Thursday, 25 January 2007

gone bowling

This is why I haven't been around lately.
No, not because I am officially the worst photographer in the world.
These are some bowls that I made for my exhibition. Although they are bowl-shaped, they are made, weirdly enough, out of fabric and fibres and thread all magically brought together to celebrate the essence of bowl.

Anyway, being made of fibre, they are effectively bowls that you can't put anything into, at least not your morning bran flakes or anything, and thus almost as redundant as the cup cosy. (Actually, no - nothing is as redundant as that). They are simply bowls that are nice to look at and meditate on the nature of bowliness.

You'd do better dropping into the gallery to look at them properly, because they definitely don't look very much like this photo suggests. You will also then be able to admire some of my flatter artwork, which will be hanging on the walls.

Incidentally, underneath the bowls is the very solid oak table which I am lucky enough to own, and around which the Shepherd side of the family (I'm told) has sat for a cuppa since the 1930s. It's served a lot of purposes over the years, and bowl-holding surface in a bad photo is perhaps not its most glorious moment.

Go down to Handmade House on Broadway to see the artwork; sit round the oak table for a cup of tea, is what I'm saying. It just works better that way.

Thursday, 18 January 2007

thank goodness for...


It's surprising, but nobody guessed it.
If you can't tell, it's a cup cosy. Duh! In the coffee culture of Canada, where nobody makes a pot of tea and everyone drives-thru Starbucks and gets a cardboard cup of mocha chocca half caf double de-soy milk chai with a twist of lemon, to drink during the ten minutes before they hit the next Starbucks, the cup cosy is king.
This comes from a really neat knitting book that has lots of patterns that use just one ball of wool to make something (or several somethings, in the case of the cup cosy; the book estimates about five per ball). However, although the cup cosy is indeed an ideal little piece for practising following a simple pattern, and for feeling a sense of accomplishment at completing something, I have got to ask:
What????
For one thing, if you are environmentally conscious enough to want to avoid using one of those disposable cardboard cup sleeves that prevent you from burning your hand off, presumably you are someone who is also environmentally conscious enough to buy an insulated mug (as seen above modelling the cup cosy). And if you accidentally left your insulated mug at home, and had to get a cardboard cup at the drive-thru...surely you would no more have remembered your woolly cup cosy (I imagine it sitting on the counter right next to your freshly-washed insulated mug, and possibly also your packed lunch). As far as I can see, you're either all thermos or all cardboard, and there isn't a handy gap in between for the woolly cup cosy. It's got to be the most redundant piece of equipment on earth.
Still, they are sort of fun, aren't they?

Wednesday, 17 January 2007

can you tell what it is yet?



Not, admittedly, the best photo ever taken.

But can you guess what they are?

Answers on a postcard. I'll tell you tomorrow.

Tuesday, 16 January 2007

easy peasy


Here, you see the completed cute green cardy, this time modelled by "Owly", in the absence of the actual child who will eventually be wearing it. Owly is wearing the cardy on his head because he is somewhat wider than your average three-year-old. It is lacking in buttons at the moment: I KNOW I had several green buttons in the shape of little buses but I can't locate them at the moment. As soon as I go out and buy more buttons, they'll turn up.
This is the easiest thing I have ever made. It verily skipped off the needles in a matter of moments. The sock languishes.

Monday, 15 January 2007

Oh, I do want to be...

Last night I dreamt of rain. I haven’t seen rain since the start of October. I won’t see it again till April. Of course, I can’t wish for rain, because rain now would be dangerous. If it hadn’t frozen and exploded in shards on your head before it hit the ground, it would freeze into a death-dealing ice rink the moment it did. But oh, I miss it.

“But it’s a dry cold!” everyone says as they breezily throw on another fleece hood that covers nose, mouth and eyes, and then wrap a scarf around the outside and jam a hat on top of the whole precarious construction. “Aren’t we lucky? If it were damp, it’d get into our bones and we’d all be miserable.”

Before I came to Saskatchewan, I was taken in by it all. The heady thought of “dry cold”, that holy grail to island-dwellers who drag themselves through five months of grey skies in winter and four months of grey skies in summer. Oh, the eye-popping blue of the Saskatchewan heavens! Their cloudless, rainless expanse! Aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we lucky?

Comedian and wise man Rich Hall, sometime resident of Montana (Saskatchewan’s neighbour to the south), notes that what we call ‘winter’, “the rest of the world calls ‘the abbreviated glacial age’.” He’s not kidding. (incidentally, comedian and wise man Rich Hall now lives primarily in London, and is probably warm).

Now, a sea coast in winter is a beautiful and terrifying thing. The bashing and swirling of winter on coastal rocks is something to behold; the iron-grey waves give you a satisfying sense of security when you shut the door on them and sit by the fire with a hot cup of tea. Here, I don’t even have amber waves of grain to pretend a sea, due to some freak weather conditions in the summer that ruined all the crops (I am only a newcomer, but through my limited experience of the Saskatchewan agriconomy, it appears that even normal weather conditions are in fact freak weather conditions in disguise, and they still ruin all the crops).

