Having the Snip

I really do love Etsy.

It's so awesome getting a little gift to yourself in the post. This one was from Crave Jewellery Design. I'd seen it on Pinterest and convo'd her to ask if she had another for sale, since the original had sold. You can either wear it open....

.....or closed:

So sweet. 

Scissors were much in use to finish a project this week. I've been taking part in the #craftsocial heart swap and here is my offering:

I always find needlebooks so handy and I didn't just want to make 'a heart' as I preferred it to have some use.

Yet more scissors on the inside plus some felt 'pages' for the needles. It's flying off to America as I type. 

I was in Greenwich earlier today to visit the library (prompted by the "Save Our Libraries" Day today) and had a look around the clocktower market. It is my favourite bit of Greenwich. This time I spied these gorgeous little jampots.

I was sorely tempted to at least get the strawberry one but then I remembered I started packing for the move this morning and I already have more than enough stuff. It made me sad, because I wouldn't have hesitated to buy it 6 months ago. Ah well. 

At work the recycling bins have just been labelled to stop the small of brain getting confused about whether teabags constitute paper or not, and the ordinary bin has been labelled 'landfill'. This struck me as a simple but effective way of really making you think about the rubbish you thrown away. And so in spying an old sofa cover about to be thrown away I took a look at it to check for unmoveable stains or holes, and then resolved to make a tablecloth for my new flat with it. 

I wanted a red and white one and was looking for polka dot fabric (naturally) but couldn't find any in an upholstery weight that wasn't super expensive (thank you Cath Kidston!). This is an excellent red and I can use the machine embroidery skills I learnt at the Make Lounge to decorate it. Bonza. I've washed it at 90 degrees and it's come up as good as new. And all for £0!

Second Base

Source: stumbleupon.com via John on Pinterest

Cinnamon Buns, Tupperware and I.

I saw this recipe last week. I knew they must be mine.

The recipe is for twice this many so I duly halved the amounts and ended up with a dough that, once risen, had the consistency of custard, which is hardly condusive to kneeding. So I had to add about twice as much flour as the recipe suggests. But man, they still tasted gooooooood. I took half into work for the boys and they were highly appreciative. The coffee in the icing really does bring out the maple syrup. Nom.

They are pretty calorific though. In fact, the only way you could make them less healthy is...if...you....

Nutella. I was extremely upset to hear nuts do not count as one of your five a day. Thought I was onto something there. And yes, I do feel quite sick now.

While actually using the kitchen I had a dig through the cupboard and pulled out all the tupperware. Considering I never seem to be able to find any when I want it we seem to have collected quite a lot. This is not a small box.

I have ruthlessly been through it and thrown away anything without a lid or that had gone nasty. It's all being done with a purpose now as I have a flat to move to. So 3 weeks until the next phase of life starts. To coincide I've been thinking for months about going back to my maiden name and I have now put the wheels in motion at work. I was thinking of when to actually draw the line between names and was looking at suitable mondays in February. The most suitable one is...the 14th. Hmmm. Bit odd, but just another day, right?

Meanwhile the sock yarn cardi continues - thanks for kind comments! It is my own design although I may put a recipe style pattern together at some point. Plus my blog project continues....today's letter is the letter I.

M is for...

I have a cunning plan. My blog was in the middle of a makeover when the sky fell in October so it just got left halfway. I've decided to get on with some of the changes I had planned, one of which was a new header. The M is the first of three letters I've done already. Only another 11 to go.

I had a little crafty spurt the other day, but I'm being cheeky and saving it for the thing-a-day month. I've been making other plans too. Mainly on Pinterest.... Little ribbon hairclips:

Source: etsy.com via Alex on Pinterest

Fabric wrapped coat hangers:

Source: corrieberrypie.blogspot.com via Alex on Pinterest

Button Pendant:

Source: thinkcrafts.com via Alex on Pinterest

Lots and lots of lovely inspiration.

My sock yarn cardigan continues pretty well.

I'm halfway up the first sleeve now. I'm going to make the sleeves more or less match although it'll be impossible to do it exactly because of the self-pattering sections. But still, I think it'll look quite fun. It reminds me of another pin I've seen recently:

Source: imgfave.com via Alex on Pinterest

Even if whoever created it wasn't so hot at the spelling. 

Big white fluff

I have a bit of a problem at the moment. I keep trying to think about the future and plan n'stuff and it's like when you're in a plane, in the window seat (my favourite) and you climb or descend through some cloud. You go from blue sky....

to fluff.

