Looming on the horizon

One thing you've probably noticed by now is that I don't do crafting, or for that matter life, in nice neat little separate pigeonholes. Everything bounces off and influences everything else. I'm the sort of person who has a 10 cm square for calculating knitting gauges but uses it more for working out fabric shrinkage percentages for sewing, or buys seed beads for an embroidery project and then realises they make a brilliant quick fix to disguise topstitching on a metallic fabric, or notices that pattern drafting paper is ideal for cutting into perfect squares to do origami with. (And this, incidentally, is why I will never be a minimalist. The more assorted stuff you have, the more unexpected options you have when you find that you need or want to do something. I have stuff. I'm not in the least perturbed about it.)

So... yesterday I went to Yarn On Cone to get some more metallic knitting-in filament, because I had decided some red would be nice. I do use a lot of red (and, generally, that part of the spectrum). And I've bought from them a few times before, so I had forgotten I don't have an account with them, and I thought I'd lost my password. I did the "password reset" thing and waited. Most sites would give you an error here and tell you helpfully that there's no account registered for that e-mail address, and ask you if you'd like to create one; Yarn On Cone does not, for some reason, do that. I knitted a couple of rows of jacket while I was waiting, but nothing happened, so about a quarter of an hour later I had another go.

Now, usually when I visit Yarn On Cone I dive straight into their metallic filaments, grab what I need, pay for it, and rush off again, because that's all that normally interests me; I've tried their cotton DK and it's good quality, but (as I may have mentioned before) extremely variable in thickness. Some of it's all right and some of it is pretty nearly aran weight, and it seems to depend on the colour. I will therefore not be buying that again, at any rate for knitting. However, this time I had to hang around, and I noticed they had a section labelled "Weaving Yarns"... at which point, my gaze happened to fall on my little diary, which is not far away from my chair.

Yes, I know. Everyone is supposed to have a smartphone these days. In my defence, I did try one; the experiment lasted a couple of years (until the dratted thing broke and had to be replaced). I was greatly relieved to revert to a stupidphone, and, to be honest, I wouldn't even have that if I could avoid it, because the reception is so bad round here that if it does manage to ring, my default response is now "Hallo, why are you not using the land line?". (It's useful when I'm in hospital, I'll grant you.) But I hated the smartphone with a burning passion. I'm a good touch typist, and therefore the keyboard drove me out of my skull every time I used it; I hate phone keyboards at the best of times, which is why I very rarely text. (I simply cannot do that thing with the thumbs that appears to come naturally to most teenagers.) Moreover, the screen was far too small to see anything properly unless I took off my glasses, and even then I generally had to do a lot of scrolling. My smartphone wasn't especially smart (it was an experiment, therefore it was fairly cheap - I wasn't going to shell out for something like an iPhone unless I knew I was going to be happy with it), so there was a rather limited number of apps available for it, and the only app I thought I might use was a map of the London Underground. Which, as it turned out, came up so small that I couldn't read it even without my glasses, so it was to all intents and purposes useless. The only good thing about that smartphone was that you could download ringtones for it, so I downloaded and installed Bach's Sheep may safely graze*; and I was the only person I knew who had that, so you always knew when it was my mobile ringing. But other than that - bah.

So that is why I have a little diary. It's a week-to-view, it's from Ryman, and it's pretty good, but it is just a little too big to go comfortably in my pocket (unless I'm wearing the concert skirt, whose pockets will swallow anything up to and including my Bible), and so I have been vaguely musing about what to put it in so that I can take it to church without having to scrabble in the bag on the front of my scooter for it. And "little diary in need of portability hack" and "weaving yarns" underwent one of those mental collisions, and I thought... if I wove a carrying pouch for it, I could make the fabric just the right width so I wouldn't have to finish the seams on the inside. And I could make a cord for it from the same thread to go over my shoulder or hang over my handlebars, using kumihimo. Bingo! (Not to mention the fact that, on top of all that, I've also been having thoughts about weaving my own ribbons so that I could get them the exact width I wanted, because sometimes that matters.)

While I was waiting for Yarn On Cone to send me a new password link, I did a search for "small hand loom" and found the one in the photo at Hobbycraft. It's undoubtedly big enough to weave the carrying pouch for the diary, but I'm not sure if it'll handle something really long like a ribbon; I don't think the bar at the top rotates. On the other hand it'll weave something pretty much the size of a fat quarter, and you can do a great deal with pieces of fabric up to that size, so I should still get good use out of it even if I end up having to buy another one for ribbons. I have also bought the shuttle kit to go with it, since it seemed like a good idea.

By this time it was clear that I was not going to get a password reset e-mail from Yarn On Cone, so I put some linen weaving yarn into my basket and experimented with making a new account on the same e-mail address when I checked out. And, wouldn't you know... I didn't get an error. I did not have a previously existing account. Oh well, I do now.

It should be here before Christmas, but I have far too much to do already so I shan't be unhappy if it isn't. I have done weaving before - had a little loom when I was a child, on which I wove a bookmark, not with my own initials but with those of my school (I had a self-esteem problem the size of Jupiter at the time); but I've never done it on a proper grown-up loom, so I'm looking forward to it. When I have a few odd moments!

*There is a story behind this. Not long after I bought the smartphone, d'Artagnan was one of the soloists in a concert in The Middle of Nowhere, Kent. I was staying in the nearest town of any size, which was 8 km away, but at that time I had no problem walking that distance, so I explained to d'Artagnan that I was staying in [town - it might have been Ashford] and asked him for directions to the venue. He has very many excellent qualities, but he is also, as befits a genius, the most absent-minded person I know; so his idea of directions was "the church is not in the village", which didn't exactly help me with where it was.

So I thought, OK, I can always ask for directions as I go; and I set off walking. At this point I should explain that I was wearing a pine green salwar kameez with basically all the little sequins and bells. I looked pretty much like an animated Christmas tree. I got to the village, asked for directions to the church, but the people I spoke to didn't know; so I kept walking, and after a bit I was afraid I might have gone past it. I knocked on the door of an isolated house, a woman answered, and I said I was very sorry to disturb her but I was looking for the church and I didn't know the way.

She was most helpful. She told me to go down the path by the house, turn right at the bottom, and go through the gate, which would take me into a field. I would see the church right in front of me. All I had to do was walk across the field and I'd be there. I thanked her warmly, and continued on my merry way.

This field was full of sheep. Now, I was born and brought up in the Lake District, so I'm used to sheep... or, at least, I thought I was. I was therefore not at all prepared for what happened. These sheep looked at me, panicked, and, as one sheep, fled to the furthest corner of the field as fast as their legs could carry them. I can only assume it was all my bells and sequins that did it.

Well, at any rate it greatly amused d'Artagnan (who assured me that, really, I was not at all scary!); and I downloaded that ringtone as soon as I got home.