What do you do when every possible surface in ones apartment
- and I do repeat: every possible surface - is covered in things to print, glue, make or finish?
Well, you weave a way between your kitchen and your sofa, sit down with a beer,
knit quietly and silently, fervently, pray that it may pass until next you sneak a look.
When the laundry pile took on a life of it's own, and there was nothing (I repeat: NOTHING) left to put on my feet, I saw myself confronted with two options today: either go barefoot, or finish tying the ends and weaving in the threads on that pair of socks I finished knitting more than a year ago.
Now that I think of that pile of dirty laundry and my options for tomorrow, does anyone have a good pattern for underwear?
- I'm kidding. Just kidding.
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Allison, you won yesterday's Advent gift. If you send me an email with your address, I'll send it on it's way.
If you're new to the Lineanongrata blog and want to participate in the daily advent giveaway, just leave a comment beneath each day's post and you'll be entered automatically.
It has been a year now that I'm home, and I can see, looking back on this blog's poor history, that it has been a blog-it-easy year for Lineanongrata. I must thank you all for sticking with me. It's a constant pleasure for me, to be able to connect to so many people.
Over the last couple of years, as my life kept changing, I have defined this space very differently at times. It sure is a lot easier to tell a funny story when you basically live with four big burly men who secretly fill each other's backpacks with chestnuts or tape mousetraps on each others cars doorhandles.
It sure was easier to take beautiful photos in the South of France, where there was always sun and light.
This has been a year of many changes for me. I have tried to tell a fancy little story or have an illustration ready for each post I presented here. But it's not working really well, is it? So I'd like to take this space in another direction again, at least partially. I would very much like to show you where I live now, in photos as well as in illustrations, and I would like to share the small things that make my day and eventually my weeks.
It's probably going to be like notes instead of stories. But it should give me the chance to be here more often.
The 'Food for thought' project is taking place more than ever, recipes have started to arrive (and I still owe so many of you a heartfelt thanks for that) and there has been a very important addition to the project, too.
But for tonight, I'd like to share just a few photos of the space and the things I have created around me here in Berlin so far. Making a space a home is more work than I thought.
But as more and more things fall into place, curtains get made, spaces are being defined and routines are being found, I am so very very happy.
Sometimes I pause during my day, look around and see all the things that I have, and the things I can make or draw, and I'm so grateful.
When I walk the streets of Berlin, and be they oh-so-grizzly grey and rainy, I am happy to be here. Sometimes I have to refrain from doing a little two-step in the middle of the subway or on the street somewhere, or in the shopping mall around the corner.
Because I am so happy.
When I run, longer and longer distances, and my body obeys, I am violently, savagely happy to become the athlete I have wanted to be for so long.
But what really makes me giddy with happiness is when I see my friends and part with a 'see you soon', or watch their kids for a night or when I don't see my best friend when I'm at my parent's place, and it doesn't really matter because we'll see each other again, really soon.
This is still a post about 'optimizing', or 'scaling down' as Amy has called it, but I disguised it. So as not to bore you more than necessary (says she, listening to 'Sunny' on her iPod and wriggling dance-like in front of her computer. Harvest season really is exhausting for body and for mind.).
As you have probably guessed, I'll be reporting on socks tonight.
They come in pairs and have, thus, a kind of a parallel. At least literarily speaking. Let's not talk mathematics because I almost failed High School because of a complete lack of mathematical understanding. Our maths teacher, a great fan of carrot cake and the healthy life, sighed greatly (and I mean greeeeeaaaaatlyyyy) and gave me the mark that had me pass - barely.
So socks come in pairs. And when you have knit a pair, you're sure to be left with a tiny rest of sock yarn. My sister tried to buy the same yarn again to knit a new pair and maybe finish the yarn this way, but she eventually got bored of the color scheme and was still, and very surprisingly, left with a rest of sock yarn. Which is kind of magic, if you ask me.
There are several, or actually, many of these tiny balls of yarns in my possession. And while I would move them to Berlin without any regret, I can just imagine myself opening a box in Berlin, in a new home, already quite distraught because of the moving stress, packing, unpacking, cleaning and being generally in a bad mood. And it's - oh, it's another leftover ball of untidy sock yarn. Great. Where shall I put that ?
Which is why we are starting the 'unparalleled project' here on the winery. The goal is to knit up any leftover sock yarn into funny socks that don't match and are thus unparalleled (in a literary sense, of course).
Anyone want to participate ? This is a challenge. I'm ready to employ terms like 'could not' and 'would not' and can't'. If anyone of you knits up a pair or more of these, I'd start my first flickr group (oh, what excitement there would be in store for me) and if you blog about them I'd blog about them, too. But really, there is no reason to go public. It's actually fun to knit socks that are not the same old same old all the time.
