Monday 8 November 2010

Definition

I should define myself.
I am an aspiring writer, proofreader, knitter, cook, cross-stitcher, crafting genius, book/film reviewer, coastal walker, director, screenwriter, and general all round domestic goddess (remember, I say aspiring, not actual :p). Amongst many other things. I try to teach myself things out of books. I get very very frustrated when I cannot quite make the things that I learn from books work, or when I'm not sure whether they are working in the way that I feel that they should be working. Currently, I am being defeated by purl stitch. I *think* that I'm doing it right. I appear to be doing what the people in the video's and in 'Stitch n Bitch' are doing, and what my mother in her ''oh this is how you purl' do something very fast with some needles and wave your arms around' demonstration, was doing, but at the same time, the result appears to be just more holey wool. And yes, I know that knitting is, by definition, making holes in wool with sticks, but my holes seem to much less orderly that they are meant to be, and it is annoying me.
I just want to be able to make beautiful things, for not very much money. I'd like to be able to make my home beautiful without resorting to cheap Primark/Tesco crap :s Please?

Wednesday 3 November 2010

My need for a sugar thermometer..

Everybody says I don't need a sugar thermometer. I really feel that this is untrue. I am currently extremely poor, and about to move, and therefore become even poorer, as I will be working lots and lots less hours, at least to begin with. Therefore, in order to be able to feed myself, and make lovely (and really quite cheap) presents for my disgustingly large family and friendship group, a sugar thermometer really is a necessity. I would like to point out, just as a kind of 'by the way', that I will not be feeding myself solely on fudge, barley sugar etc, but it would be nice to have the option to open a sweetshop if I were to get bored :p
What is more likely, is that I will go totally insane the day I get the sugar thermometer, and make tonnes and tonnes of sweets, which will then have to be posted back to my family, as otherwise I will actually become the 20stone woman, and then after that, it will sit in a cupboard, being mostly unused for most of the year, probably until it gets to Christmas time, and I start having pangs of guilt about the sugar thermometer I told everyone I really really needed and went on and on and on about until they were so sick of me that they gave me one, just to shut me up, and which I have never used since the day that I got it.

Friday 25 June 2010

i dream of being as good as this

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (W.B. Yeats)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams.



0de (Arthur O'Shaughnessy)


We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world's great cities.
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion art empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure

Can trample in empire down.

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth.
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying

To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

This seems appropriate for my first post: the beginning of a long (VERY long)
list of things which inspire me, and there are a lot..
These are the impossible heights to which I aspire. But if you're not going to
dream big, why bother dreaming at all?