he'd make me a couple more, but he ran out of time (you know who you are, Dad).



One of my SILs is expecting in February; I have
completed one baby cardi in Sirdar 3 ply gifted from my Shetland SIL; on the needles I have a 4 ply hoodie, and on yet another set of needles, a feather and fan baby blanket in a great marble yarn from JC Brett (scroll down). Everything is neutral colors as they don't know the sex of the baby.

In addition, on a recent visit to Taverham in Norfolk with my father and sister, I bought some fabrics to make a baby cot quilt. I made one for my eldest niece (now 18!), my daughter, my son, and my DH's friend Samantha's DS Benjamin when they were born (pics below). This time, I have somewhat departed from my color comfort zone, picking brights rather than pastels; I feel they're a modern, trendy couple that would prefer these colors more - I hope I'm right !


DD's cot quilt










DS' cot quilt


Ben's cot quilt (reversible)

















bright colors for the new cot quilt

None of my extended family seem hugely into the internet, so I feel I'm fairly safe in this continuing to be a surprise.

On top of that, I need to knit DD and DS something for Xmas; I already have the pattern for both of them, and the yarn - for some reason I've forgotten, I seem to have shedloads of bright red yarn. Lucky for me DS' nursery color is red, and the dress I'm planning for DD (see earlier post) is red polka dots. The Universe works in wondrous ways.

So .....guess I better quit gabbing and get on with doing !

(apologies for the not-great photos & the formatting seems to have gone odd today)

Struggles

This Saturday was my DS' 4th birthday. He is now fully Ben Tenned up - pyjamas, sports bag, watch, action sticker book, monster illuminator thingy, and, of course, the birthday cake itself - thanks to his aunties and uncles and our excellent neighbor Su. He also received lots of army stuff - little plastic men, tanks, missile launchers etc. Stereotype, much ?

He was chuffed with his Ghostbusters outfit, complete with inflatable proton pack, even though he broke it within 10 minutes of putting it on. He had one friend to play, and his sister had one friend to play, which meant the kids amused themselves while the adults drank wine, lots and lots of wine. I think we'll follow this format again.

My father flew back out to Tennessee, where he'll be for about a week before heading back down to Honduras. While we have the central heating on, he may just have to put on a light jacket if the evenings get cool .... His English house is completely rewired, a brilliant job done quickly and neatly by the electrician Andy Smith.

This week, I shall be struggling to add Google Analytics to my
website, Kismet's Companion. I have the html code, it tells me where to put it; however, as I'm a technical luddite, I have a package which has a sitebuilder (point & click). I can get it to show me the html for the webpage I want, but when I add the Google html code, it shows as html code in the finished version. Hmm. I may try again tonight when the kids are in bed, and I can concentrate without interruptions. Also today, Mozilla Firefox is not cooperating at all nicely with Blogger - I've been trying to do this post since lunchtime, with brief breaks for swearing, nicotine, cup of tea, and trip to collect DD from school. It does not want to upload pictures.

Yesterday, I dug out the sweater I have been attempting to knit for

DH. It's been on the needles since the end of December 2008. Actually, I hadn't realized that it has been quite that disgracefully long! The pattern is a shawl collar sweater from the Lion Brand website. Last time I knitted a sweater for DH, a raglan turtleneck, it was also from this website; I assumed the measurements etc were accurate. It was woefully short, and the supposedly long sleeves were elbow length on my DH. Rather than frog/re-knit black boucle yarn, one of my sisters-in-law was very happy with it - so not an entire waste of £60 worth of yarn, but a total waste as being DH's birthday present.

So this time the sweater is in charcoal, in aran weight; I have diligently measured, and added 17 inches in length to the sleeves, and 10 inches to the length of the body. No, my DH isn't Shrek, I believe it's the pattern at fault again. Everything was going swimmingly - I set in the sleeves, added the panels for extra width - it all matched up nicely. And fitted. Until DH tried to get his arm into the sleeve - the underarm part of the sleevehole was too small. So I chucked it into a corner and we have been sulking at each other ever since. Which is months now.

