Still On The Edge (Having Not Fallen Off)

As I was getting dressed to go to Bead Society yesterday (it's not much like High Society; it's sparkly though) I realized I needed earrings to go with a recent weird necklace.

By the time I ate dinner, I was wearing them.

I also made a couple of beaded beads.

Today I finished the necklace.

On Friday I saw The Artist, which I wasn't terribly keen to see, but decided to anyway since it's been getting so much attention.

Yawn.

Too long, too predictable. I don't know what the fuss was about.

What is getting me excited though, are my vacation plans for a few months hence: I'm going behind the Iron Curtain.

Yes I know it no longer exists. Yes I know it never existed in any literal sense. Nonetheless in my previous life when I held a South African passport, I wasn't welcome too many places, and Eastern Europe in particular. That's in part why I have to go there.

I was introduced to Kafka the first time I went to Europe, as the guests at the youth hostels traded books relentlessly. You can only carry so many books for a three-month vacation. Yes, one needs books even on vacation, perhaps especially on vacation. I much preferred The Castle to another trade: The Amityville Horror, which was (predictably) pretty stupid. Even though Kafka hardly painted an appealing picture of his environs, perhaps because it was inaccessible to me it has always held a mysterious appeal.

Some mumble decades later, I finally get to travel there.

We (my kids and I. The attack cats and the cat sitter will be guarding the house) will be going to Krakow, Prague, Budapest (yay! Hungarian beaders! I need to find Hungarian bead shops), Dubrovnic and perhaps somewhere else in Croatia, though I haven't decided exactly where.

The last real vacation we took (as opposed to visiting family in Australia which is like a vacation in many ways, and yet not entirely) was when we went to Spain and France in 2003, the summer that people were dying of heat stroke and we had a car (not to mention hotel rooms) without air conditioning. No really, it was a lot of fun!

This time the kids are older and aren't such picky eaters and are more interested in the totality of the experience, which I think will make it more fun for all of us. I think we'll have a blast.

I'm psyched.

Never Just One

(Unless it's big and takes ages. Like this necklace which was in the queue forever because something else suddenly took precedence when I wasn't even close to finished and then it sat until I absolutely had to finish it so I could submit it with the rest of my classes for February through May).

I really like it though. The insides of the beaded beads are marbles.

On the other hand, I finally got what I wanted in these pendants with rivolis and daggers.

This one was right.

See? the rivoli sits up above the daggers, unlike the blue one where it's somewhat submerged and can't seem to lie straight.

Of course I had to make another one to iron out the details that were slightly off.

And then another to be sure that it wasn't just a fluke.

I guess there was just the single star though, because I realized that the necklace I had made somehow found its way into my Etsy shop which means it's probably not a great idea to have it also sitting in the case at the bead store and besides, the class will just be on making a star, though I'll also give examples of how to use it (other than as a pendant).

Apropos of nothing I've mentioned here before, except that it was weird and I feel like talking about it, I saw a movie last night and for the first time in my entire life, had to leave in the middle because I thought I was going to be sick.

(Turns out I wasn't).

There was nothing in the movie (Melancholia) to induce this; it wasn't even disgusting or violent or anything like that, though the cinematography was very distracting: extreme close-ups (often only half a face could fit on the screen) and jiggly and bright, but I'm not sure that's it either. Roller coasters (or more accurately, that one roller coaster that one time) only scare the bejeezus out of me, they don't make me ill. (They do make my cry though, hence only one that one time ever. It was very bad).

It wasn't even a very good movie. It was self-indulgent and overly long (the first half could have been cut out as it added absolutely nothing relevant) and the only potentially (but not actually) redeeming feature was that the Kirsten Dunst character did a single kind and unselfish thing (ensuring that her nephew wasn't afraid) seconds before the end of the movie. This was not enough uplift for me, not that I of necessity require happy endings. It just wasn't satisfying in any way, shape or form.

Perhaps I'm influenced by the fact that I felt rather ill through a full three-quarters of the screening time, but I think not.

