pointysticks.net

I remember as a little girl my mom giving me all these complex, arbitrary and often bizarre rules for how things were to be done. I can’t help but remember every time I pick up a thread and needle because usually in my attempt to comply with her rules I completely ruined whatever I was working on and ruining perfectly good materials is one of those fears I carry with me still. I loath big bright white canvases, blank pieces of paper, perfect skeins of yarn, uncut cloth, new color pencils, virgin mole skin journals, unopened vials of beads and fresh rolls of batting. I am so scared of ruining all these great things then not being able to see whatever it is in my head come to fruition.

I’ve dumped the rules, but at almost 40 years old I still have the fears. I see where they got Mom too, she has a craft room that is the fear of wasting all the potential of all those carefully hoarded supplies incarnate. Except hoards are destroyers of useful stuff, places that moths and mice will happily turn into their own little ecosystems and where craft supplies go to die.

I finished another sample and while I was stitching away during the wee hours when I’m least likely to be interrupted I kept going back to that place; that fear of things being “ruint” (seriously, that’s how Mom says it) when I started considering what I might do with these samples. It’s not like they have any value for anything other than examples of what I’m capable of doing, and after being photographed they’ve served their purpose, but I hate the idea of just tossing them out and I like the idea of stashing them even less. I am also afraid of someday being a hoarder, and I’m pretty sure it’s a valid fear since I have given serious consideration to opening a road side craft museum (and cafe) as a justification to own a property merely for the purpose of housing my vintage sewing collection (and owning one of those really big espresso machines.)

I do however, like the idea of confusing the snot out of future archaeologists. I am tossing around the idea of making a lot of corporate looking logos and using them to make myself a fresh set of pot holders or if I do enough samples; maybe even a window pane quilt. I’m leaning towards the quilt, even though I am not a quilter. I have a ton of quilting tools and fabric but that doesn’t make me a quilter, just someone that cannot pass up cool sewing gadgets. When it comes to sewing and knitting gadgets Clover owns me and they know it, they are my dark crafty overlords and I must give them my money.

I finished knitting the shawl, it took about 10 skeins of Lion Brand’s “Amazing”, I’ll know for sure when I wrangle up all of the labels and count. I have most of two colors left, and two more colors in smaller quantities. Now I’m I’m looking around like a kid with a shiny new hammer for nails that need nailing, except that hammer is entrelac and the nails are metaphors for things to knit.

I think it’s probably about time to figure out how to knit entrelac in the round.

I’m spinning up 4 ounces of Shetland super fine for lace knitting (I want to make another Icarus shawl) but the spinning is taking for-freakin’-ever, so I think my next knitting project will either use yarn I already own or yarn I’ll purchase in the near future, nothing has really caught my eye and I don’t have a huge long queue of “must do” projects at the moment.

I have four phalaenpsis orchids, one just coming out of blossom, one completely dormant and two that are in spike with developed buds (but have yet to blossom.) Even though I had nicely labeled them, when I replaced their potting medium and repotted them the nice labels stayed on the old pots and I forgot which was which.

Now when people ask me what varieties I have I say “Flowers.” and let them figure out that I’m not the sharpest crayon in the shed when it comes to houseplants. It’s probably for the best at this point that I don’t own any rare or super expensive orchids.

There’s much less pressure that way.

Last night Matt gave me a lovely cymbidium orchid, in full bloom. It’s just gorgeous.

The tag didn’t have any additional information other than the name cymbidium, which I’ve never killed owned before. I did go to the growers website, but they are in the process of updating the website so there was no information there to be had.

Through invoking the power of Google, I did find some fairly straight forward care instructions for the cymbidium genus. They only flower during the winter, which might be a downer, but my other orchids flower during spring and fall; at least I won’t be stuck with a collection of funky fat orchid leaves and no blossoms when they are dormant.

I’m still having a hard time believing that there are so many blossoms on this one plant, and they are all so huge.

I temporarily moved the plant from it’s new home to the kitchen table so I could isolate a blossom against the neutral background of the wall for this photograph. I think the sunlight from the East window where it now lives (see photo above) makes the colors of the blossoms stand out better. (Click on the photos to embiggen.)

And I swear, hand on heart: I am not knitting backwards.

Really. Honestly. I’m knitting and happen to be left handed. I knit continental style left handed. I’m a left handed knitter. I knit from left to right. I don’t have to rewrite entire patterns unless I want to, and 99% of the time I do it’s because I think my math will improve the overall fit and structure of a garment or because I’m recalculating because I like my yarn better than whatever the pattern recommends.

It’s really not all that difficult to read a decrease as left leaning or right leaning, or an increase as left leaning or right leaning. Cables either go over or under, left or right.

With the exception of lathes and sewing machines; the rest of the world is designed to frustrate, embarrass, injure, maim, and kill us lefties. If I want a left handed chainsaw, guitar, archery bow, or circular saw I get to pay more for it, and if I go to resell any one of those things I get less back.

Why don’t you learn to knit right handed?

It isn’t like I can’t knit right handed. I can, I taught myself to knit from a book and learned using my right hand because the illustrations were all depicting right handed moves. I don’t want to knit right handed. It’s not natural for me, it’s not comfortable, it doesn’t feel right.

Little things can go from slightly annoying to extremely hurtful when done often enough. I knit because I enjoy knitting. I am a good knitter because I’ve put in the time and effort to learn how to be a good knitter, but little things done often enough and over a long enough duration can go from slightly annoying to very hurtful.

My own mother cannot mention that I knit without bringing up that I knit left handed. As if doing something with my dominant hand is the greatest of accomplishments. That just sets the bar kind of low for brag points. Wouldn’t it be way more interesting or impressive if it weren’t something I do every day out of necessity?

If I were going to construct how it comes out in a non-knitting context this is what my mom sounds like to me: “Have you met my daughter Wendy? She chews with her mouth closed.”

When I go to new knitting groups I usually don’t fair much better unless another lefty knitter has broken the group in for me. I’m really not cool with questions like “So how can you use a pattern?” in a group setting, because I’m stuck trying to figure out if this polite curiosity that requires a short answer or if I should whip out my notebook and start drawing diagrams because the person really needs to know for some reason.

I’m pretty sure I am anyway. Unless J.J. Abrams is directing my life. He might be since I seem to have a pretty rockin’ soundtrack as of late. No polar bears though.

A few weeks ago I finally lost it with Facebook’s lack of security and deleted my account.

I think it’s far better to not use the site at all than have people think I’m sending them nasty messages or making mean posts. I do consider myself pretty fortunate insomuch as most people on the receiving end of the messages knew me well enough to know that it was not me. At least most people knew me well enough to know my spelling and grammatical style.

I really wouldn’t have known either, except my password kept being reverted to the original password that I used when I set up the account years ago. Considering some of the things that were said, I’m surprised only one person told me to f*ck off.

Pretty sad (not sad-ironic, just sad-sad) that in ten years my Neopets account has proved to have far better security.

So now I’m thinking about renovating my remaining blogs. If anyone is still reading this one they might witness a few test themes before I settle on the next one.