louisa

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Double-pointed needles: double the needles, quadruple the hell

knitting needles After many, many false starts, I’ve just finished my first knitting project (a hat for John) using circular needles and double-pointed needles. The circular needles were a dream – as soon as I realised you have to have the right needle gauge AND the right length for the job – but as I’m making his matching mittens, the DPNs continue to be a nightmare.

Here are some things I’ve learned/figured out along with way to make things easier – probably really obvious or even wrong for a more experienced knitter but it’s stuff that’s helped me:

Circular needles: I cast on and do the first row (until the last few stitches) on straight needles. I tend to cast on quite tightly (too tightly) so the first row is always a pain for me and trying to stretch it round the needles too is just annoying. After the first row, there is a lot more give so things stretch around the loop a lot easier.
Double-pointed needles: The first DPN video tutorial I watched showed me how to hold all the needles at all times, using my redundant fingers and whatnot. This confused me. The second DPN video tutorial I watch told me to ignore all the needles bar the two I was using at that very moment. The other two/three can just flail around by themselves. This confused me less.
Double-pointed needles: I kept getting ladders of loose stitches near my first stitch of each round because I couldn’t pull the thread tight enough. Now I knit the first stitch onto the existing working needle (my third needle) then once it’s on there all nice and tight, slip it onto the fourth needle (the new working needle) and continue from there. It’s a chore slipping it back and forth all the time but it’s a way to avoid ladders for now.
Double-pointed needles: You’re supposed to divide the stitches up equally between the needles but while I do that roughly, I always make sure each needle starts at the start of the stitch sequence: ie, with a basic 2x2rib, each needle starts with the first knit stitch. I keep getting lost/distracted/forgetting where I am and this makes it far easier to quickly work things out.
Double-pointed needles: Following on from that, because of the yarn placement or something, I find it considerably easier to start each new needle with a knit stitch rather than a purl.
Both circular needles and DPNs: Up until now, I’ve tended to put place markers in the stitches (because I have a problem remembering whether a place on a needle means the stitch before or after – I’m a bit scatty when it comes to knitting). (And everything.) But, when it comes to reducing the stitch count with two-togethers, I put the place marker after the stitches to be knitted together so I don’t have to move it between rows or do anything like complicated like counting any higher than 2. I suspect this is generally a best practice thing anyway but it was new to me.
Double-pointed needles: I can’t remember how many times I knitted the same bit of yarn trying to get DPNs. The theory of them just did not compute to start with, then when I got my head around that, I had (and still have) the ladder problems, or the problem of accidentally pulling all the stitches off the working needles, or the cat problem (which is, admittedly, not limited to DPNs and is closely linked to the latter). Anyway, what I’m saying is that it was tough. But it was fair easier to master when I transferred a nice tube of fabric from circular needles onto DPNs – perhaps because the tension of the fabric was already there or something – rather than starting on the DPNs from scratch. A great learning aid.

Mercy and Grand: The Tom Waits Project

27/10/2008 / louisa / 3 Comments

DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about music, can’t play any musical instruments and only sing for the cats. I have the utmost respect for people that can play or sing.

We (= me, John and Tom) went to the West Yorkshire Playhouse last night to see ‘Mercy and Grand: The Tom Waits Project’.

It’s an Opera North thing and to quote the blurb from the WYP’s website:

Mercy and Grand brings together ten songs by Tom Waits, a handful of numbers by Kurt Weill, a sea shanty, a hymn, a couple of instrumental gypsy tangoes and a classic Fellini film score, all arranged for an extraordinarily versatile ‘circus band’ ensemble.

The band was “extraordinarily versatile” (Dai Pritchard on a range of woodwind instruments and Simon Allen on percussion were the most versatile – the latter playing drums, a marimba (I think), a saw (!) and something that make a woo-werr noise that can only be described as FRICKIN’ AWESOME) but I didn’t feel the “ensemble” thing as much. As I described it to the guys on the way home, sometimes it felt like we were watching eight people masturbating separately rather than having a musical orgy. It was Tom Waits-y so I probably would have been disappointed if it had been polished like a Girls Aloud song but at times, the disjointedness was awkward. It just didn’t work for me and on some occasions, actively annoyed me.

I had similar feelings towards the choice of singer. I can see why they didn’t go for a male singer (the temptation to Waits-out probably would have been too much and that would push it into tribute band territory) and it is an Opera North performance thing, but the singer’s (albeit really amazing) voice was too clean, too pure for the dark tone of most of the songs. When she did try to rough it up or whatever, it reminded me of a (reasonably well-spoken) old boss of mine who used to go for a fake gruff, Northern accent when trying to be ‘one of the girls’ — and I didn’t think the technique worked in either circumstance. Tom suggested a more sultry singer would have been better and I thought either that or someone singing bawdy falsetto like the Tiger Lillies’ Martyn Jacques.