I have negotiated a record 20 days off work in March. 20 days all in a row too, not in blocks of 2 or anything. I was going to go to Egypt. I tried to book and what I wanted wasn't feasible so now I'm trying to make a decision about what to do instead and...I...just...can't...seem...to....think....about.....it.....fluff......There are things I need to do but I start thinking...about.....doing....them....and.......fluff......I'm moving flat and so I start.....thinking....about....moving....and......fluff..... It is literally like walking into very dense fog. It dulls all my senses and leaves me disorientated. 

So....I saw this thing:

My first thought was that the last thing I need to do is put pressure on myself to do something every day just when I'm moving and have got...other....stuff....to.....fluff. But then about 5 minutes later when I was able to start thinking againI thought that actually this might be quite a good thing to do to structure things. It says somewhere on the website that you can just spend half an hour a day creating something and I thought that actually that might be quite good. And if I miss a day, well, it doesn't really matter. It's just for fun. 

I've decided my theme is going to be buttons and beloved Pinterest provides plenty of inspiration for quick projects, a number of which I have been meaning to try for ages. This is my own Button Pinboard, then there is Crafty Inspiration, which also includes a number of button projects, and...speaking of clouds and fluff...

Source: ohdeedoh.com via Alex on Pinterest

Cool, huh?

Freaked out on Mars

One of the books I seem to tell people about fairly often is 'An Anthropologist on Mars'.

It's written by Oliver Sacks who also wrote 'The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat' and is the guy who Robin Williams played in 'Awakenings'. It's 16 years old now and it must be at least 10 since I first read it but several of the stories really got stuck in my brain and there's one in particular I keep going back to. To put it into context, the book is a series of case studies looking at people who have some sort of brain abnormality, either something caused by an accident or illness or something they were born with. There's a daredevil surgeon with asperger's syndrome, a buddha like religious convert with a grapefruit style brain tumour and then there is a woman, an expert in her field, who has autism.

The field this woman is an expert in is the human slaughtering of animals for human consumption. She lectures about it all over the world, consults widely, is credited with patents and so on, but she is not comfortable with people and is seemingly incapable of forming relationships. One of the things she has invented is a device that holds a pig securely but without cruelty so that it can be killed accurately and quickly without unnecessary suffering. Although she doesn't feel comfortable getting close to people, she recognises the psychological benefits of things like hugs, so she builds one of these machines for herself, and sometimes she wriggles into it and it gently compresses around her and hugs her.

*hug*

I'm flat hunting. It's depressing. Pooch has got a place in a house on stilts surrounded by water in which ducks and swans swim. We used to walk there on sundays sometimes and say how cool it would be to live there. I am pleased he has somewhere nice sorted out but also fairly gutted. All I really want to do at the moment is sit in bed drinking champagne and having the occasional cry. I guess that makes me Elizabeth Taylor circa 1970. But you guys can call me Liz.

It's what's inside that counts

It's not the skin, it's the 'nana.

I've written this post so many times in my head now. It basically comes down to the fact that in trying to protect people, myself included, I have hurt myself and apparently hurt them too. 

Shame is also involved though. Big fat shame. My own shame. Shame that started off as a response to being cheated on two years ago, then warped into shame at my own emotional response to being cheated on, then ended up as shame again in response to a conversation I was never meant to hear and which marked the end of my marriage. 

Public vs Private is another element. My marriage ended on 1st October so my life now is not very similar to what it was on, say 30th September. I have been using twitter for maybe a year. I've been blogging for about six. And while my blog started off as almost a personal diary it changed and become more private after I got married. Except of course now I am not really married. Except I am legally, just not practically. I am meeting new people and doing different things, but Pooch is through his own choice still reading this blog and my tweets. And so while what happened and what has happened since is something I want to refer to he's not comfortable with that and thinks it should be kept private. 

This week has really been one hell of a week. The kind of week you just don't want to have too often. Work pressures, an argument with Pooch, all underpinned by PMT such as you get let off murder charges for. And one of the things that made it worse was my mistaken efforts at shielding others from the truth crumbling in a quite spectacular fashion. If I had just been honest about the reasons for my marriage breakdown then I wouldn't have had the stress of it all coming out recently, and wouldn't have felt the isolation I have felt by keeping things from people, even though I realise this was self-imposed. 

So what should I do? This is my blog and I'm starting a new life which is, I assume, going to involve dating and the rest. Last night I went to a friend's house for dinner. It was a low key chill out thing for both of us since he works long hours and socialises hard during the week and I was just burnt out after the week described above. 

