One of these days

Yes, one of these days...

When I am not at work, talking to people in one of those snug double-lit rooms with the armchairs and the ever-changing number of water glasses and the non-lockable cabinets and the one fuzzy wall each, on which I have been tempted to stick a life-size camel made of felt -- except where would I find one? -- just to see who would be the first to notice...

When I am not outdoors, listening to the swish-swish of a playful summer breeze and observing what it is that sunlight does to leaves and vice versa...

When I am at home but not reading, watching a DVD, cleaning house, hanging out laundry, ironing, writing or otherwise Busy...

Yes, one of these days, I shall take out yarn needle and stuffing, and I shall make small, even stitches attaching ears and nose to head, head to body, body to tail end and so on, and then there shall be nothing lying about in pieces in my home.

 

Nothing that I'd want to know about, at any rate.

I hope she enjoyed her birthday as much as I did

Because I moved west just short of missing one Queen's Birthday holiday, and then stubbornly stuck it out here when all human instincts were telling me to just throw in the towel already and return to the ol' birthplace, I got to experience the holiday twice this year. And the irony is: neither one made a difference to my usual routine. The first, dreary, soaking wet one out East, I was unemployed. The second took place at the end of my first week (a very happy, satisfied, fulfilled week) at work... on the one day a week that I wouldn't ordinarily be working anyway.

Nonetheless, it was a great day. I hope the birthday girl enjoyed all that my home city of the moment held out to her. (Going by the news, that would be more bouquets than even the most crowded English parlour could hold, and a chance to slum it with the sizzled-sausage-clutching masses.)

I kept it low-key, with crochet overlooking the Indian Ocean.

I'd carefully packed all the supplies needed to continue with the current work in progress, because I knew that the path back from my morning meeting at Hillarys would include many enticing places to stop and listen to the waves.

It was a productive time, with not too many incidences of my starting with a foundation ring too large, neglecting to change colours, or forgetting how many rows I'd gone. And I haven't sworn out loud for years, but that day I didn't even think it, that's how well the crocheting went.

And then, while I was busy figuring out which angle to photograph from and quietly savouring the song of the waves... I felt something.

What was this sensation? Hair on my brow? Couldn't be, it was too... active.

Horrific memories came flooding back.

I had a brief flash of hairy legs before they darted back on top of my sunglasses, which I happened to be wearing as sunglasses are meant to be worn. I quickly pieced together that there was an unidentified arachnid with discernibly hairy appendages scurrying back and forth not two centimetres from my left eye.

Thanking God all the while (all the 0.5-second while that this was happening) for my unflappable demeanour, I calmly whipped them off and placed them on the table, avoiding sudden movements in case I'd got a specimen of the biting sort.

There were no bites, but all the same, I would be perfectly fine never to see another spider again.

Especially here:

There appears to be something wrong with my camera. I'm very sure that creature was at least five times as big in real life. Silly machine must be messing up its perspective.

17: Sewing

I came home from work late one night in 2006, tired and hungry and grumpy. My brother and sister-in-law called to me from upstairs, where they'd been clearing out some long-held childhood clutter from the built-in cabinets. "We have a surprise for you!" my usually not so chirpy brother chirped. I mumbled something about laterafterIfindsomethingtoeat or justcomedownstairsandshowmeI'mexhausted. You don't always have the strength to enunciate clearly, especially one storey upwards, when you've just spent thirteen hours staring at pages of work by writers who have an anarchic view towards punctuation.

"No, come up now. We're hungry, too, so you can rest for a while in your room while we make something to eat."

no said tired then sofa down here call when...

You also don't always have the energy for complete sentences at such times.

"You really have to come up now."

All right, but you can't stop me being grumpy while I do it. I stomped upstairs and past two dusty, sweaty but inexplicably cheerful people, threw open my room door not looking forward to the messy sight of a bed I knew I hadn't had time to make before rushing for work in the morning, and saw...

"Surprise! Remember them?"

I don't know if I answered audibly, absorbed as I immediately was in being three again. It was Lowly Worm and his... lady worm friend whose name I can't recall. But I did remember. They were among the many stuffed toys in our childhood, distinctive for one very special reason. These were no store-bought, mass-manufactured worms.

They were hand-stitched by my grandmother, or mother, or both. In those early days when craft felt first came to our tropical home, and Richard Scarry was a hero in my household, someone had mentioned to someone wouldn't it be nice if the children had a stuffed worm, a three-dimensional, fully detailed stuffed worm, to play with? Not long after, we had worms. If only every child's early encounter with worms were so fuzzy and friendly and non-parasitic.

