Fyrewitch's Knitting Adventures

Under the weather

I was hoping to be able to entertain you with tales of a gorgeous wedding today. Unfortunately I have come down with a particularly evil and badly timed stomach bug.

I can always gauge just how ill I am by how appealing (or otherwise) knitting is to me. I've done about 4 rows in the last 2 days.  My angelic witchlet has been behaving admirably, entertaining herself while her mother lies like a vegetable on the couch. I did make it to the shops yesterday afternoon (driving very slowly through the back streets) to get her a barbecued chicken as a treat.

This bug has cramped my style in the following ways:

• I couldn't get to Tina and Tim's wedding. :(
• I've been unable to venture out to get the brushes I need to practice my face-painting skills
• I've had my poor kid trapped in the house all weekend
• Knitting slump! I'm seriously behind on one of my projects.

I'm hoping I'll be better tomorrow so I can visit my sister and my dear nephews. I'm sure they will be terribly excited to have their aunt paint on their little cherub faces, even if it's not up to scratch.
Here's to tomorrow and being on a more even keel.

Bathurst

I was very disturbed when, on this morning's news, a female sports commentator stated that Bathurst embraced "everything" about Australia.

For those of you lucky enough not to know what Bathurst is, it is a big car race. That's right, lots of men (although I think there was one female participant this year)  get into hotted up cars and drive around and around and around, increasing the hole in the ozone layer. Have these people not heard of the environmental crisis?

This embraces everything about Australia? I don't think so!

I have never seen the point of motor racing. How boring (not to mention hot and smelly) would it be to drive in circles for hours on end?  Plus, it's on a big old mountain in the middle of no where.

If I had to pick a sporting event that characterised Australia and our way of life, it would have to be one of the pro surfing events.  Sun, surf and sand. The smell of the ocean in your nostrils. Kids playing on the beach, taking turns burying each other in the sand. Poking dead jellyfish with sticks and collecting shells.  Our beaches are a huge tourist drawcard, and with good reason. Lots of golden sand and clear blue water.  Cricket or beach volley ball. Sand in pretty much everything. 

I love being an Aussie. And it has nothing to do with those stupid cars.

Hey Hey, it's the 21st Century

I pay very little attention to commercial television. If it's not on the ABC, or a regular show that I watch, then it doesn't cross my flight pattern. So when I saw the footage from the new Hey Hey, It's Saturday, I thought it must have been happening in the USA. After all, surely no one in Australia would be stupid enough to give Darryl Sommers that show back.

How wrong can a girl be?? So footage of an appalling skit from said TV show has gone around the world and has been condemned and rightly so.  Let's examine the details of this particular incident.

a) Darryl Sommers is a dickhead. Always has been, always will be. He seems to be one of those people who thinks he can still make racist or sexist comments and still be funny due to his age.

b) the original skit was performed 20 years ago.  Come on people. It was inappropriate back then. The world has changed a lot in 20 years, it's even more inappropriate now!

c) Channel 9 brought Hey Hey back?? Never, ever exhume something when it's nicely buried. You never know when it's going to turn zombie on you.

Hmm, zombies. Maybe it's time for Shaun of the Dead.

Blogtober?

October seems to be the month that people adopt as their own. I don't know what it is about October that makes this happen. Is it because is starts with a vowel and has more than two syllables (Blogust just sounds wrong). Is it the Virgo energy morphing into Libran energy, the desire to serve morphing into the energy of of getting out there and relating to others (which then ends in the Scorpio need to go underground). Or is it just that it's taken us all 9 months to get organised, and the close proximity of December makes us realise that we've actually achieved very little this year, and we should probably get a wriggle on and do something constructive.

At any rate, I've seen October spoken of as both Socktober and Blogtober. As much as I would love to dedicate the month to and endless array of socks, my current crafting schedule won't allow it, which leads me to contemplate Blogtober as more realistic.

Dare I try to blog every day? The minutea of my life aren't actually that interesting, so I will probably turn to lots of philosophising and pontificating. Dear Reader, if you aren't up for that sort of crap, I suggest you check back in November, when the madness has ended.