I have now tinked back several rows on the side panel, and am knitting increases on every row til it gets to an appropriate width, and then I shall decrease like mad also, to hopefully achieve a diamond-shaped gusset thingy for the underarm. And if it still doesn't fit, if he still can't get it on, after that .....Bonfire Night approaches.

Images from the Universal Waite, and the Beardsley Tarot

Kicking Butt

My friend and talented knitter, the witty Eskimimi, has started a group on Ravelry designed to help people like myself, who lack blogging motivation and self-discipline. I'm interested to see what hints and tips will turn up that will help me improve this blog. Mainly, I'm hoping the group spirit will guilt me into actually posting properly - frequently and regularly.

Of course, these last two weeks, I do have the excuse - I mean, reason - that my father's home from Honduras for a few weeks. He's having his house rewired, and so nearly 30 years' worth of clutter and junk needed to be removed from his loft and then sorted. He hired a skip, and I admit that we were exceedingly wicked ....we were throwing out a lot of books. I'm not sure that there is any greater crime. To balance that, my mother had been the main hoarder of books; she bought many from the ex-library sales. I wish I could ask her why and when did she ''Teach Yourself Persian''. Bizarre, but this is only one example of her random book-buying compulsion. My father tried everywhere to find a home for these books - charity shops, colleges, prisons. Nobody wanted them. OK, I understand why the prisons didn't want her vast array of true crime murder/mystery books. But, have books in general lost their value, their meaning, interest to people ? Surely somewhere there should have been a loving home for ''Certificate Needlework'' and her sisters, the ''Golden Hands'' magazines ? I live in a house designed for dwarves, with no storage, or else I might have rehomed these lost and lonely repositories of knowledge. But, no, we hardened our hearts and turned our faces away from the pleading of dedications made in 1899 or whenever. Perhaps we should have hung onto them until November 5th, pretended we were some kind of revolutionaries, and bonfired them. But that would have been too public an admission of our shame.

So, my routine (such as it is) is completely out of whack. The most knitting I've done was on Saturday, when I babysat for my neighbor's baby. The baby slept through, and so I started and finished the RH front of a baby cardi in pink. The back and sleeves had been sitting there for a while, since I'd run out of the yarn. I ordered a ball of what I thought it was - Stylecraft Special DK in pale rose (scroll down about halfway to see it). It arrived and totally was not the right color. My sister visited, fished around in my on-the-go project bag and found a ballband for this, Baby Rose shade 867, Hayfield Baby Bonus DK (there's no picture of this shade on Sirdar's site, can you believe it ?). So no wonder it didn't match. The importance of keeping one's ballbands with one's projects as opposed to just chucking them straight in the trash is now clear to me. It's not a Mistake, it's a Learning Experience. See, all those Human Resources seminars over the years did have some use ......

Too Much ....

...to do.

This week I have realized I am spending waaay too much time on the interweb as a form of avoidance. I did manage to buckle down and take up and hem my DS's first pair of school trousers, ready for the start of kindergarten today.

But I am giving a talk for TABI on Saturday in Bury St.Edmunds, and so far have only a few draft notes written down for my theme, which is 'Fun & Amusement: The Forgotten Side of Tarot'.

I am also avoiding setting in the sleeves of DD's school sweater, knitted in an eye-watering shade of green called'Jade'.





I hate sewing. So why did I buy a dress pattern marked 'easy' in order to attempt a dress for DD ? And when did fabric prices get so high ? I remember when 'home-made' was the cheap option: for what I paid for nearly 2 yards of medium-priced cotton fabric, I probably could have got 4 or 5 clothing items from Primark. And I have the challenge of making it in secret, as it's intended for Christmas, in a house with no storage or space built for elf-sized people instead of humans.