This friend and I had a few rebound type encounters in December but we were both clear that it was just one of those things and so that side of things is over. Pooch knows this but he does not like any mention of this friend. But if I spend time with someone and something that I want to blog about happens, how much should I consider Pooch's feelings and not make any reference to it online (which seems to include not tweeting at them) and how much should I just get on with it? 

Pooch is not going to be happy about me putting this much online, but I am increasingly feeling like I'm approaching a point where I might want to try out dating. I'm not there yet, but I think in another month or so I will be. And I don't need the stress of living a double life and trying to remember what I've told to who. So...this is it. Stage 1 of this whole process was when I moved out and was in a state of shock where eating and sleeping went haywire and I just couldn't believe what was happening. Stage 2 was when I accepted that the marriage was really over and started making serious plans for the future. Stage 3 is now. I am single and I'll be blogging as a single person from now on. That doesn't necessarily mean the content of this blog will change at all, but it does mean I'm not going to censor myself from now on.

I won't be doing it with the intention of hurting anyone, or scoring points or getting revenge. I'll just be doing what I've always done - which is blogging (and tweeting) about my life.

When a blog post really speaks to you

I have a friend who follows people on twitter so he can scoff at what they say because he considers them to be so laughable.

Personally I only follow 62 people and I only follow them because I want to read what they say. One of these is @bigtangle and not only did a totally unexpected and awesome thank you present arrive from her yesterday in the post, she also tweeted about a friend of her's blogpost. I am so glad she did - because I reckon that post was written mainly for me.

This is the post. 

If you've ever had any kind of set back and needed to pick yourself up, you should read this post. 

After reading the post I turned to my trusty iPhone and my ListPro app and created a to do list based on that post.

Bit geeky I know, but...I went to bed early last night. Sadly was woken up early too by noise outside but it was a good start. Then I decided to make myself happy with Dim Sum and I faced up to a scary something by going by myself. I have also washed my hair in readiness for changing my appearance overnight using the 'curls without heat' tutorial from here. And I found that tutorial on Pinterest, which just makes me happy generally.

That bit about permission to quit is a really good point to keep in mind. It makes me think of my previous post about marshmallows and decluttering. It also reminds me of the half finished afghan I posted off to a worthy recipient yesterday. It was one I had been making as part of my nest building activities but I got it out again a few weeks ago and knew I just didn't want to finish it. So it has gone, and I have started a replacement.

I'm using stash yarn and it's a pattern I've made twice before - once for a friend going through some tough times and once for a sister doing ditto. And now it's my turn. It's a free pattern - Starghan - and very easy to follow. It's also relaxing and simple and so probably counts towards my 'finish uncomplicated thing' task.

One other thing has made me happy already today and that is the boat ride to and from the dim sum restaurant. It is only one stop on the Thames Clipper but it's lovely to watch the river and travel on it, especially in the sunshine.

Plus it reminded me of the river crossing after my hot air balloon ride in Luxor.

I want to go back there in March and will find out tomorrow whether my request for 20 days leave will be accepted. Fingers crossed.

Low Marshmallow Tolerance

I was reminded today of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. To summarise, small children were given the choice between a single marshmallow now or, if they waited by themselves in a room with the marshmallows for fifteen minutes without eating one, they could have two. 

A third of the children could 'defer gratification' long enough to get a second marshmallow. Follow up studies showed that the children who did resist at 4 years old later performed better in school and achieved more as adults. 

I find this interesting because up until about two years ago I was unable to metaphorically and literally resist the marshmallow. If there was chocolate or sweets in the house, I would eat them. Equally, if I had the option of buying myself a present now, and saving the money and buying something better later, I would always buy now. That also only changed about two years ago. 

One way to 'explain' a habit like that is to claim that you collect things. This is what I did. 

I had a yarn collection, a knitting book collection, a vintage haberdashery book collection, a collection of all the books written by various mystery authors, a bead collection, a button collection, a fabric collection, a collection of necklaces, a pen collection, a collection of notebooks, a bag collection, a ribbon collection and probably others that I've forgotten about. 

Adding to any of these collections didn't count as mindless acquisition of small and largely unnecessary objects - it was adding to my collections. And often I felt like if I didn't buy them and collect them they'd be lost forever. That made it not only fun to buy, but also my responsibility to do so.

I don't know what it was that happened to help me realise that, actually, I wasn't responsible for keeping these things archived, and that they were holding me back. It's not something that happened overnight and it's something I still remind myself of as I continue to declutter and weed my collections in readiness for moving. But I'm gradually getting there.

It's been a funny week. Pooch stayed in the spare room for a few nights partly so we had a chance to talk and maybe even get some of that magical 'closure'. It was good for both of us and while it confirms that our marriage is over, it leaves us both freer to move on. 

