organization

The remnants of having worked in libraries are, for me, the compulsions to straighten books on the shelves (at home, at the library, at the bookstore), to put books back in order when they are out of order, and to organize my own books. This is, as always, an interesting exercise.

When J. and I got married and combined our libraries (admittedly, mine was much larger, but he contributed a number of very heavy science books), I decided that since we were combining libraries and moving in, I might as well alphabetize things and stick them in some kind of file so I'd have a list of what we had. The document included author's names and titles, and no more detail than that. I'd separated the fiction from the non-fiction, but didn't bother to organize based on any other system (admittedly better than my previous system, which involved book size and favourites).

That has changed. When we moved again, having sorted the books into boxes based on alphabet section, re-organizing was easier. Then, last summer, I went on a cataloguing kick. Our nonfiction is now arranged according to a bastardized version of Library-of-Congress and catalogued in an excel document that includes publication dates, editors, translators, and other salient details.

I've been meaning to properly catalogue the fiction and tidy it up (skipping the rearranging by genre, since the collection isn't really big enough to justify that yet--alphabetizing the fiction is fine for now), but it's taken a while to get there. I've been doing it by letter over the last few days. I just finished the "E" section. Eco, Eddings, Edwards, Eliot, Ende. A very short section. The "C" was impressive for my selection of Beverly Cleary's work. I don't own all of her books, but I do have most of them. I'm almost looking forward to the "J" section: between Brian Jacques and Diana Wynne Jones, there's a lot of books there.

Is this symptomatic of some form of OCD? I delight in arranging and re-arranging things. They just don't usually stay organized (which means I get to re-arrange them again). If this is OCD, it is at least a form I can live with. I'm not quite so bad as my brother, who immediately goes to the kitchen and re-arranges the drawer of measuring cups whenever he visits my parents. Speaking of, I re-arranged my measuring cups the other day. The drawer is much tidier now that the odd items that J. put in there are back in their proper places. I have a system. Really. You just wouldn't know it to look at my kitchen right now.

Tailor's Chalk Tea

Tea and my design notebook; yarn bowl and soan papdi in background

 When one has no car, while living in a city designed around cars as a primary means of transport, one becomes accustomed to public transit, occasional rides from friends, and long walks. Today was a long walk. The florescent lights in our kitchen all decided to go at once--all three of them--so we walked to Home Depot in the pouring rain carrying one 2-foot and two 4-foot glass tubes, to match sizes and to recycle the old ones. We stopped in at Canadian Tire on the way, reasoning that they might have lightbulb recycling. They don't. Not for another couple of months. We got to Home Depot to discover that they'd discontinued their lightbulb recycling and we'd have to go to London Drugs. Fortunately, another person with the same dilemma offered to take ours over, since they were driving, and we were drenched.

After procuring more lightbulbs, since after wandering around town feeling like Jedi warriors, we couldn't possibly stop now (not to mention I'm tired of cooking in the dark), we wandered into the liquor store, where I finally found kirsch liqueur. I've been looking for it all over the place. Now we can do Black Forest cake properly.

In line at the register, the man in front of us took one look at me, and accused me of being seventeen. While handing the cashier my ID, I informed him that I was on the wrong side of twenty-five for that. I know I'm short, and I have a round-ish face. But do I really look like a teenager? Last time I checked, I had to look at least 20. Oh, well. Maybe if I develop grey hair at some point people will stop accusing me of being a teenager.

J. and I got pretty close to completely soaked from the rain on the rest of the walk home. While he put the lightbulbs in (he's the designated tall person in the marriage), I dried off and put the kettle on. Steaming hot tea always makes me feel warmer and happier after a long chilly walk.

I finally got around to drafting a pattern based on one of my skirts this evening. I found some really fabulous wool fabric at the thrift store, enough for a skirt, and I've based the pattern off of my favourite pleated skirt. I've changed things, of course. It has this weird appliqued side pocket, which I appreciate it because it is a pocket, but I'm just doing side-seam pockets. And the buttoned straps on the hips are gone, too.

