The Sick Chick Crafts

I do a lot of crafts, but what has me fired up at the moment is the prospect of loom/frame knitting. Regular knitting I just can’t comprehend but I’ve been doing various types of frame and spool things since I was a child. I just have soooo many ideas and cravings for hats and can’t find anyone to make them for me so I have to figure out a way to do it myself. Not having hair is a huge motivation to have a huge supply of warm headgear!

Tomorrow I am going to the Knitting and Stitching show at Alexandra Palace here in London. I may buy a knitting loom there if I find one at a reasonable price. If not, I am going to America to visit my parents in a few weeks (I am an expat American/naturalized Briton) and I know I can get the Knifty Knitter brand easily and cheaply while there. But I am really hoping to find one before then so I can be using it on the long flight over!

Also tomorrow I am taking classes in luceting, blackwork embroidery and batik. I know the basics in all of these but I am hoping to get a lot better.

I like to make a new item of jewelry for every major event that I attend (I am first and foremost a beader) and I’ve had some fiber that I bought to bead with some time ago and it only seemed fitting to use it for this event. Unfortunately, due to the difficulty of threading multi-ply yarn onto a suitably small (tapestry) needle, things just weren’t working out as I had planned. So I took one of the fuzzy yarns and fingerwove a bulky cord and then added glass beads using wool embroidery floss tucked and twisted around in the woven piece. The light has faded too much now for me to get a decent picture of it but I will try to get one tomorrow. I may not decide to keep the piece in my permanent collection, but I think it does a decent job of what I was going for and will hopefully make me look less of a total outsider

I have a ton to do and need to sleep early so I’d best get going! I just hope I can sleep despite my excitement. Several friends are going to be there so it should prove a very enjoyable day

I’ve blogged before, on different topics, in different communities.  Sometimes I post once in a blue moon, other times I post so much I bore myself.  My interaction with a community varies tremendously by how I am feeling — I don’t mean on a day to day basis, more like quarter by quarter. Given that none of my previous blogs have been what I would call a rousing success, why on earth am  I starting another one, on a new system, and with intentions to interact with a different community?  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a fader, and that chances are that I won’t keep up with this either.  But at least there are good reasons to try:

 1) Crafting is a big part of my life right now and I want to give it even more prominence.  I’m sick of talking about being sick, and tired of being too tired to do anything.  I want to try to push myself to do more creatively.

2) My writing needs work.  I think it’s a use it or lose it skill and over the years, especially the ones where I was unable to type much, I think I have lost a lot of it.  I want it back.  I also want bak the brainpower that comes with pondering issues, puzzling out problems and more importantly for this blog, explaining the end results.  I need to engage the verbal part of my brain on a regular basis and I think that tying it to another creative process (in this case, crafting) might help.

3) I want to give back to the community that inspires me and also to get to know more people.  This is probably the hardest for me to do as I go through long stretches of just not wanting to deal with people or having a hard time communicating.  I’m in the latter now but I want to see if I can inspire my way out of it.

I know that being accepted into a community requires a lot of reciprocation on my part — you have to write regularly and comment often to be in people’s field of vision.  I also know that I have failed in this numerous times. So right now I’m not going to really tell anyone about this blog or make my blogroll public until I am sure that I can keep things up.  There will always be some down/away periods and there’s nothing I can do about that.  But I don’t like raising people’s expectations and then being unable to deliver.