It's Apart Hate

I put off seeing the movie Invictus until a couple of days ago for a number of reasons, all valid, and really I shouldn't have given in and seen it because it just irks me, as I knew it would.

Although I grew up in South Africa, I'm as interested in rugby as I am in baseball or curling or lacrosse, which is to say, not at all. Blind patriotism has never seemed natural, sensible or desirable wherever I've lived, and since I haven't set foot on the African continent since 1989, anything going on there is largely only of academic interest. Plus: rugby. Don't care.

Every time I see a movie about South Africans not made by South Africans, everything they get wrong annoys the crap out of me and this was no exception.

The people in the movie in South Africa who are purportedly South African at the very least should pronounce the word "apartheid" correctly.

Say after me:

Apart.

Hate.

That's the way it's said. When speaking in English, by English-speakers. If people in the US get in a snit because someone with no Spanish mispronounces the word "tortilla", then they should learn how to pronounce the pivotal word "apartheid".

Couldn't they have found an accent coach for Morgan Freeman? Really not? Because he was awful every time he opened his mouth.

Just because English is not Mandelea's native tongue, doesn't mean that he has to pause between each word. The man is literate and articulate and far more fluent than Mr Freeman would have us think. There were a couple of real black South Africans in the movie who spoke at normal speed albeit with their usual accent and cadence, which is quite distinctive. (Actually, it's pretty similar to quite a few other African accents that I've heard, but to no non-African accents I've heard). If Mr Freeman had paid attention, his accent would have been improved a thousand-fold.

The woman who played his assistant, apart from her awful accent (it was she I noticed mispronouncing "apartheid"), was obviously not for a second even before she opened her mouth, South African. Just because she has a darker-than-white skin doesn't make her any of the ethnicities in Southern Africa, and certainly not one with the family name Mazibuko. She's very beautiful, but her looks scream "NOT FROM HERE!"

A small detail in the Pienaar household. Yes, the maid would have done the ironing, but she would never no how no ways ever have done it in the living room.

There would be a room somewhere near the kitchen, or perhaps (as in my family home) there would have been a room between the kitchen and the back door, that also contained the washing machine, freezer, brooms, vacuum cleaner and other cleaning equipment, where she would have been doing the ironing. I realize that the maid had to have a presence in the movie so that Francois could give her a ticket, but any work that she did would have been while the family were not in the room. Most likely, they would have interacted with her in the kitchen.

Clint, I'm disappointed.

Personal enlightenment and the growth of empathy and understanding always make a good story, and I loved the Cape Town nostalgia shots: the mountain, the lighthouse, the aerial shots, and the rugby looked authentic to me: lots of grunting and mud, but they say the devil is in the details, and so many of the details were so flat-out wrong that it (as expected) completely ruined this movie for me.

Contrariwise

I freely admit, I have some reliable hot buttons.

For instance, I hate a Big Fat Waste of Time.

I don't mean that every second of every day has to be dedicated to my enjoyment (although this is not something I'd refuse if available, let's face it). I also don't mean that all of my free hours (or minutes, as the case may be) have to be fully employed in the Making of Something. Pawing through the Yum Section of the fiber stash (that part lives under my bed for safe-keeping) or deciding which is my absolutely favourite gold seed bead are perfectly valid uses of my time.

What I can't bear is being trapped doing something that is neither beneficial, necessary nor pleasant and not being able to escape.

Like being unable to extricate myself from last night's performance of Stomp (insert universal finger-in-mouth sign for gagging).

The current season's dance subscription has so far at best been mediocre, and at worst (so far), Stomp.

Wikipedia describes them as a dance troupe, but I think that's being generous. Tina Turner's live show had a dance troupe. Those cute boy bands are pretty decent dance troupes. Brittney does a pretty good imitation of a dance troupe.

You get the picture.

Stomp doesn't even come close.

They have one concept: making rhythmic percussive noises by hitting things with other things, none of said things being anything manufactured for their acoustic properties. That's a fine idea, if not unique, and eminently suitable for a ten-minute slot on a late-night or morning talk show, but two hours of it on a stage WITH NO FREAKIN' INTERMISSION was more than I could bear.