Between the singing style and moments of musician self-love, I felt the whole thing was lacking in … voom. Energy? Confidence? Passion? I’m not sure what exactly I mean but it was something like all those things. It felt a bit by-rote it’s-a-job-squawk! rather than a band coming together for the love of it.

All in all though, I’m glad we went though. I very much enjoyed watching the percussion guy go about his work, making all different sorts of sounds – I was amazed by how bowing a saw sounded like a voice and the shiver of bowing a cymbal – and we got white Magnums (an essential WYP visit treat) at the interval too.

Afterwards, we gave Tom a lift home and had an impromptu stinky cheese-fest with him and Paul then watched some clips of David Icke doing his crazy thing on YouTube. An evening of diverse sensory stimulations.

Learnings

20/10/2008 / louisa / 0 Comments

stock photo of a steering wheel and mirror Over the last few weeks, I’ve been learning to drive, belly-dance and crochet. Not at the same time, mind you.

The driving thing came about because I’d said in, ooh, 2002 that I’d get around to driving one day. In July, Katherine thought six years was long enough for me to arrange my own “one day” and very nicely bought me some lessons with her driving instructor neighbour to force me into it.

Now the thing about driving lessons is this: it turns out it involves piloting a tonne of metal around the roads surrounded by other tonnes of metal. It’s SCARY. Speeds feel a helluva lot faster when I’m behind the wheel. 30mph feels like I’m about to break the sound barrier, which at least would distort the sound of my own screaming.

I’ve had four hours of lessons so far (got another one tomorrow morning) and about an hour going around in circles in an empty car park with John to practise my steering. It’s going … ok. I’m not a natural but given I had nothing except the vaguest idea about driving before (“a brake is for stopping, you say?”), I think it’s going ok. I’m looking forward to being a bit better on the roads so I can practise just tootling around with John instead of fannying around in a circle on an industrial estate.

Katherine is to blame for the belly dancing too. Well, partially to blame. We decided we were going to do a course together this year and after drawing up a spreadsheet listing all the possibilities (location/day/requirement of no fish involved), we ended up with belly dancing. It’s also going … ok. Again, we’re not naturals; in fact, we’re considerably less coordinated than we ever thought and it’s scary showing off that lack of coordination in front of a room full of people – but most important, to ourselves in giant mirrors. Gah. But it’s something new and it’s exercise, and my my, some of the pelvic circle and shifts feel nice on my rather stiff lower back.

Crochet is much easier than driving or belly dancing, and involved far less clutch control and jigging about. I wanted to learn how to do it after the wirework workshop in Liverpool last month – I thought it was a really nice technique for use with wire so thought I’d try it out on yarn first. In my first week, I made a large number of circles using the double crochet and triple crochet stitches (which instantly became cat hats) to practise but then found some dishcloth cotton in a great green colour at the wool place in the market for 70p a ball and that inspired me to stretch myself and make a cotton shopping bag.

I kinda improvised around a random pattern I found. I started off with a square base rather than a round one, had 28 stitches/holes rather than 36 and did more rows – but the handle and finishing off instructions were great – very neat. (I reinforced the spots where the handles join the bag though. It didn’t feel strong enough to me.)

I’m very happy with the finished bag – it’s very stretchy and feels strong – and I’m delighted to have figured out how to do the holey/net stuff too. Double and triple crochet didn’t produce something different enough from knitting for me to be interested pursuing it but I like the idea of being able to do different things with it, like that net or granny squares.

On the knitting front though, I knitted two super chunky scarves for me and John yesterday (John’s is the orangey thing at the bottom of the string bag). Both scarves would have been better with a third ball of wool (I like them extra long) but are both fine – neat – with just the two balls I used. Each scarf took about two hours to knit (while I was listening to Joanna Bourke’s ‘Eyewitness: A History of Twentieth Century Britain’ – some of the accounts are a bit waffly but otherwise bloody excellent stuff) and is super snuggy. Bring on the cold winter.

Ukepedia – our fun! new! project

9/10/2008 / louisa / 0 Comments

Back in August, I had earache. Otitis Media to be specific.

After I got back from having it checked out by my doctor, I wrote a Twitter about it. John was playing on his ukelele and looking over my shoulder at the time so sang the Twitter as I wrote it.

Then I went over to Wikipedia to read all about Otitis Media, and as I read, John sang. As it turned out, the Otitis Media article worked beautifully as a song.

