Intermission

This Week I Am…

25 May 2013 21:49

This week I am:

listening to the latest episode of the Vampire Hype Podcast;

trying to figure out how to draw the geometric shapes I’m imagining for my mandala painting;

reading the graphic novel Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 9;

watching reruns of Long Way Round with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman (absolutely brilliant, holds up to infinite rewatches!);

knitting snuggly stripey Noro socks, and swatches for a cardi/hoodie in Malabrigo Worsted;

daydreaming about backpacking in Scotland (again);

contemplating trust: rewarded, misplaced and withheld;

looking forward to the postie hopefully bringing me the Spinner’s Book of Yarn Designs soon;

enjoying many mugfuls of hot, sweet, milky masala chai.

Ewan McGregor sent me these flowers* earlier this week, and it totally made my day :) I absolutely adore this colour, as you’re probably already aware of if you have been following this blog for a while. Soo gorgeous!

What really amused me was that just before getting on the web and seeing this picture for the first time, I was snuggled up on my sofa knitting away on a shawl in the exact same colour..! Seriously, the colours are much more accurate in Ewan’s picture that what I’ve been able to capture with my own camera + Photoshop :)

I can’t help but smiling!

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Overdyed Alpaca Silk Yarn

17 May 2013 17:47

This yummy skein of yarn (80% superfine alpaca, 20% silk) used to be a lovely pale, semi-solid pink, but I fancied something much richer and darker to use as the contrast colour for the dark gray shawl I’m knitting at the moment, so I decided to overdye it.

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This Week I Am…

15 May 2013 16:49

This week I am:

listening to the silence;

observing my seemingly uncurbable desire to modify almost all of my knitting projects into something that is even prettier than the original design, and how this unintentionally tends to make what was intended to be relaxing and grounding into something that is challenging, complicated and soo much fun! but sadly also way too much for my brain to handle;

wondering what RSS reader to use now that Google Reader soon disappears (maybe Feedly?);

wearing the wearable equivalent of comfort food: cosy hand knitted shawls, snuggly warm hand knitted woolen socks, and a warm cardi over colourful indian kurtas/tunics;

eating cucumber salad with wasabi nuts, and oven baked blueberry pancakes (not together);

reading the graphic novel ‘American Vampire’ by Scott Snyder, Stephen King and Rafael Albuquerque for our vampire book group, and ‘Svulten’ by Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo (vampires in Helsinki!) just for fun;

watching Smallville season 4 and Being Human (US) season 3, both for the first time, and on Friday the season finale of The Vampire Diaries season 4;

knitting a snuggly pair of stripey and colourful socks in gorgeous Noro Silk Garden yarn;

contemplating my conditioned reactions and responses to the hugely increased bodily suffering and grief caused by the most recent severe overexertion due to the ongoing legal appeals process (for sickness benefit);

looking forward to Radio Adyashanti tonight, and the postie hopefully bringing me the art supplies that I ordered so I can start painting a really big and colourful mandala to put on my living room wall;

being grateful for my parents’ generosity and willingness to help;

wishing myself healing and fearlessness, and boundless happiness for all beings.

The format of this post is inspired by a post my favourite author Maggie O’Farrell made a while back. I read her new novel Instructions for a Heatwave a few weeks ago and it was amazing, just like all her previous ones :)

(Be)longing

13 May 2013 06:46

Spiderweb (Photo by Janne Olkkonen)

Hidden inside the desire to belong is a longing for boundaries.

The desire to belong only makes sense as long as you believe yourself to be separate. To belong somewhere also means to not belong somewhere else. You are limitlessness itself, don’t trick yourself into giving away your freedom. You already are that which you are looking for.

(an insight inspired by Being Human UK)

Yet Another First: Hand-Dyed Yarn!

25 January 2013 11:10

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at hand-dyeing yarn for quite a while now, and a couple of days ago it finally happened! Here’s the result: 1600 meters of semi-solid fuchsia laceweight yarn that I painted with a Nuvem shawl in mind. (The colours in the picture are slightly off, but this is the best that I & Photoshop could do; the yarn is a wee bit darker in real life, and leaning slightly more towards raspberry than pink-pink.)

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Soon: The ‘Next Step’ Sock Knitalong

20 January 2013 15:31

The next Crafts from the Cwtch knitalong will be starting soon, and I think I have finally decided on what I’ll be knitting :)

One of the things that I love the most about knitalongs is discovering designs and techniques that I probably wouldn’t have chosen otherwise, so I was admittedly a bit disappointed when I found out that there won’t be a fixed pattern this time.

My favourite socks to knit and wear are really simple, warm and snuggly striped toe-up wellie socks (“raggsockar”), so it took quite a while before I finally found something along the lines of ‘next step’ that excites me.

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Spinning in a Playful Direction

19 January 2013 16:45

I started on my second handspun yarn today. A beautifully dyed handcarded batt of 50% British Shetland, 50% Merino; this too from the HilltopCloud Learn to Spin Kit.

It feels like a completely different experience than the first, probably because my mindspace is so different… no longer groping randomly in the dark, but slowly letting go, carefully starting to play around and allowing the energy to show the way.

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