One week in London at the International Wine Fair left us exhausted, but it did give me the chance to meet the wonderful Janet. The first time I met someone I only knew via the blog world, and it was an absolutely wonderful day. She took me to see Liberty's, and just looking at dresses that cost more than 600 GBP was quite an experience. So was rummaging through their fabrics, and I had to restrain myself from not buying every single one.
My mother is one of my readers (always wondering about the amount of fabric I just absolutely need for survival), so I can't tell you how much I really did buy.
I don't know how many of you have already been to Janet's blog, if you haven't, you should go right now. She's a designer and makes quilts (and other items) that are really very beautiful. I was lucky to get this tea cozy as a gift and it makes me wish I were patient enough to stitch things as detailed as these birds.
Since we got back home to France we had a great deal of bottling going on around here, which is always emotionally draining because so many things can go wrong.
Besides that a team of craftsmen is renovating one of the houses on the winery and it seems they need constant attention, which is taking up most of my time at the moment (they don't do a lot of planning beforehand and are often wrong about the quantities needed of certain products, and that drives me to distraction).
In the evenings I am usually too tired to illustrate or do things that involve a great lot of thinking. So I started finishing all the projects I started and have never brought to completion (Clutch from Amy Butler's Institches).
It's soothing in so many ways, diminishing the piles of things with loose threads, pins and needles poking in every direction,
thereby lessening the amounts of 'ouches' that can be heard from my studio (Sweater: Duck Soup from Jujube and Lolo, my absolute favorite for kids) .
A finished project is a thousand times calmer than one on progress, visually but also in my head. It doesn't cry out 'I'm still here ! You still haven't gotten around to my threads and needles !' every time it sees me. Unfinished projects are annoying that way.
Now I just have to give all these newly finished things away and I'll feel much better with the world. After all, these were supposed to be Christmas presents. For 2008. Ahem.
Oh, and by the way: Ernie called and told me to say 'hi'.
This post is titled 'a walk', but it might have been 'a week's worth of photos' or 'what we love'. Because at the moment I don't have a lot of time to post or even to think about the things that are happening, but there is one hour that is more or less always the same. The one hour I reserve for taking a walk with the dogs.
It's usually a solitary hour (even though there are four of us) where I feel strongly about nature and see so many things changing incredibly quickly over a week or so.
I love how there Irises are just there. All of a sudden.
I love the geometry of the first spring green in the vineyard.
'Drinking while walking right in it' is a huge favorite. For some of us. It's difficult to restrain myself. But I've yet to give in.
It's amazing how rain is omnipresent. It's either here, or we're waiting for it. That's as 'May' as it will get.
I wonder about the grasses. Can oats really be growing already ? Grasses are something I associate so much with fall.
I love the feeling of 'this is the South'. This is the South because of the small huts, because of the vineyards. Because of the smells. Because of the ever changing sky. Because of the birds and the cicadas.
We love playing 'where is the 45 kg doggy ?'.
How lovely is seeing the sky after the day spent in front of the computer...
watching my mother fall asleep over a book,
finishing a child's sweater ?
But nothing is as funny as seeing what Akbar left for the cat after a raid on the cat food. Really, that's my absolute favorite.
We're off to London for a trade fair next week. Cross all your fingers and toes so that we'll find an importer.
I hope I'll find a moment to post. Because I'll meet a very special person I've never met before. My first blog friend meeting ever. I'm incredibly excited. Janet, I'm on my way for cake, coffee and London ! And a no-boy day.
When I woke up this morning I thought I'd go right back to sleep, so tired was I. You know those mornings, of course. After having slept badly you wake up and think that this will surely be a day of failures. And an early night.
The good thing about those days is that when you expect nothing good, every positive thing weighs double. You notice them more.
Thinking back I could hardly tell you what I did today. It seems like a succession of unrelated events and work procedures. But I never felt overwhelmed or bad about the things I did. I know that much.
Oh wait. I did feel bad when I saw my dog Orion limping because he had been in a dog fight. But male dogs are another story at our house lately. Male and jealous. Not a good combination.
A long time ago I read the feeling neutral or unmoved was a good thing. Probably when I read about Buddhism. Back then I didn't entirely understand how feeling neutral could be positive. It seems a contradiction in terms. And waking up expecting the day to be at least a tired, if not a bad one isn't exactly what one might call neutral. But getting through a day without major disturbances or big outbreaks of emotion is definitely positive at this busy time of year.
How about you ? Does your workload increase before Christmas ? I sometimes wonder if everybody works more before Christmas or if that's a phenomenon happening in some lines of work only.
