chimera

It was harder than you might think to get this photo here.

First, I had to knit the object in question.

I did not follow The Pattern. Would you, by now, expect such a thing of me? I started with good intentions and followed The Pattern to the letter. Then as this very beautiful yarn knitted up into some very beautiful mixy marly colourful material, I realised I did not want to wear this particular very beautiful sweater.

Yes, sweater (or jumper, for those who speak English properly). And since I very much liked the very beautifulness of the wool but not in its sweaterish form, I had to do something to enable me to still wear the very beautiful wool. This led to a lot of measuring and a very large amount of GCSE maths (without a calculator, mind you) and, ultimately, a skirt. Hence, a chimera of knitting: half-sweater, half-skirt; two genetically distinct lines of provenance. Though if any scientist would like to tell me conclusively whether this actually is a chimera or a mosaicism (I'm a bit hazy on the zygote side of things), I'd be pleased to know.

So to photograph it, I had to haul down our one and only mirror to stand it on the floor (sat on top of a French and an English dictionary), and then stand in front of it. And then remove my jeans and put on the skirt, and stand in front of it again. And then stand so my legs didn't look like one giant leg (not sure if I managed that bit). Once I had darkened the room sufficiently for the flash to work I had to discard several attempts because the flash reflection in the mirror looked like I had spilled something suspicious down the front of the skirt.

Then after removing the disk from the camera (yes! We actually have a camera that takes disks! What Luddites! No wonder all my photos are rubbish.) and replaced my jeans, and hunted for the disk that I had lately removed from the camera and put down somewhere, I had to transfer the photo from the disk (via a plug-in floppy disk drive, because computers don't have such outdated technology any more) onto the computer so I could play about with the funny photocorrecting thing (yes! This is a corrected version of the photo, with enhanced contrast and colour! Imagine what the original looked like.) and finally upload the thing onto here, during which time I also spilt something suspicious (oh, all right, it was only tea) down my jeans.

That's a whole lot of mucking about for one chimera. Next, I shall be tackling the Fibonacci sequence. Watch this space.