I have spring-cleaned my father's house ready for his return this weekend, at least. My own house is not looking quite as trashed as usual - what does it tell you that I have done housework rather than the stuff I need to do with a deadline ? I find further excuses for not getting the Musts done in the approximately 3 hours I spend in the day trudging up and down the big hill to school - no point in starting anything, as I have to go to school in a little minute ....

I suddenly recall what it is I'm doing - procrastinating; as we know from the Eartha Kitt song, 'procrastination is the thief of time'. And surfing the net is the King means of procrastinating .....
But now, off to school to collect DD ....and so the cycle continues.

Le Temps Perdu

I hope you're not expecting anything Proustian in style or quality - I merely stole the title, as it seemed to suit my thoughts.

I was wondering about people who disappear from one's life. Of course,there are those with whom one has regular contact for a period of time because of work, social activities, family etc and when one's path goes a different way, some of these people fade from one's life and are generally forgotten - one's life has not been impacted by them in any meaningful way.

And then there are those who simply disappearin a big puff of blue smoke, and one never knows why. I have two such in my past - Jacqueline Bliss, my BFF in high school, and David James Angus Hockton, to whom I was engaged for a time when I was at University. Immediately these two people have something in common - they are people to whom I was very close (by definition, one hopes).

I did not attend Jacqueline's wedding owing to various other commitments, and she was less than happy about it, although she had not attended mine. Perhaps she wanted to show me how well she had done - which was never in question; she did well at University, then at law school, and was very successful in a large practice in London, where she met her husband, a successful American lawyer. She moved to Connecticut and had two children. They divorced a few years back, according to her mother. I've had no contact with Jacqueline for about 15 years, I guess. I don't know why, I don't know what grudge is being carried. I don't mind at all that she holds a grudge, but it kills me not to know what it is, at least.

My relationship with Angus, as he was known, was also somewhat complex. We dated, we split up (I don't do well with anger expressed physically) and we got back together, and got engaged .....what can I say, except I was young and not overbright. My mother was partially responsible for some of my questionable decisions, I may have followed advice more appropriate to an earlier and different age. He called one evening and told me he never wanted to see or hear from me again, and put the phone down. I still have absolutely no clue at all as to what lay behind this, as I have not spoken with him since. I believe he has been living in Australia for some while now.

Now, while most people who know me will not find it in the least surprising that some people might go to such lengths to avoid me, it seems to me to be discourteous and gutless not to tell me why. I find that on the internet, in many communities, people have no issues whatsoever with telling one one's metaphorical arse looks big in that; in real life, most people's sense of self-preservation kicks in, and discretion proves the better part of valor ....

If you've waded through this to find out what the point was - apologies, there isn't one. I don't obsess about it, but it does pop into my mind occasionally. Maybe someone out there has the answers, knows either Jacqueline or Angus, and can enlighten me - please, do.

I don't know that the Tarot has a card for a Great Big Question Mark, so this will have to do until some kind person offers me a better card :


from The Aubrey Beardsley Tarot

Getting It Together Part 1

OK, I realize it's rather late in the year to be starting some good intentions, but I want that road to be paved, you know ? I want some style and ease on my journey. So my first good intention is to update this blog at least once a week.

This newfound Puritan work ethic resulted from rebuilding my website, Kismet's Companion, with a better webhost. Lacking a Mom to do the Mom Test, I girded my loins and underwent the Brother Test - kinda the same thing, but much harder to survive with any remnant of self-esteem, as my brother thinks social niceties like sugaring the medicine are wasted on mere family.

It was very helpful, and very constructive; however, although over the years I have vastly improved my ability to actually listen to criticism, my endurance of it is somewhat limited. I will make some changes, based on his input, but the stuff dearest to my heart will remain unchanged. I think the sequence of cards (from Ciro Marchetti's Gilded Tarot) that best illustrate this experience are as follows:





If you think other cards would be better at describing this situation, let me know ....