Thursday 27 May 2010

"One day I hope to make something with a thumb."

A while back I wandered across Felicia Day talking on the topic of knitting. For the those of a less geeky persuasion* Felicia is pretty much a Geek High Priestess - she was in the season of Buffy that we don't talk about (not her fault), is one of those responsible for The Guild (sublime) and has even been Neil Patrick Harris' charity-working love-interest in Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (bizarre and sublime). Added to that she's an actual gamer.

Naturally my first thought was to forward it to my beloved MrBorg who has something of a thing for both Ms Day and Ms Hannigan-Denisof, geek girls with at times improbably red hair - see why hair-dye manufacturers make so much money in the Borg household? Anyway, how I chuckled (cackled he'd say) - the geek girls knit.



Here's what threw him most though - apparently I'm a more accomplished/experienced knitter than Ms Day. Watch the clip! At the time I sent him the link I was knitting 'something with a thumb', as well he knew. Since then I've progressed to socks and the sheer magic of turning a heel - I keep waving half-knitted socks in his face, saying 'Look! Look at that! Isn't it amazing? Look, it's turning..!' He just looks perplexed.

Knitting can be an odd mixture of old-fashioned crafting and modern tech-geekiness. The vast choice of needles, yarns.. and then there's notions. Just how many potentially useful things can I cram into a small Burt's Bees bag?

This many as it turns out. There's even a rogue Christmas decoration in there.



*And I'm not particularly geeky myself - I'm best described as geek-adjacent, which is how Wil Wheaton (an ubergeek) described his wife and I'm very grateful for the term!

Wednesday 26 May 2010

In which I gibber incoherently

Because I have blog posts in my head (and even in Tomboy note* form) but I've not managed to blog for, em, ages.

Knitting etc has continued however, and I have gone over to the Dark Side - yes, like many before me I've been tempted by socks. Hey, could be worse. It turns out that dealing with actual thumbs (more on this later) when doing the Reading Mitts made me realise that actually I'm a perfectly competent knitter and that now was the time for tackling heels. Mudpaddle had given me the most gorgeous sock yarn for Christmas and they knitted up into the most gorgeous comfortable socks. Hmmm *sigh*.


I love this time of year, suddenly there's so much colour.



In sartorial terms I loathe pink - and being the mother of a three-year-old girl I encounter pink clothes rather more often than I'd like! Yes I know I don't have to buy her pink clothes - and I don't. But little girls acquire clothes by all sorts of means.

However nature does pink really well - well done nature! That's just a mass of happiness on a tree. And having grown up lacking trees I am still deeply impressed by blossom. I'd heard of it of course but for some reason had imagined a basically green tree with a few blossomy bits - like the pictures you draw of apple trees when you're a kid but with pink blobs instead of red. So when I see a tree looking like candy-floss I can't stop myself smiling.



* oh I love Tomboy notes, it's like have post-it notes stuck all over my screen but without running the risk of the cats trying to pull them off..