This daughter of a seafaring nation has cabin fever in reverse. I’ve never rowed, sailed, or fished, but nevertheless the sea is calling. And it’s two days’ drive in one direction, and five days’ in the other. Having lived all my life in England, where even the very geographical centre of the country – as far as one can possibly be from the sea – is only a couple of hours from the coast, if I think about how far I now am from a shingle shore and the sound of the tide, and how long it’ll be before I need an umbrella, I get a miniature panic attack.

I don’t know the legend and lore and rhyme that kids have here. They don’t grow up with “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside” and “rain, rain, go away” as their staple childhood songs. How do you fill the never-ending car journey that it takes to get from here to… anywhere? “Oh, I do like to drive in a straight line for seven hours”?; “rain, rain, come every morning for just about half an hour during the summer, so we can at least salvage some of the harvest and make a half-decent living”?

Of course, should I actually make it to the rain and the sea and the coast anytime soon, here’s what would happen. I would dash into the curling waves, fall on my knees, raise my arms to the slate-grey heavens and declaim “Break, break, break/ On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!” with teary and thankful eyes.

Thereafter, of course, you’d find me indoors bitching about the damp and how it gets into your bones, just like everyone else. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it doesn’t take long to bring a coast-dweller back to her senses. But for that one glorious moment, it will all have been worthwhile.

Wednesday, 10 January 2007

storm in a jolly big teacup




This is sort of what Saskatoon looks like at the moment. Although "looks like" is a bit of a strong term, as visibility is officially nil, and should you lift your head in an attempt to "look" at anything you get a face full of blown snow. Blizzard conditions are set to last into the night, with the temperature dropping to minus 41 overnight (currently minus 31). All the highways are closed; no planes out or in; we are officially sealed off from the outside world like the plague village of Eyam that we all learnt about in primary school. (Though currently there is no plague evident in Saskatoon. In temperatures like this, even viruses give up the ghost). You could definitely get lost on the way from the barn to the house in this one. And by the way, although it looks like twilight in these photos, it's actually mid-day and the broadest of broad daylight we're going to get. Now does a drop of rain seem so bad?

Tuesday, 9 January 2007

we shall overcome




It's been a busy weekend.

The sock and I talked, and we resolved our differences - for now. Although you can't see it very well, I have now "knitted one bit for a lot longer than the other two bits", and am ready to begin bending the heel so it doesn't just go on in one long bit forever. However, I was unable to concentrate on the instructions for that whilst also watching a film (the sock and I may have reached another impasse, but we're putting off dealing with it for now) , so I started something easier.

The green thing at the back is most of a little cardy type thing for my nephew. The wool was given to me by a very kind friend. Although I wanted to use the wool to make this cardy, it is actually too fat wool for the pattern. Also, I needed 4 mm needles, and I only had 4 1/2 mm. Ah well - knit the smallest measurements, it will end up a smidge bigger, he can wear it later. (I KNOW, all right? Do I ever follow the actual instructions for anything?) I suppose at the age of thirty he may no longer want a cute minty-green cardy that he's finally grown into, but what the hell.

I read three books: the Hollow Kingdom trilogy. A trilogy for teenagers - no, not a weird penchant, it's actually my job to read such things - and it was a very good trilogy, too. I don't much like fantasy, elves and goblins and whatnot, but this doesn't take itself too seriously and has some really subtle, compelling, and suprisingly, very funny, things to say.

The weird rubbishy looking thing on the right is marginally better represented in the second photo. These are fibre leaves for the aforementioed mini exhibition. The exhibition people are more about 3d and I am more about 2d, but I am 3d-ing away by making these leaves from dyed raw silk fibres and lovely scraps of stuff, sandwiched together with wires and suchlike. Some will be made into pins and others something a bit bigger, and there are now many more of them than this sample.

There was other stuff too this weekend, like swimming and going to the post office and the bank and playing cards and buying milk and getting cold and warming up and making bread. It's really no wonder I start the week pooped.

Friday, 5 January 2007

There's a right way and a wrong way


I'm ready to cry because of a sock.
It's not an overreaction. I have now put away the sock for three days and not had anything to do with it. We aren't on speaking terms, me and the sock.
First of all, it turned out that I had been knitting the sock inside out. Who'd have thought it possible? You just follow the pattern and bob's your uncle. But the pattern, which I bought on the advice of a nice wool shop lady as being for someone who has never knitted socks before, does not anywhere say, "hey, if you've never done this before, here's the way that you hold the needles so you don't do something stupid like, oh I don't know, knit the whole thing inside out". A startling oversight.
Having rectified the situation, I got as far as what is called "turning the heel" which is in fact "knitting one of the three sides on its own for a whole lot longer than the others". I am following the pattern - I promise - yet it does not look like the picture. Something is very wrong and I know not what it is. I suspect I'm doing it inside out again without realising it.
Fortunately I have a legitimate reason for spurning the sock and its evil ways, as I am meant to be preparing for a little wee exhibition of my other fibre-related artwork. Sewing machine, I embrace you. Knitting needles, I shun you.