Poem for St Brigid

I'm not sure this is still a Thing; but I realised today that it was St Brigid's day. And I said a prayer for the Brigids/Bridgets I know, and celebrated that it's Candlemas Eve and we may be able to see our way out of the dark from here.  This was helped by a final Christmas celebration, eating and exchanging presents with a friend.

I was given a complete Robert Frost for Christmas 2013; this poem seems to sum up the fragility so many of us feel at this time of year

Peril of hope, by Robert Frost.

It is right in there
Betwixt and between
The orchard bare
And the orchard green,

When the boughs are right
In a flowery burst
Of pink and white,
That we fear the worst.

For there's not a clime
But at any cost
Will take that time
For a night of frost.

Poetry for St Brigid

St Brigid's Day, and while I'm not sure posting a poem is still an internet Thing, I had a Collected Robert Frost for Christmas, and this one remains a favourite.

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

And if that one's a bit sad, Frost can be lighter...

[Forgive, O Lord...]

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

'Tis done...

So. The torch will be passed on to Sochi at Vancouver tonight... and I've managed to finish my Olympic projects. This was looking very unlikely last weekend but I squared up to the challenge and have spent most of the weekend knitting away...

Exhibit 1: St Brigid.

The start date on this of January 05 was very approximate - I can't actually work out when I did start it... but anyway, she's finished. And I've been wearing her all day during the miserable, cold, rainy weather. I'm regretting lengthening the sleeves by half a repeat, but mainly because I've lost nearly 3 stone since I started her; I'm sure this was a sensible decision when I made the first sleeve! That was my Cambridge KTog project; and here's my medal!

And then tonight, right under the wire at 11pm, I finished the IKL project, a Clapotis for the UK Knit Camp Clap-o-Tea party in August...

Exhibit 2: the Summer Silk Garden Sock Clapotis...

The table is 165cm/5' 6" long, so it's going to be a nice length...

Phew. It's not been the greatest fortnight really in Actual Life; but it was nice to achieve something and clock up some serious knitting metreage...

Ravelympics, the halfway point (ish)

The Ravelympics progress is, well, progress... Neither of these pieces of knitting existed until last Saturday morning, so I've knitted a fair amount this week, given that I spent time sampling for and teaching a couple of classes! But I'm still only just halfway through, so will have to speed up a little...

On the left, St Brigid, which is four-and-a-bit repeats in (needs 7 repeats before the neck shaping start), and on the right, the Clapotis in Noro Silk Garden sock yarn (about 60% complete). I'm using two balls of the same colour, one outside-in and the other inside-out; and wondering whether it's going to be too short and too wide...

Kickstart

It's all been quite slow around here at Knitting on the Green. The Seasonal Thing I usually get has been absent for the last couple of years, only to come back and kick me in the head with a vengeance this year. The NHS site says that staying warm is part of it, and that's been all-but-impossible with the temperatures this year, so maybe that's it. Anyway; although I've been here, and knitting (mainly on stealth projects), I haven't been talking about it... or anything else since my spate of invective about the railways in early January!



But the Olympics are here, and with them the Ravelympics.

The idea was originally kicked off by the Yarn Harlot, who is also running her original Olympic challenge again - and if I hadn't become co-captain of the KnitCambridge team and a member of the IKnitLondon team before she announced she was going for it again, I'd absolutely have been doing that one, not least because Franklin will be designing the medals again (see sidebar for the beauty of the 2006 one...)

Three Olympic challenges = too much, given that I'm teaching two classes on February 19th (yes, it's Textiles in Focus time of year again!) and one on March 7th (at White House Arts) - all freeform type stuff, which you can't really stop sampling for...

I'll introduce/re-introduce you to the Olympic projects as we go along... I'm aiming to knit one new project and finish one long-neglected one...

Poetry for St Brigid 2010

It's the fifth annual cyberposting of poetry to celebrate St Brigid/Bridget's day. Officially this is tomorrow; but depending on where you look, the day is either the 1st or 2nd February...

I took a break last year, after a somewhat mixed reaction to my choice in 2008. This is another one about babies, but a cheerier one, and has been rattling around in my head as three of my friends have had babies since Christmas. This is for Thomas, Katharine and Emma.

Born Yesterday
for Sally Amis

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love -
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you're a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn't, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull -
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

Philip Larkin

And thanks to caughtknitting, who sent me a St Bridget's Day card!

At least it's not a sleeve

This weekend, the knitting in prospect consisted of two purple (second) sleeves. I have been making fairly remarkable progress on St Brigid since I learned cabling without a cable needle from Gwen at the Weird Knitting Class - I didn't think it would make that much difference - but it does!

This is despite having to be quite obsessive about keeping my place in the increases while reading 3 cable charts...

And this is purple sleeve #2, from Primrose Path. This is great train and bus knitting - there's a bit of pattern at the bottom of the sleeve and then just 3x2 ribbing for the rest...

So anyway; it was all sleeves, all purple, all the time; so I thought I'd like another project on the go, and I haven't knitted much lace since Christmas - one shoulder-shawl, to be precise. And I love the Aeolian shawl from this time's Knitty (despite it containing my personal nemesis, the nupp). So I dug out the yarn I thought I'd use, and some beads I'd toddled up to Covent Garden to get; and took them out in the garden to photograph; and only at that point did I realise what colour I was intending to use.

Yeah.

(The yarn, by the way, is 2-ply laceweight dyed by Wibbo in a colour she called High Priestess, and was a Christmas present...)

