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I am finding that my flower arranging is getting simpler and simpler.
When I am arranging flowers in the house I very rarely mix varieties up together.
Instead 9 times out of ten they are plonked into either my old glass bottles
or into the very similar old stoneware ones (all originally scavenged from disused dumps)
Even when I actually manage to sort out a vase the "arranging" is increasingly low key.
Can you spot the lazy dog?
I have always had a problem with photos.
I take masses but then never get them into hard copy.
And then whichever computer they are on blows up and all are lost.
So earlier this year I started to use Instagram on my phone with the express intention of taking photographs of random little things
and then getting them automatically made into a proper book by Blurb
Good photos, bad photos, weird photos all together in a date sequence. It arrived today and I am amazed to find that already there are things in there that I had completely forgotten.
along with some landmarks like the end of school that I couldn't possibly forget.
I joined Instagram as a photo storing/editing software but then found that I could link to other people and now one of my favourite things is sitting in bed with a coffee catching up with photos posted by web friends in New Zealand.
I am snapdragonjane there - and I just take photos of things that make me smile, just life really.
This is the book that changed my life
When Glorious Knitting was published I was 16;
I was an odd sort of teen - very creative in that I created lots of things, but constantly put off by there being a specific way that things should be done. A specific way that I never seemed able to master.
I had been chucked out of sewing classes, I wasn't allowed to take art as I couldn't draw, and every single thing that I made at school was a disaster.
But here was a knitting book that was cavalier about technique - that said it didn't really matter what the back looked like, that encouraged mixing it up, experimenting.
I picked up knitting needles for the first time since Primary 5 (the disastrous brown acryllic teddy) and I don't think I have ever really stopped.
This is my favourite pattern in the book - persian poppies - where you make up two balls of wool from knotted lengths and then knit up 2 colour rows with beautiful combinations arising randomly with no effort.
In their early years my children lived in cardigans knitted in this pattern
I took to wearing jackets with 2 roomy pockets so that I could wander around knitting as I went - making up enormously exravagent coats and jackets.
Life gets in the way I suppose and I recently realised that I haven't knitted in ages.
A couple of weeks ago I was back at my parents' house for the weekend and ventured up to the room where my Mum stores the hundreds of cones of wool we acquired from the local mills before they closed down. I grabbed a couple of dozen and made myself a couple of knotted balls . . . .
A full length mirror has convinced me that I need to grow at least another foot taller before I look good in the jackets but I do have lots of sofas . . . so cushions is the way I am going!
This is the first . . . . hopefully of many
But of course it isn't just in knitting that Kaffe Fassett changed my life - it is in the way he gave me confidence in my creativity; the beautiful knitting I was able to produce "the wrong way" allowed me to experiment with everything else.
It is quite clear to me that had I not picked up that first copy of Glorious Knitting in the Library I would not have a business making things today.
