New knitting!

Well, okay, I haven't started yet, but I got some of this yarn:



I know. I keep buying the same colour wool. I can't wait to start knitting, though!

I'm doing a project at a school that's right next door to a farm and there's a farm cafe. The farm is beautiful and the cafe is very sweet. Here's a photo from around the cafe:



Yesterday, I went to Paris to spend the day with my aunt. I was really lucky, it was a lovely day. I came back with some new books to keep my French up to date. I've already finished one, on the train on the way home.

Settling in

We've been in the new flat for almost a month. It's finally starting to feel like home; hopefully the nightmare bit is over. Did I tell you that our estate agent deliberately misled us, and had a damp survey altered to hide the fact that the kitchen has a lot of damp? Yes, well, he did. Luckily, R caught him, and they're now paying for it, but they're not paying for all the upheaval and misery it caused us. And, he didn't even get fired, despite the manager's insistence that they are an honest company who care about their image.

Despite all that, we are starting to settle in. The garden is no longer just a square of mud. Last week, Rog started to shape it:



And this week, we put in a path (see the compost bin in the back, there?). Next week, we should get some flowers.



We ordered some little fruit trees to put in that big patch at the front (closest to the camera). It's all very exciting!

I haven't been knitting. I've barely even looked at Ravelry. I know. It's weird. One of the jobs I have, where I work freelance, is undergoing huge changes, which aren't really affecting me, but I am watching some of the other freelancers who are being affected overreact, and it's stressing me out. Of course, the majority are silent, and it's the vocal few. People seem to feel that because it's an arts organisation, it shouldn't treat them or this particular programme as a business. But it is a business. It does have to make sure that it is being run efficiently. If not, the money will run out, and there will be no programme, and then everyone's out of a job.

I guess I look at this from an art history background, where this whole notion of the artist not being a business person is fairly recent - 150 years or so? And a very Western idea as well. So here is this arts organisation asking artists to act like business people, and they can't because of firmly entrenched ideas of what an artist is. Well, that's my hypothesis.

Hopefully I'll be back soon with some knitting pictures!

Out of Practice

Well, we've moved. It's not love at first sight; we'll have to get comfortable in this flat and this neighbourhood, and that takes time. It's taken up a lot of time and energy. Not quite so central as before, but we have more space (I can be in one room and have no idea in which other room R is), and we have a garden. We hung up a bird feeder, and we already have little birds coming by, which is lovely. So far, a robin and some blue tits. I also got a composter, which I'm very excited about.

In knitting news, I have mostly been knitting scarves and also some wrist warmers.





I knit some of these wrist warmers for my yoga teacher as well.

I'm now trying to decide on my next big project, and am thinking about this. But, it means buying wool as I don't have any chunky yarn, or not enough for a jumper anyway. And, what with the move, I am a bit on the skint side.

I'm feeling very out of practice blogging.

Cabled Cocoon

My mother's birthday present. Happy birthday!

All or Nothing

A glimpse of one of my new holiday-knitting projects. It's sublime extra fine merino wool in a very warm, chocolate-y charcoal grey.

When I'm worried about finding work, it's hard for me to do anything but worry. But, this past week my September work schedule started to really fill up and as the worry started to melt away, I actually felt like I could relax, and enjoy some hours of knitting. It also made me feel like tidying the flat.

Hoxton Square

This past Sunday was a gorgeous day, and so I went to the square to sit and knit. I ran into some friends, which was really nice. I love that kind of fortuitous encounter. Admittedly, they live around the corner so it's not blind coincidence, but it was still nice. Well, until P got stung by a wasp on his tongue. He didn't make a fuss, though I kept trying to tell him that if he's not going to take advantage of this opportunity to make a fuss, when can he? "Tiff uppah lip," he tried to say, though of course, it was really just a swollen tongue.

It's the season when secret projects start to work their way into my consciousness. While I'm not knitting presents for everybody this year, as I did last year, I still want to get started on the few I'm doing. I'll finish the legwarmers I started for my yoga teacher last year - it's great to start on something that's already 50% done! And then a couple of other things. Rog's yearly birthday scarf, which he loses yearly, but then asks for again, so I can't really take the losing as a hint. Or not as a hint that he doesn't like them; more as a hint that I should somehow include velcro on it. And the rest of the projects? Really secret, so I won't discuss them here.

When we were sitting in the park, two of our local drunks were sitting on the bench behind us. When P went to get an antihistamine for his tongue, the drunks started talking to me. The young one (who has aged so much in the past year and a half) said, "excuse me! excuse me!" til I realised he was talking to me. "What are you knitting?" he asked. "A scarf," I said. "Oh," he said pausing. "Where did you learn?" As he's asking this, the other drunk, who is much older and much more f**ked up was saying things like, "hhmfffs jumpah fu mmeh?" "I'da smmmss scarf?" I told the young drunk, "my best friend." I told the old drunk, "no, I'm not knitting you anything." The young drunk said, "not so many people knit anymore, do they?" I told him there are lots of us. He said, "Oh. I remember spending lots of time with my nan while she was knitting." Then P came back, and the conversation stopped.

I feel bad for this young drunk. He obviously wants social interaction with other people besides the other drunks who are overwhelmingly male and probably twice his age. There's one woman that I've seen, but she's twice his age as well. They all seem to share this big brown dog, who always looks so resigned, with a "why me?" look on his face. The young drunk kept talking to other people in the square, trying to help a small child, for example, explaining something about trees and why you can't climb them. As you can imagine, a lot of people are pretty snobby to the drunks, though generally they keep to themselves, and their dog is gentle. I find the trustafarians desperately trying to be cool in their "I just pooed my pants" trousers (you know the ones I mean) to be the really offensive ones, leaving their rubbish all over the square. Or opening crap galleries on the square (that's you, Julian Schnabel's son with your crap taste in art). (Seriously, his last show included plastic turds left on a stack of catalogues - that's what he thinks of the people who come to see his shit.)(Sorry for the cursing.)

In other news, I was longing for corn tortillas once again, and just out of curiosity, I googled "corn tortillas," and it turns out that there's a Mexican grocery about a fifteen-minute walk from here. I came home with corn tortillas, mole, masa harina and ancho chiles, and we had a lovely Mexican / New Mexican fusion green chile stew with little corn flour dumplings.

And now we're off to see Gang of Four at the Macbeth!

Finished!