Image from here, but who knows where this person got it

In that moment I remembered something that used to be a major part of my life, but which I'd pushed aside except for one or two isolated incidents in the six years since my mother's death while I tried to be a responsible grown-up with no time for fun. I used to sew. I'm part of this family of women (and some men) who Sew. We enjoy this. We have huge stashes of sewing and knitting needles, crochet hooks, frames, patterns, threads, flosses, yarns, transfers... earlier that year I'd made a small concession to that part of my life when I made an E. coli, but I'd gone from that job into an even more hectic one and sewing was shelved again.

By the time the food was ready, I wasn't very hungry. Or grumpy or, magically, tired. I just wanted to play again, with the worms and some other long-forgotten toys that my brother had arranged on my window bench... and as I examined the tiny, even stitches holding Lowly together, the precisely copied Tyrolean caps, Ms Worm's string of pearls, the impossibly detailed red sneaker on each worm's... end? Well, I can't possibly call it a foot because worms don't have... anyway, not to split hairs, but that's the way Scarry drew 'em so we'll leave it at that... I realised how much I missed sewing.

I have tried since then, though life has continued to be just as busy and full of external stressors like you wouldn't believe, to keep sewing and related skills close by even if the projects are small and simple. Because if ever I lose touch with sewing again, I'll have again lost a huge chunk of me.

In a little gift shop somewhere in Western Australia...

... sit the first minuscule buds of my enterprise.

It's been a slow process, but at last I'm getting somewhere.

While I'm in the final leg (photography, packaging, listing) of opening the Etsy shop, at least I know not all of my handmade hairpins are quietly passing their soft-petalled days in a plastic box in my room.

As of today, a tiny consignment of hairpins is available for sale at the Kent St Gift Shop of the Victoria Park Centre for the Arts.

The petals are made using the Japanese tsumami-kanzashi technique; the centres are ruffled fabric pom-poms using the same fabric. They came to me as discarded sample swatches pleading to be made into something beautiful. I hope I obliged.

If you're in the area and would like to make one of them your own, please drop by the gift shop. If you're not in the area but would also like one, please email me or leave a comment so I can tell you when the online store finally goes live.

I suddenly have all this energy to promote my wares and make more. I think they call this momentum. I like it.

Oh, and one last thing. I'll give away the full proceeds (without knocking off the shop's commission, material costs or any other amount) from every tenth item I sell. For now, the money will go to a children's home in Thailand where a dear friend of mine is involved in helping the little ones to forge joyfully through adverse early lives. I'll tell you more about them soon, once I know how much of the project I'm at liberty to share.

"Learn to crochet": Check

I've wanted for years to know how to crochet. Despite having inherited, by default, my late mother's enormous stash of hooks, yarns, notions and patterns, I never had the time to pick up the skill while I was living at home.

Over two years ago, I bought a beginner's crochet book on the cheap. You'd think I believed that owning the book would itself give me the magical ability to crochet without ever picking up hook and yarn, because it took me so long to acquire both of the latter.

But it finally happened. Last weekend, I passed my time in the city by getting acquainted with its op shops. And there they were in the knitting-needle basket. Not just one but four crochet hooks, stuffed into the plastic case made for the largest. Shorter and skinnier than most knitting needles, they must have been passed over by other vintage-seeking types. Or it could be they were waiting for me.

Around the corner, a dollar shop (where nothing costs a dollar anymore, sigh) had 100% pure acrylic yarn on offer. I brushed off my misgivings about the acrylic. After all, I thought, I just want to learn the basics; I'll be choosy about yarn content when I know what I'm doing.

Less than an hour after I got home, I'd got the hang of it and seemed to have a scarf well underway. But as the scarf grew longer, I realised it wasn't going to be my scarf. It was working up into a scratchy, slightly shiny texture. That acrylic might do for some other purpose, say a pouch or bookmark; not something to keep in contact with sensitive neck skin for hours.

But what was I to do, I thought, now that I was already so far into my first project. I wasn't about to just donate it to landfill. Did I know anybody who could pull off a shorter scarf length, who wouldn't be bothered by the acrylic?

Did I?

Turns out I did.

Very good. On to the next project, then. And from now on, I think I'll stick to natural fibres.