So I stared thoughtfully at my shoes, wondering whether knitting three purple objects simultaneously was insane...

I guess that's my answer then. I'll be casting on later. So I'll be knitting a purple Primrose Path, a Purple St B in a colour called Pagan, and a purple Priestess shawl... the alliteration just kills me.

A bit of a sort-out

There isn't much visible organisation in my house, as anyone who's visited will know; but there are a few tiny pockets where order prevails - the CDs and DVDs go in alphabetical order (by artist for the CDs and title for the DVDs, with boxed sets in a separate sequence below, in the unlikely event you were interested); and the bookshelves have an internal order of sorts. My knitting books were reasonably organised, but my knitting patterns were all over the place. About a month before Christmas I realised I'd downloaded and printed the pattern for the Serpentine Mitts not once, not twice, but four times... I exacerbated the problem at about the same time by vandalising my Interweave Knits, Vogue and Knitters pile, and scalpeling out patterns from those where I only wanted to make one or two of the patterns, but then didn't have anywhere to put them, so they sat in those loose-leaf plastic things, periodically avalanching from the bookshelves onto the floor in a slick puddle...


When I was in Tesco yesterday, they had extra-strong (and wide-enough-for-US-letter-paper, as it turns out) pocket protectors, and files at three-for-two-quid. So behold, the four coloured files on the right of the "tall" half of the books... "Accessories and Home", "Hands and Feet", "Lace" and "Sweaters and Kids' Knits".



The remaining mags now fit onto the second shelf down along with my notebook collection...



The other half is here, on a shorter shelf...




(I'm saying 'half'. In fact there are another couple of feet of knitting books and magazines upstairs, old Rowan books, 80s Phildar collections I can't bear to throw away, that sort of thing... but this is the presentable bit of the collection...)

And these are the new ones from Christmas. I haven't really had a good look at them yet, but am looking forward to having a very good read.

I did manage to get photos of one of the knitted and both of the crochet items I received for Christmas, but will take pics of the remaining one for tomorrow's post.

Meanwhile, I have finished the first sleeve of St Brigid. This is momentous as I think I last knitted on it in 2007. I'm determined to finish this this year... It's not a particularly difficult knit - but it does involve sitting down with a series of charts which don't lend themselves easily to remembering (the large ones, anyway). I turned away to get the camera to photograph this event, and when I got back...

This is the Bug's "what could you possibly want?" expression...

But I shall have my revenge. She was sitting under the daylight lamp (which gives off a welcome shred of heat in the otherwise unheated dining room). As I snapped the shutter for one shot, she stared directly up at the light, and her ridiculously luxuriant neck-ruff startled the camera...

Poetry for St. Brigid

Part of the annual Silent Poetry Reading

This poem's been rattling around in my head for a few months now, maybe because my family's been blessed with two beautiful children this year... Warning : it's not exactly cheerful...

Limbo

Fishermen at Ballyshannon

Netted an infant last night

Along with the salmon.

An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back

To the waters. But I'm sure

As she stood in the shallows

Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists

Were dead as the gravel,

He was a minnow with hooks

Tearing her open.

She waded in under

The sign of her cross.

He was hauled in with the fish.

Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls

Through some far briny zone.

Even Christ's palms, unhealed,

Smart and cannot fish there.

Seamus Heaney, from Wintering Out (1972)

A bit of a sort out

Thanks to a very kind friend (thanks, Suzanne!) I made it to the glories of Dunelm Mill at Huntingdon this morning. They didn't have quite what Suzanne was wanting, but they did have a lot of other interesting things - her girls are going to love their PVC ice-cream-pattern aprons when they're done - and when we eventually found it (having given up), the chest of drawers on their website looked as good close-up as it did on the site. After an unnecessary amount of to-ing and fro-ing, we got it into the car and brought it home... I am a bit of a fan of the FLYLady, although you really wouldn't guess it from the normal state of my house; but I do like her dictum that you can do anything for 15 minutes. I went for 15 minutes on that, and 15 minutes on finishing up something urgent... and it seemed to work - here are the stages starting from 0 minutes...

And because this sort of thing always fascinates me; the things in the drawers...

1: the ballwinder, underneath that is a spindle. When I find my yardage-measuring-thing, I'll put that in there as well...

2: a purple box (thanks, Jan!) containing my smaller DPNs and a small number of circular needles which haven't made it to the Big Purple Circular Case, which is squished underneath it (thanks, Nina!)

3: the next half dozen sock projects

4: skein of laceweight (Cherry Tree Hill in Fall Foliage) I can't bear to consign to the lace box in the loft; three balls of DK weight self-patterning - maybe a Baby Surprise Jacket?

5: the current Guilt-Inducing WIP bag, and a bag of oddments of sock yarn...

6: the next two blankets. The Hemlock Ring Blanket hit me hard...

7: St Brigid. She will be finished this winter. She will, she will...

Anyway I'm really pleased with it; and it was as a result of a bit of a windfall (thanks, parents!)

The question Not To Ask around here at the moment, though, is 'what happened to all that crap you took out of that corner'? Because I'm going out to knit at the Lamb with EJ (who is living rather than blogging at the moment), and I still have a very belated birthday present to sew up, and I've only got an hour, and I'm not listening, anyway!!

The aim with the chest though is to finish up the WIPs which are out in the living room in baskets, and start on the ones in the chest, and gradually getting to store WIPs in the chest. Bwaahahahaahahahaha, I hear you cry. But I have an ulterior motive for this. Have for some time. I just can't tell you.