Have you all your presents ?
Yesterday's Advent present goes to Tracy. Which is much more positive than neutral. But as neutral is positive...
There are two answers to that question. Either knitting or drawing.
But those are not the only two things I'm doing at the moment. Sewing would definitely be a right answer, cooking, but not as much as I used to (we have a lady who helps me in the kitchen and the household now. I'm really thankful for that because it gives me much more time to spend on the ten thousand other things I need to do). Working for the winery.
And between all those options, all the things I need to do, I didn't have the feeling of arriving at anything conclusive today.
Started this, continued that, but finished only the letter concerning the taxes I'm not going to pay (the French administration would like me to pay for a TV. Which I don't own. I have not been a friend of television ever since I spent one year in Michigan with an American family (that I liked a lot. The family, not the TV) and overdosed on the ever present, always repeating television programs.).
With Christmas coming up it would have been more pleasant to have finished a gift for someone, items for the shop, an illustration I need to make for another person.
Don't the French administrators need to make Christmas gifts ? Can't they ask me for 150 Euros in January so that I could write them I'll be damned if I pay in February ?
The ten days of absence (at least, I think, though I don't dare count) were due to a trip to Germany I undertook. It was my father's birthday and we had ourselves a little celebration.
Well, there was one official celebration, but until we reached that one, my brother, my sister, a good friend and I had another celebration. Which was fun until about six in the morning. It was much less fun on waking up in the afternoon, I can tell you.
Maybe I'll get to last weeks follies later this week, for now I'm content to dive back into fabrics and threads, into pens and inks, and some computer design work.
My first attempt at the placket neck sweater looked all right. All right, I mean. It looked very handmade. It was destined to go to a wee little girl who was born about two months ago, and my little sister had, two months ago, already offered her a beautiful patchwork blanket.
You know, beautiful. All cleanly sewn, nicely to behold, and the little girl's father had said, on seeing it the first time: 'Oh, something so valuable...'
So I imagined what he would say (or not) to my very handmade sweater and made it again. Cleaner, nicer, a little bit more perfect. The wool helped, too. It's 100 % Merino (Bingo by LanaGrossa), very thick and very very soft.
The needles will come out, in case you wonder. Thought I'd give you an impression from where the action is (right. It's not that I haven't figured out kitchener stitch to perfection, at all).
When I came home on Friday these lovely yarns were waiting for me, fresh from PurlSoho. It's Baby Alpaca (chunky) by Cascade Yarns. Lovely soft, as well. It's destined to be knitted into small sweaters of various sizes, the pattern of choice being 'Duck Soup' from Jujube&Lolo.
May I say that it's absolutely not my fault I bought this yarn ? It's all because of Ulla, who posted about tiny dufflecoats a while back.
All I can say is: Don't start blogging. It will get you into a whole lot of trouble.
But it's full of good ideas, I have to admit. These birds will be, if I keep with the task, this year's Christmas decoration. My first own Christmas decoration ever, to be more precise. I never remembered it was going to be that time of year until about two days before the 24th and couldn't make decorations in time.
The bird pattern is from Joelle Hoverson's 'last minute patchwork and quilted gifts'.
(Seriously, was there anyone out there who didn't know already ?)
As the world is seeing one baby after another being born, I have gotten seriously behind on my gift making list. Many a present was sown, but at the moment I feel I need to rest in the evenings, so more time in my studio, even though it would be passed with the sewing machine and fabric and not the computer, wasn't really an option.
As the last beautiful days of autumn, the days that still feel almost like the end of summer, pass, knitting feels so natural. You can take it outside and back inside in the evening, after a day of basking in the last warm rays of sun.
Can you see how tiny these are ? I'm always amazed someone actually has feet this small, and be it just for such a short time (yarn: Hazel knits).
Socks alone seem like a very small gift for such a great achievement as a perfect baby, though, so I started making the baby sweater from 'Last minute knitted gifts'.
...Fervently hoping I'll get the instructions right. Because I have never knit anything from written instructions (and surely not in English) before. Oh yes. Did I mention I haven't knit a sweater before, either ?
Until now it feels right. But until now I haven't gotten to the point where arms and a yoke will need to be put in. ...I'll just worry about that later. Has anyone of you knit this before ? Just in case I need to ask some questions (haha, just in case. I really mean: For when the knitting world breaks down and I'll need to ask a hundred questions).
It actually felt so right I had to make a deal today: For half an hour of concentrated computer work I got to do two rows of knitting.
Not because I feared I wouldn't get the sweater done soon enough, but because I was afraid I wouldn't get any other work done today.
ps: Never should I have linked to HazelKnits. Never ever, or just with my eyes closed.