Fabric, newspaper pattern, rotary wheel

I traced the yoke portion of the skirt onto newspaper, and then drew the skirt piece based on measurements from the skirt. You cut the yoke on the fold and one half of the skirt on the fold and the other half as two pieces, for the zipper. A back zipper lets me do pockets more easily. Plus that's what the original skirt has. The original has knife pleats which I've made a bit shallower here (not enough material), and a box pleat beneath the zipper which I haven't figured out how to replicate yet without essentially adding a gusset.

I'm not a professional at this by any means. In tightening up this version so I could fit the pieces onto the fabric, I managed to cut the skirt pieces short a bit in width (whoops!). I'm adding a couple strips along the zipper to fix it. There's enough in the scraps for that. It's not going to be super noticeable--it'll blend in with the pleats and the zipper line--but it is a bit silly of me to think that would work. I have a blue-and-white houndstooth that I'll probably do in this pattern too, and I won't have to worry about having enough there. I probably have enough for a dress and a skirt out of that one.

The fabric is a plain weave wool plaid, but the colours are subtle, and have almost a dark rainbow feel to them. I'm lining the skirt, of course, since this is the sort of wool fabric that has a scratchy feel to it. Gorgeous stuff, but not against my skin.

While marking the pattern onto the fabric, I managed to toss my tailor's chalk into my cup of tea. That's right. So, there went that last of that tea, and that piece of chalk. Whoops.

dressing up

Last weekend, I got dressed up in an outfit that included boots, a tunic, a cloak, and a big sword. No. This was not for Halloween. Truth be told, I'm not much of a Halloween person. Something about a holiday celebrating scary stuff has never really clicked with me. Probably something to do with how I was afraid of everything as a kid--spiders, skeletons, zombies, end-of-the-world, clowns, you name it. So, we don't really do much for Halloween most years.

However, I am not opposed to costumes. Quite the contrary. Right now, we're working on the cover image for a book, and this pic is one of the many images from our first shoot.

On the rocks

Obviously, this isn't really the greatest picture. Most of them didn't really turn out to be close to what I was hoping for. J. was busy snapping photos, and I was busy trying not topple over onto the rocks when he insisted I crouch dramatically beside the river and put my weight on my bad knee. Plus we have to re-arrange the cloak. Most of the pictures look like a blue-green plaid blob with a bit of sword showing.

This is the result of being a writer who's decided to take a chance at online publishing on the advice of a friend in the publishing business. You end up nearly falling into a river early on a rainy Saturday morning wearing a wool cloak and trying to hold up a sword that was designed for a bigger person.

But the book's almost done with the editing process, and I need a cover image, and my friend Mika's letting me use her copy of Photoshop to mess around with a photo once we've got one. I have this image in my head, and I'm hoping we can get close to it. Next time, though, I'm insisting on the trail with lots of trees instead of the bit by the water. More stable, and closer to my mental picture.

The book's called Comrades We, and it topples into the high fantasy genre. What happens when you put a group of trainees with an interesting mix of talents together and then add a few high-stress situations? This book's got magic, villains, musicians, some meddling gods, a few games of Go, a couple mysterious pasts, and a legend come to life, together with half a dozen young people trying to figure out how to react to it all. More information to come, including when I'll have the blasted thing up on Amazon and Smashwords.

A long-expected project

Most of the knitters I know have works in progress (abbreviated as WIPs) that for some reason or another, have been put on the back burner. I have a box for these, and when I just want something that's already in progress, I dive in there and grab a project. There's a sweater that needs its fronts finished, and a couple half-knit socks, a shawl or two, and a hat that still needs a brim. My practice of having multiple items on the go has spawned these things that aren't quite done yet, and that will be finished at some point. All of them are things I want to complete, and just because they've been in the works for a while does not mean they'll never be finished. See below:

Glass Slippers Socks

These socks were started close to 2 years ago (yes, I'm ashamed of admitting it, but it's true) on a trip down to Portland to visit my family. I was knitting them on the train and gritting my teeth at the charting and the tiny twisted stitches. I loved the pattern, loved the way it looked, but those twisted stitches were killing me. I managed to finish the first sock eventually, picking it up at intervals and working through a repeat or two before I wanted to pull my hair out. 

