More reasons to knit

My mother-in-law found an English version of Lana Grossa's latest pattern magazine and showed it to me yesterday; I don't think I've stopped drooling yet. It is astonishing what good design can do for knitting; there just is no comparison between this stuff and the ten- or twenty-year-old plain vanilla sweater patterns commonly available. Having just completed my first voluntary knitting project in 30-odd years, is it too soon to try lace, do you think?

The tooth fairy has a lot to answer for

JJ's teacher called me from school yesterday to say my child had knocked her two top front teeth out on a see-saw; I arrived to find her sobbing in the teacher's lap, an ice-cube pressed to her gums and her two little teeth in an envelope. It wrings my heart just writing about it... she calmed down once I'd got her home and cuddled up on my bed with a few stories, but didn't want anybody to see her; she was worried that she looked awful and couldn't talk properly. The dentist helped a lot by showing her the x-ray on which the new teeth were clearly visible, just waiting to come out. And by giving her a balloon, which I followed up with a visit to the toy shop. So all in all she was feeling much better by bedtime, and even more so this morning when she found the Tooth Fairy's letter and double dose of coins. She actually *asked* to go to school, which doesn't happen much at the moment.

But. My poor baby is far less winsome than she was yesterday morning. A gangly kid with a huge gap in the front of her mouth who talks funny is, let's face it, far less appealing than her cherubic peers, and she is not going to find quite such easy acceptance from the world for a while. Maybe never again. Sekkie, meanwhile, is at the height of her three-year-old charm, able to melt hearts just by putting her little chin in her hands and looking at people. She has taken to bringing me rolled-out bits of paper wrapped in sticky tape and saying "Here mama, here's a sceletope for you." I sometimes wonder whether she gets the word wrong deliberately because she knows we think it's cute.

JJ has been concentrating her gift-giving on the fairies, with gratifying results (for her). The Sleep Fairy, who's made a reappearance in our lives, has been outfitted with an entire wardrobe made of tinfoil and left on the plants outside overnight: skirts, ponchos, shoes, hats, a wand cover and several purses. This means Dad and I have to remember to go outside every night and collect them, leaving appropriate thank-you notes behind. Being a fairy is hard work.

Exorcising Miss Armstrong

Miss Armstrong is the person who taught me how to knit, when I was seven and new in town. I was delivered to her class by the principal halfway through the school year, with the words "She's skipped a year, so she might be a bit slow." Off to a flying start, then, with suspicion and resentment on both sides, and things never really got any better. I remember her as small, blond, and sharp in all dimensions; my mother, with whom I checked this memory, says "She was a pretty little thing, but she shouldn't have been teaching little ones".

When it came time for our first needlework class, I didn't have any knitting to work on; and when I confessed that actually, I didn't know how to knit, Miss Armstrong was incredulous and angry in a "what's wrong with you?!?" sort of way. So she taught me how to knit, not in a manner which suggested this might ever be a fun thing to do -- and right-handed to boot, which for a very left-handed child didn't make things any easier. My first project, a purple square, finished as a lopsided purple rhomboid of sorts with a large hole in the middle. Our term project was to knit a toy; I spent weeks poring over magazine pictures of lovely and utterly unattainable knitted toys before resorting to my mother in tears at 6pm on the night before the project was due. We made a pink square, rolled it up and stuffed it, sewed two eyes on it and called it a worm (my mother still has it somewhere).

All of which goes some way towards explaining why I've always associated knitting with failure and incompetence on my part: "Oh, I can't knit". I made one oversized and never-worn fisherman's sweater when I was 14 and everyone was knitting, a baby jersey when I was pregnant with JJ and awash in hormones... and that's about it. Until now. Thanks to a lot of crocheting, Ravelry and the world of knit blogs, it has slowly dawned on me that this knitting business is worth another try. I realised it would be fun to experiment with a different kind of fabric to the one made by crochet, and even more fun to try combining both in the same project. It would be cool to learn some new stuff: circular needles? cabling? socks? lace? Mmm.

So, here is the first thing I have knit in 30 years without thinking "thank god I never have to do that again":


It's not perfect -- my measurement skills leave something to be desired so the two front panels came out slightly different lengths and they don't match up properly-- but there are no holes in it and all the bits fit together more or less as they should. I have (re)taught myself how to cast on with one needle, knit, purl, increase (two different ways) and decrease, cast off, pick up stitches to knit an edging and make buttonholes. I consider that a very satisfying learning curve (she said, smugly). Back to crochet next because I have some yarn left over and I really want to make the Boteh scarf, but consider me a convert.

A guerrilla gardening primer

I have been sucked into the publicity machine surrounding the release of the wonderful Richard Reynolds' new book On Guerrilla Gardening, and will be doing an interview with Jenny Crwys-Williams on 702 this afternoon. For those who are finding this blog via the show, there is regrettably little about guerrilla gardening on it (so far), but here are a few other resources to get you started:

• The Guerrilla Gardening Home Page.
• A fantastic guide to how to make your own seed bombs.
  
• The site for ActionQuest Atlanta, who made seed bombing one of their quests. This entire site is well worth an extended browse, and the idea is ripe for emulation
• Guerrilla gardening on YouTube, including a video guide to seed bombing.
  

PS "Guerrilla" is an awful word to spell.

Update: Just got a call to say they're postponing the segment to next week, which may mean never, but I'll leave this up in any case. Partly because that ActionQuest site is REALLY cool and demands your attention.

Time vortex

It's been a frenetic couple of weeks since that last update, including an intense three-day course, a holiday in Sedgefield interrupted by bits of work, and several flights to and from Johannesburg including one unplanned night in a hotel because I missed my flight due to the death of a dog (not mine). Last Wednesday, which was pretty much the last time I turned my computer on before the blessed four-day weekend, included a 6am flight for a 9am meeting in Joburg, then a lunchtime flight home for a 4pm meeting in Cape Town and finally a quick stop-off at the lovely Krishna's for takeaway food so I could feed the dinner guests due at 6:30. It's bizarre that two meetings can account for an entire (long) day; the rest of the time just gets sucked into that dead zone peculiar to aeroplane journeys.

On a less whiny note, I have been knitting! For the first time in 25 years or so, not counting the teeny sweater I made for JJ in some sort of hormonal nesting pregnant-type state. Next time, I shall reveal all about the exorcised ghost of Miss Armstrong...