At first I was just bored.

For quite some time - at least it felt like a few days, or perhaps even a week. I kept waiting for intermission so that I could leave.

Then the noise started to bother me, especially the mindless and endless "WOO!"s made by audience members, especially the prepubescent boy to my right.

I found it dull and low-brow: the sound ordinary, the so-called comedy trite at best, unfunny more often, and I kept on wondering when the dancing would start. People putting their whole ungraceful bodies into hitting things with feeling is not dance, no matter how hard you squint.

I may have been the only person in the entire theatre who was not hysterically enthralled and enraptured.

As it happens, I did have a small (sock) knitting project in my purse, but it's more complicated than stocking stitch or even two-by-two ribbing and so not well-suited to KITDWB (knitting in the dark while bored).

Now that I'm well and truly past the halfway mark on my own personal time line, I really resent those three lost hours (two sitting there, another getting there and home again). At least I got some knitting done in the ten or so minutes sitting in my seat waiting for it to start.

Today my time was well-spent.

I made a kit sample.

I made a cool right angle weave open cube on a necklace (removable).

And earrings to match.

And a pair of earrings to match the pendant I sold two weeks ago.

And then I saw Jane Eyre, which I liked far better than I'd thought I would, notably the actress playing Jane, who was remarkably aptly-cast. She's not ugly and has a wonderfully expressive and interesting face, but isn't too pretty, unlike in the previous Jane Eyre I saw. And Mr Rochester was pretty yummy.

Also I think I may be clawing my way out of Knitting Hell. (I've resigned myself to stripes in the context of multi-directional knitting in the interest of not being permanently mired).

Back to the Cold

Breakfast our last day in Byron Shire saw us once again at my brother's pie shop.

This time I took pictures.

In the reflection below, you can see a bit of the view upon which he looks out when behind the counter.

The shiny stripy things are petrol/gas (depending on English dialect) pumps, in case you were wondering.

After a morning in Byron Bay, we made our way to Sydney and its Northern Beaches, where my middle brother is currently living.

Below is Barrenjoey Head, where you can walk over the dunes on the left to reach the beach on the other side of the head.

The waters are clean, clear and blue. Some beaches have gentle swells; on others we enjoyed the adrenalin rush of big waves and a bit of a rip-tide.

My sister-in-law took us on a short scenic drive one afternoon. Pristine, uncrowded beaches follow one another around the coastline, each more beautiful than the next.

I need to be living there; every time I opened my eyes, any unpleasantness would dissipate, any problem could be handled, I'd live forever. Sadly, being neither independently wealthy nor supported by someone who is, being able to afford this is somewhat problematic: a house with a view (even without a sunset view) costs many millions. At this time I'm not able to come up with the requisite funding, so that phase of my life have to wait.

We got up early the last morning so my brother could take my son wake-boarding.

The sun was barely up, ditto the local populace, so the waters right at the cove in front of the house were still and uncrowded, which meant that we didn't have to go far. All the sailing boats in the background were moored. Or is it docked? Or anchored? They weren't moving at any rate.

Our timing was perfect. As my son hauled himself back into the boat, we were surprised by a few heavy drops of rain. By the time we climbed back onto the jetty there was enough rain for a rainbow.

By the time we got back to the house, it was pouring.

After the rain cleared, I stood on the top balcony, still in my swimsuit. I think the colours attracted this lorikeet, who perched on the railing about five feet from me.

A friend came to see what was going on.

Another two friends made it a party.

If I'd had some bread and milk and honey, they'd have eaten from my hands. Very biblical in their food tastes, apparently.

We spent our last night in Sydney proper, where we met up with my oldest brother, his wife and two little girls for a Peking duck dinner (my son and I fantasize about Peking duck from visit to visit. We always go to the same place) and then for coffees.

Charlie and Ruby get steamed milk with a swirl of caramel sauce and think they're highly privileged, especially as they get to swarm all over Stuart.