Coughing through a Crisis

So that is that. I have just been ill and coughed my way through the whole of christmas and the whole of the 5 days I was supposed to have volunteered at Crisis for Christmas. I am so annoyed about it I could spit. I am bored but mostly too knackered to do anything and about once an hour I have a coughing fit. Nice.

As I tweeted a day or so ago, it is a terrible idea to cast on your own design when you are ill. Because you'll do something mindnumbingly stupid - like casting on the waist measurements instead of the hip measurement. And when you have my kind of figure, that's the kind of negative ease you would usually only see on a Beryl Cook painting. 

So this is where I'd got to...

That's about 3 inches in sock yarn on 3mm needles. All now ripped back and an extra 20% of stitches cast on and 2 rows done. So fecking annoying. The garment itself is destined to be a raglan ripple cardigan using left over sock yarn, of which like all sock knitters, I seem to have endless amounts. The ripple is a very simple one like that for Jaywalker and is just *kfb k5 sl2k1psso k5 kfb* alternated with a purl row.

I quite like it and going bottom up means  I'll have time to contemplate how exactly I'm going to do the raglan bit. Time will tell. Bodging will no doubt come into it. 

Although I haven't been able to do much around the flat because of being so exhausted, I have put the advert up for a flatmate online. It was pretty upsetting to do because it seems like another great big nail in the marriage coffin, to get all maudlin about it. Pooch has several times said that I've clearly made my mind up and am convinced it is over between us and in one way that is very true. I do not think there is any way it can work out between us now, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it, and that there isn't an irrational part of me that wishes things could be different. But there are no time machines, and such thoughts are just a kind of internal torture that I guess affects everyone who has ever grieved for the loss of anything.

All in all am trying to remain positive but as the year comes to an end it's all a bit miserable, and with no plans for new year it could be a very quiet start to 2011.

Ill

By now I should be at the Crisis Ops Centre half way into my second day of volunteering. Instead I am half way into my 4th day of flu like thing. Haven't seen anyone since got back from work on thursday afternoon. Have barely made a dent on my Quality Street.

Although I did have a bit of a play and make them into a spiral. 

Bit sad really but gave me something to do on one of my brief stints out of bed. 

It's nearing the end of 2010 and so I've been thinking about my blog book. 

It'll be my 6th and probably the one with the widest ranging contents. I've used Blurb for each of them. They have a tool that slurps the blog posts and some years the pictures too into a basic format and then you just take it from there. I always used to look forward to reviewing all my posts and going back through photos but this time it's going to be a tad upsetting. I spoke to Pooch yesterday which was nice but also very sad. There he was with his lovely family and here I was in bed feeling like death and on my own. Bit glum making.

Ah well. 

Before I completely run out of puff (I know this blog post is boring but I am literally too knackered to think of anything remotely interesting to say) let me show you two FOs. The first is a baby hoody for a little one due in January. 

Exceptionally simple pattern and free too. On Ravelry here. The second is my dad's christmas jumper. 

I used a standard raglan pattern but added this lovely saxon cable up the arms. Sadly, it's still here with me since I was supposed to be meeting up with that side of my family on thursday but had to cancel because of my cold. 

OK, enough misery. Back to bed.

Holidays are Coming

Two vital ingredients of my christmas have arrived chez byrne.

I never used to like Champagne. Now, I definitely do, but I can't help thinking that it would not be a good idea to drink it a bottle at a time by myself when I have to get up at 5.30am from the 25th-29th for my volunteering.

I now have a sponsorship page for Crisis at Christmas so if you have a pound to spare...that's the page. It would be lovely to raise £100 and I have £20 online and £20 offline already so literally £1 will be appreciated.

Thanks for your kind wishes and thoughts about my poor relationship. It's really meant a lot. Fortunately, whatever the tragedy, one can at least attempt to knit through it. And with a friend with a first baby due in January this is what I have been working on the last week or so.

I'm thinking toggles for the buttons with i-cord loops to fasten them. The pattern is a free one from Pure & Simple whose patterns are....pure and simple. Nuff said. Top down and seamless with lots of scope for adding flourishes if you want to.

Along with the champagne, muppets and the slow-cooked gammon I have planned, I happened to be in Fortnum and Mason on Monday when I saw these little gems. I adore marzipan fruits.

Normally I am a traditionalist and like them to actually look like fruit, but I couldn't resist these.

Sadly I had to open the box to take the photo and...they're half gone. But I will be strong! At least one will make it to xmas day itself ;)