I received my latest Amazon order yesterday. Bless Amazon, you have to love a service that allows you to buy books and have them shipped for a fraction of the cost that it is to purchase them off the shelf in this country.

I received my copies of The Knitting Way and Mindful Knitting, both focusing on Knitting as a spiritual practise. How perfect!  I've started on the first, which has thus far spoken lots about mathematics and the beauty of maths in nature. I hate maths and recoil from it, so fortunately there are some nice patterns in there as well. Although the patterns are all in Americanese, so I'll have to go find out what a size 8 needle actually is, and convert all the inches etc before they make any sense to me. Why do I knit again??

There are little sections in the book by the secondary writer called Spaces between the Loops. The text itself is interesting enough, but I love the title. In knitting, we always think about what we are creating - the stitches, how they are formed, the yarn that we use. We don't generally think about the negative space between them - the space in the loops that traps the air, which is part of what makes knitting so effective. In art negative space is a big thing. It helps you to see the proper shape of the object you are drawing, without actually looking at the object itself.

What other negative spaces are there in our lives that exist but that we ignore? What helps us shape our lives to the point that we no longer pay attention to it. The space around us? The air we breathe? The clutter filling our homes? Is the stuff we don't look at hindering or helping us?

Hmm, I have the sudden urge to declutter.

After the dust settles

There's still a bit of a haze in the air, but after dust storm number 2, things have finally settled down, leaving us with an icy cold breeze, reminding us of the winter we didn't quite have. Jacarandas are blooming all over the place a good month early. They've clearly been confused by the unseasonally warm weather we've had.

I think I have a cold coming on, although it's hard to tell if it's that or just the remnants of the dust in the air. It's amazing how insidious the stuff is. I hosed down the windows and screens out the back yesterday and, even though none of them face the way the stuff was coming from, there was a thick layer of red on everything. Even the huge metal power poles look more red than silver at the moment. At any rate, it's the perfect time to snuggle up with a nice cup of tea and a warm snuggly project.

I've finished making my purple swap stuff (photos to come) which means I can get onto more pressing things - my birthday and Christmas list. Also (drumroll please) I have some contracted knitting work which I will start next week when the witchlet returns to school. Half the joy of knitting for me is playing with gorgeous yarn. The projects I've been given are using baby alpaca, which is just beautiful to the tough, and Bocu by Noro, which is great eye candy. I'm going to enjoy playing with yarn I didn't have to pay for, and getting paid for doing it!

Thanks for dropping by, I love that you come and visit me here at the witch's stead.

I see Dumb People

So, you can tell by the title of my post the kind of mood I'm in today.

I love the irony that only two days after my road rules post, I've discovered that there has been a study done which shows that Queenslanders are the second most dangerous drivers in the country. Our New South Wales brethren topped the list. And you all thought I was exaggerating !(apart from Relle, who, living as close as she does to Ipswich, I know shares my pain.)

The other reason for my mood is that I spent a  morning of self-imposed torture fun and games reading with the witchlet's class. Prior to that one of the other mothers chose to hang out and watch for a bit - and complain to me that the teacher was unapproachable and wouldn't talk to her when she thought she should be available. (In the teacher's defence she is putting in extra hours before and after school to help kids who are lagging due to the multifarious issues in the classroom). I asked if she had made an appointment the teacher. No, she hadn't. Well then, perhaps she should. Pity the poor teacher if half the parents who rocked up to pick up their kids all wanted to speak to her at once. People just don't think things through.

And then there was the class itself. One of the demon's spawn little treasures had a full on tantrum which sounded more like a wild animal for a full ten minutes. I was horrified and had to bite my tongue and sit on my hands to not grab her and shake her till her teeth rattled. Is it any wonder my poor witchlet doesn't want to go to school?  She doesn't want to change classes or schools, but I hate seeing her so depressed.

In happier news, yesterday was a public holiday here in Pine Rivers for the Royal Brisbane Show, so the witchlet and I took the opportunity to take her to Coraline.  It was great, truly creepy and the animation was awesome. The contrast in the visuals between the real world and the "other" world were great. I would highly reccomend it, kids or not.