I pulled them out back in October, and realized that the second sock was not far from completion. The chart on the foot needed to be worked to the point, and then there was the toe. I figured I could get them done in time for the end of the month. The bonus to that was there's this group on Ravelry I'm part of. It's an extremely geeky sort of thing, but I'm an extremely geeky sort of person. It's know as the Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup. You sign up, get sorted into a house each term (there's 3 terms per year, each lasting 3 months, with a break month in between each term), and then turn in assignments for classes that fit prompts, most of which are general enough that with a little imagination, it's not hard to make them work with the world of Harry Potter. For month-long projects, you have to start and finish them in a month, but they do have this great class: Detention. For that you get a base number of points, no bonuses, for completing a project that was unfinished before the start of the month. Great incentive to finish that sweater that only needs seaming, or that sock that just needs a toe.

So my pretty blue socks were my October Detention project. I got points, and I finished one of my long-term WIPs.

Close-up of the Glass Slipper sock foot

Oddly, while I was finishing off the chart, it occurred to me that it was much easier than I remembered. I think those almost two years between start and finish have improved my knitting. Sadly, my gauge has not remained the same. I've tightened up ever so slightly from the looser gauge that characterized my knitting a couple years ago. I had to make the toe of the second sock slightly longer so they'd fit properly. It's not really noticeable in the above picture, but it is when I'm wearing them, because the points of the cables don't hit at the same place on either foot. Whoops! That'll teach me to finish things more quickly.

the language of craft

I'm only running on about 4 hours of sleep here, but I have some thoughts. The first one is that I want a loom. This is not a new desire, but it has been fueled by my stint at Knit City last Sunday, when I wandered over to a demo booth when their loom was free, and they sat me down and got me started weaving. It was pretty much amazing and I had to forcibly separate myself from the loom and go back to the guild table (since I was gone for a rather long time, given that I'd left for a bathroom break and then run into the loom on my way back).

I was reading some of the archived articles on WeaveZine last night while I couldn't sleep. I'd gotten up and spun for a while, set up the wheel for plying today, and then wandered over to the computer. Reading articles on weaving when you barely qualify as a novice weaver is a little like trying to read in a language that is not your mother-tongue. I speak fiber pretty well, so many of the terms are familiar, but like any craft, weaving has a specific vocabulary. Reading about it reminds me of reading in Italian or Spanish when I only know Latin and French: I can figure a lot out, but there are places where I am entirely lost. There are sentences where I, the linguist, can tell you only what function every word in the sentence has, but the overall meaning escapes me.

Weaving has words I am familiar with, such as warp and weft. Ancient words that are heavy with significance. Draft, which has multiple meanings for the spinner, the writer, and the latent weaver. Tabby, or plain, weave. Twill. Heddle. Shuttle.

And the craft has many words I don't know (in the sense of connaitre), and many that I am only grasping at. Shaft. Shed. Beam. Pick. Dent. Reed. Sett. Some seem to be interchangeable, but not quite.

It's really that I just don't know the technical aspects well enough to be entirely conversant. I've done this before, though. Learnt a new craft. The language comes with the action. I learn what to call what I'm doing, and I fumble through my first few projects, and then it all becomes second nature. This happened with knitting, with spinning, with crochet (to an extent), with sewing. As I look around me, I see my wheel over by the sofa, ready to go when we get home from the farmer's market this afternoon. There's a niddy-noddy with a skein of already-plied yarn on it nearby. Tossed over the end of the couch is a length of material and a skirt I'm trying to reverse-engineer because I like the style. There's a pile of knit dishcloths on the table, a housewarming gift for my brother. Two are worked in a mosaic knitting, a technique that reminds me of a cross between stranded knitting and weaving. Another sits next to me. This one's a crocheted cloth, worked in a dense, loopy stitch that would make an excellent rug.