Our trip home was wonderfully un-delayed and un-beset by disaster or lost luggage or weather (there was some armrest-clenching turbulence about three hours out of San Francisco though); the biggest calamity was my media centre (the thing that allows you to watch movies on demand in-flight. I love Qantas) which periodically rebooted in the middle of almost every movie I watched (four).

My strategy for jet-lag to and from the Antipodes (loosely speaking, as the American Midwest has no true antipodes) is to sleep as much as possible on the way there, and stay up until a reasonable bed-time; on the way back I get as little sleep as possible to ensure a really good night's sleep once home. It usually works quite well.

I really needed the awake time on the way home because my knitting plans for the trip didn't exactly work out.

For starters, I completely messed up the sizing on both nephews' sweaters. I've never done that before. The sleeves were too short on Darwin's black sweater with cables running from shoulder to wrist, so I had to cut the yarn on the sleeve just below the raglan join, work another cable repeat and graft closed again. (Yes, across the knit-and-purl cabled section too) One sleeve was perfect, the other slightly less so, but (a) it's black yarn after all and (b) my nephew will be too big for it very soon, though it's really quite fetching on him right now.

Julien's sweater required a whole lot more time.

The sleeves were too short, so as I'd worked them down from the armholes, I simply undid the wrist ribbing, worked some more stocking stitch and then redid the ribbing. Unfortunately the sleeves were also much too narrow, though my sweet Julien insisted he really liked them that way. Against his protests, I undid the sleeves all the way to the armhole pick-ups and redid them. The body of the sweater still barely fits him. As his mother says, it's sporty-looking. Next time I'll get her to send me the critical measurements.

All this took time away from the cashmere-and-silk socks I'd planned to make for the cat-sitter.

I've knitted with multi-stranded yarn plenty of times, but I guess this is the first time I've knitted with such fine multi-stranded yarn. Five sewing-thread-fine strands arecombined to make a rather lightweight (lighter than standard) sock yarn which has the unfortunate effect, due to its not being a single nice, fat, round strand, of slowing the knitting process considerably on account of all five barely-visible strands lying flat next to each other on the needle, reducing the likelihood of scooping up all five strands for each stitch when knitting at my usual pace.

I have been unable to knit at my usual pace.

I also felt compelled to undo an entire foot, as my usual favourite heel (short-rowed, garter stitch over two-thirds of the stitches) just didn't look as good as usual. The redone foot took two or three movies (The Social Network, Inception, Going the Distance) to make, and then there was still another sock to do.

Salt kept me awake, but there's only so much you can knit in one movie, and after that I was pretty tired and required a nap.

Despite my best efforts, the flight from San Francisco home was fairly consumed with napping as well, so I'm about half a sock short at this point.

We were convinced that our cat would be really annoyed at us for leaving her with other people and cats while we were gone, but in fact she greeted us by doing the roll-and-wiggle, and we've been having quite the love-fest this morning.

She's purred more since we picked her up than I've heard in all the time before our vacation, and is currently glued to my lap, sound asleep - none of that sleeping-with-head-up-just-in-case nonsense, she's all passed-out and dreamy-twitchy.

Neither my daughter nor I (though really I should know better) could resist all of the shiny things at the gift shop of Crystal Castle, and it turns out that I'm expected to make wearable pendants from her purchases (well, mine too actually, but they'll just go into my stash for now, rather than dogging me as unkept promises), so even though wire-work isn't my forté, I completed two out of three (she took the agate mini-geode with her to work before I had a chance to photograph it) pendants.

The kyanite crystal scares me a little, as it's very fragile. In an ideal world in which I could do everything and had every relevant piece of equipment, I'd do some electroforming to coat its entire back and seamlessly join it to a bail, strengthening the piece while detracting as little as possible from its crystalline structure.

I'm not sure what I'll end up doing, as I have neither the knowledge nor equipment for electrofoming.

Besides, the sleeping cat on my lap precludes any activities which involve losing her current bed.