So we made it into a song. And we put the song on a website. And a fun new project was born.

Like with ELER, after an initial flurry of action, we’ve been a bit slow on it of late – but other members of the Church of the Ukelele have been stepping up and the collection of videos is slowly growing.

If you can play the uke – or any other instrument – and fancy joining the cool kids club, there are full instructions on the site.

There are only about 2,576,419 articles to go – so hurry!

Our weekend in London in numbers

7/10/2008 / louisa / 2 Comments

20 – cost, in pounds of our return train fare (each)
15.1 – miles walked (above the surface)
16 – painkillers popped by John (who hurt his back on the way to the train station in Leeds)
7 – cost, in pounds, of a sundae in the Haagen Das restaurant (worth it)
5 – drinks drunk at The Chandos pub
4 – doughnuts eaten (between us)
24 – amount of doughnuts bought by the woman behind us in the queue, stocking up for her six hour journey to Devon (she is our new hero)
2 – meals eaten in Chinatown
5 – amount of times (out of 11) that Big Ben rang while we were standing DIRECTLY underneath it before we actually realised it was ringing
3 – scarves bought: one pink/blue, one turquoise and one green/orange
7 – cost, in pounds, of a small bottle of beer and half-a-coke at the Hippodrome bar while watching La Cirque
10 – inches, the diameter of the tennis racket that Captain Frodo of La Clique squeezed himself through
1 – number of joints he had to dislocate to be able to do that
0 – the amount of laughs the ‘Viva Croydon’ song in La Cirque elicited from us
32.50 – cost, in pounds, of stalls tickets for Spamalot from the tkts booth in Leicester Square
2 – the amount of people who pushed in front of me in the drinks buying queue at the Spamalot interval
2 – museums visited
3.50 – cost, in pounds, of our British Museum guide book
2 – time, in minutes, spent looking at British Museum guide book
10 – tube stations visited
2 – maximum time, in rounded-up minutes, that we had to wait for any tube train (probably more like 90seconds)
6 – number of times I jokingly complained about the waiting times on British public transport when arriving on a platform exactly as a train arrived
3 – amusing overheards*
1 – potential punfolio submissions about ghee

* #1 – “Did you tell her about the death? Oh good.”
#2 – “If we all thought like that, we’d all live in poverty.”
#3 – something in Spanish which we didn’t understand but accompanied by a spanking motion

Zach and Jeff versus The Meteorite

2/10/2008 / louisa / 1 Comment

zach and jeff versus the meteorite I would like to introduce you to Zach and Jeff.

Last week, I went to Liverpool for a wire-working workshop as part of a fantastic “Recycle Into Art” week, organised by the city’s Red Dot Exhibitions.

The workshop was run by Alison Bailey Smith, a wonderful artist and thoroughly lovely person who I’d already featured on Recycle This – she makes jewellery, accessories and clothes using reclaimed wire (typically from inside old televisions) and other “rubbish”, such as tomato puree tubes, sweet wrappers and ribbon from bouquets.

The workshop was billed as learning how to decorate bags – to make better use of the time, some people chose to make jewellery instead but since I needed a new nice bag, I stuck to the original remit.

We started off with Alison showing us her knotting technique but I somehow kept forgetting how to do it in the middle (don’t ask, I can’t explain it), so when Alison suggested knitting it instead, I jumped on that. Then I spent the next hour knitting a strip – which in hindsight wasn’t a terribly good use of my time but I liked the finished strip.

I’d picked out a nice simple clutch bag from the selection of charity shop bags Alison had brought along for us to use and the copper strip looked nice against the black – but I wanted to add some features as well. I played with some of the different techniques Alison had shown us – such as wrapping scrap plastic with wire then coiling it – but nothing seemed to fit as well as Zach and Jeff. (I’d previously used their kin to make earrings. These guys were going spare.) Then someone pointed out the coil I’d made out of a lime green M&S carrier bag strap looked like a meteorite, and hey presto, a handbag with a story was born.

I sewed the wiry earth, the dinos and the meteorite onto the bag with thinner, darker wire (visible in parts on the finished item) and a curved needle – my, my, that was more difficult than I thought but everything seems pretty secure now.

When I showed John the finished item, he was sad because he thought that there was an inevitably unhappy ending for Zee and Jee but I pointed out they were plastic so it was beautifully circular.

I had a thoroughly great time at the workshop, learnt so much and was really interested to see how everyone took a different approach and came out with something different. Since then, I’ve also learnt how to crochet so when I finally get my hands on an old TV of my own, I’ll be able to do all kinds of fun stuff with the wire. Plus, I have a great new bag too.

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