Each craft brings its own language, its own little world, with it. Fluency in that language requires immersion and dedicated practice. A simple answer, really, though not always an easy one to live. It's been a challenge with languages such as Chinese, where lack of practice has drastically dwindled my already minimal vocabulary and linguistic skills. But when I can carry my knitting or my spinning with me, when I can speak fluidly through creation, rather than stammering through a sentence, struggling to make myself understood, I speak a language that connects me to people throughout the world and throughout history.

new design and a soup recipe

The week is at an end. Tomorrow is Sunday, the fresh start of the new week, wherein I will strive, yet again, to finish things. There are 3 matters on my list for the next week, 3 items that I would like to see checked off. And then, well, we shall see what else happens.

I finished a new pattern this week. Third Beach. It's up on Ravelry, but you can also get it here, on the page for Epenthetical Designs. After hearing my sister-in-law explain that Third Beach in Stanley Park is the absolute best beach in the park (and they live walking distance from the park, so they should know), I decided to do a shawl designed around it. It was an interesting process, as designing always is. I had one picture in my head, one on paper, and then the resulting shawl on my needles. The shawl in my head and in my design notebook underwent several changes before becoming the bluey-green shawl with hints of yellow that is currently sitting on my dining room table.

I have a few other ideas for designs coming out of the Vancouver area. Something for Granville Island, something for Gastown, something for New Westminster. I have to tinker with the ideas, see what happens. It may eventually become a pattern booklet.

The weather's beginning to change. I'm wearing long sleeves, more scarves, and I've waterproofed my boots in preparation for the coming rains of autumn. I love the crispness in the air in the mornings, and fog that swirls around until the sun burns it off. It's the kind of weather for experimenting with soup, which is what I did yesterday for dinner. I made something inspired by borscht, but which was still rather different. It was very pink, and paired well with the crabapple sauce that I made yesterday. I got out the sourdough starter and made buns to go with the soup. They were so tasty that they're already gone, but there's still a serving of soup left. Here's a rough approximation of my recipe.

September Beef and Beet Soup
2 beets, diced
1 steak, chopped into small chunks
1 onion, chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
3 large pine mushrooms, sliced (button mushrooms would probably be an okay substitute)
2 cups chopped kale
1.5 litres vegetable broth (or beef broth)
1/4 cup red wine (I used a Malbec)
2 bay leaves
1-2 teaspoons basil
pepper and salt to taste
butter

In a frying pan, melt butter and saute the sliced mushrooms until lightly cooked. Remove from pan and set aside. Reheat pan and tossed in chopped steak. Brown and then pour red wine over, and stir. Turn down heat and let simmer.
In a pot on stove, melt butter and then add garlic and onions. Stir until onions are mostly cooked through. Toss in diced beets, and then stir together with onions and garlic. Add vegetable broth, meat with red wine, basil, bay leaves, pepper, and a pinch or two of kosher salt. Stir. Bring to a simmer and then add mushrooms. Let simmer without a lid until soup has condensed a bit and the beets are becoming tender. Add chopped kale, and then simmer for 10-15 minutes more. Serve hot with rolls for dipping in the soup. My version made 6-8 servings.

Yarn Harvest countdown...last day

The world has narrowed down this week: it's all about Yarn Harvest. I feel like I'm doing theatre again. The event's tomorrow, and I'm really glad that it's almost over, so I can stop stressing about it. There's the part of me that worries it'll all go pear-shaped, and the part of me that hopes it'll be spectacular.

At this point, all I can do is let go and live with it. What happens, happens, and what doesn't, doesn't. C'est la vie; que sera, sera.

Let's just hope that thought'll stop me grinding my teeth tonight.