Serendipitously Semi Successful

So how do you measure success when what you were making turned out the way you expected it to, sort of, only ugly and a little bit House of Wax or Phantom of the Opera or something like that, but at the halfway point, you happened to notice that it made an interesting bead cap for a very large bead, and at that point, was pretty successful, even though the finished object wasn't exactly?

Is there a serendipity scale?

I like the bead cap, but the beaded bead is a bit like a Bride of Chucky dress form (though I'm not sure being a seamstress was her highest priority, as far as I know. I didn't see the movie).

Or perhaps an Invasion of the Body Snatchers cocoon, the one with Donald Sutherland in his yummy prime. It really could be an alien egg-pod-thing, like the ones in Alien before they opened.

No, I didn't set out to construct all my metaphors in terms of movies, it just turned out that way.

In other news, I'm in the middle of a "Spring Swap" in which we are randomly half-paired in that a sender is not the receiver for their receiver - or is that double-paired? Either way you get assigned a secret swap partner to whom you send a beaded thingie made to your best interpretation of the questionnaire that they fill out.

I've been so focused on the thought that time is running out and even though I knew exactly what I was going to make my swap partner from the moment I read her questionnaire I haven't actually made it yet, that I forgot that the meaning of the word "swap" implies a balanced transaction, and that there was someone making something for me, according to my answers, and oboy, she did.

Love the colours, love the style, if I was going to make a brick-stitched necklace and not get annoyed after a single medallion and decide that brick stitch really is best in small doses only when necessary, a medicinal sort of stitch as far as I'm concerned ... well if I were to use brick stitch to make something for myself (which I'm unlikely to, if the ramble above wasn't clear), I'd want to make something like this.

Thanks, Laura!

Re-Org

Every time a Bead Purchase Event (I go to a bead show or my local bead store has a big sale) occurs and I succumb, I have this problem of where to put the new stuff.

In an ideal world I'd just immediately sit down and start beading and use what I just bought, but said ideal world would not include lust-based purchasing on a grand scale (which is what happens in this not-always ideal world) but sensible purchases in quantities just enough for one more project. Of course this would then preclude the notion of a stash, which is actually in my opinion a very useful and indeed necessary thing, simply because having a big and varied enough stash means that if inspiration strikes, one isn't hampered by lack of raw (ish) materials.

Be that as it may, in my little world, my stash usually grows faster than it shrinks, so I'm continually having to re-organise how my beads are stored. This may involve something like four instead of three little drawers of bronze and brown and gold seed beads, which means that something is getting evicted, and I either have to consolidate elsewhere, or buy more storage thingies.

Last time I tried to do this, I had to return the storage thingie because the drawers were too short for tubes of seed beads, and of course that just won't do. This lack of new and useful storage meant that something that I don't use all that much had to move to a less convenient location, and in this instance, all the Czech size elevens in their sorted-by-colour little drawers moved to a large communal drawer just above the drawer with the earring-sized boxes for online sales (this is in the equivalent of a side-street or alley-way in the neighbourhood that is my beading area).

As I was performing the move, I noticed a number of too-small-to-be-useful quantities crying out to have Something done with them, so I started some tubular netting, hoping inspiration would strike.

Well, it sort of has, in that I've decided that the rope needs to be long enough to go twice around a neck comfortably (right now it's closer to choking length), and will have some sort of removable beaded thingie that will be both decorative as well as functional in terms of effective wearable length.

So far I have a not-quite-long-enough rope with yet-to-be-trimmed threads.

It'll get there.

And when I'm really brain dead, I just settle in to making more and smaller mitred squares in the hope that this mess of concertina-ed knitting will eventually be the right size and shape to be a skirt.

I'm probably about twenty percent of the way there. Optimistically.

You can see my very innovative way of dealing with yarns that I do not want to cut, and which there is in fact no reason to cut, since each different colour/yarn will form a diagonal swathe of ever-decreasing mitred squares that will shape the skirt.

I use safety pins to keep that last stitch formed by the final sl2-k-psso which I prefer to keep live rather than drawing the yarn through and making a hard little knot. Then when I start the next square, that left-over live stitch is the first of the next square.

Most diagonals/colours so far have either two or three squares, each two stitches (that's one per side) smaller than the previous square, and when all diagonals have three squares, I'll be at a decision point. I'll need to figure out whether this is the appropriate rate of decrease, and if not, what it should be, and once I've fixed on that, whether it'll matter that it's changing.

• If I keep the same rate of decrease until the hips (I have a long way to go as the skirt will be longer than knee-length, and I'm perhaps six inches/fifteen centimetres along) then it'll be a smooth slightly a-lined shape, all very well and good.
• If I start decreasing faster after three squares (I'm imagining somewhere in the seven-to-ten range, the last two of which will definitely be decreased faster to shape the top), it'll be slightly flouncy with fullness around the hem which might look funny with the handkerchief edging.
• It probably will look a bit off, but if I keep the same rate of decrease and it isn't enough, there will be all the fullness around my area of greatest fullness (spelled H-I-P-S) which isn't the most flattering thing in the world.
• On the other hand, wool is so very blockable and I may well be able to steam the hell out of it so that I don't have any pleats or gathers.
• On the other hand, if I decrease too slowly, I may run out of yarn.

See, this is the sort of stuff that keeps one awake at night.

Actually, what kept me awake for a while last night was a nasty dream in which my very unintimidating friend Fred had turned into some sort of flesh-eater (I've seen too many previews for Legion) and was trying to eat me in his very quiet and understated way, which made it all the more horrifying.

Luckily I still have nothing to do at work, so my lack of sleep is hardly interfering with my productivity.

Still in Love

Oh yeah, still loving the intarsia in the round. This yarn is absolutely wonderful, really buttery-soft and yummy, and not only am I certain we don't get it here in the US, but I'd also bet money (if the Australian yarn manufacturers operate the same as those here) it's no longer available in Oz either. Not that I mind, actually, since I have so many other yarns that I haven't yet knitted with, not to mention the ever-expanding pile of handspun; luckily the new job will slow the spinning down. Hmm, that's lucky? Uh, well, in  way, I suppose.

And a bit of yarn porn, SOAR scraps yarn porn, to be precise. It looks nicer than it feels. It's mostly medium wools, spun too fine and tight. But pretty!

And I saw another wonderful movie (and made incremental progress on the Architectural Rib sweater): The Power of Words with Tim Robbins and Sarah Polley. This one's about a slightly strange Eastern European woman (to judge by her accent) who is a nurse for a guy on an oil rig who was badly burned. She has a few odd habits (she uses a fresh bar of soap every day, tossing the old one, for example) and won't talk about herself - she won't even say where she's from or what her name is, so you keep watching in the hope you'll find something out, but when she eventually talks, it's far more powerful than you'd have thought.

I also made more earrings for my class, but took a crappy picture, so it'll have to wait for another time.

Watch This Movie

There have to be at least two buyers of movies for my local public library, because I can't believe that the same person would have picked both "The Prince & Me" and "The Station Agent", even though the same person chose to check both of them out.

"The Prince & Me" is even sillier and more improbable than "Pretty Woman", which offended me terribly at the time of its release, as I was annoyed that it was being passed off as being within the realm of the possible, even if it is an entertaining piece of fluff. "Pretty Woman", that is. "The Prince & Me" only vaguely approximated entertaining, but was good enough for plying, which is hideously boring unless it's being done in parallel with something else. Like watching a very silly romantic comedy.

"The Station Agent", on the other hand, was a delight from start to finish. The actors all looked vaguely familiar, and by the end of the movie I'd convinced myself that I'd seen them in other movies or on TV or something, but it's entirely possible that an hour and a half lent them some familiarity to me. Either way, it's a lovely little exploration of the nuances of the way people relate to each other: friendships, ultimately. Quirky characters, lovely acting, gorgeous scenery.

Meanwhile I've been making samples and writing instructions.

Yes, it's an earring class. Yes, there will be more earrings.