Does poetry translation count as a craft? Well, I'm going to count it. At some point in the late 00s, I discovered this book and it completely blew my mind. I was already familiar with some of Hofstadter's other work, so I was expecting it to
When I joined the church I currently attend, it was pretty small. There were maybe about thirty of us. Since then, the town has grown apace and the church with it, and now we can easily get 150 people in on a Sunday morning. That rather makes me feel we
Today I'm going to talk about something I made for Porthos; but before I do so, a quick aside about Athos. You've probably noticed that I've been telling you I made such a thing for Porthos, and such a thing for d'Artagnan,
When you really want to knit, but you can't because your wrists are going to hurt if you try, you look for alternatives. I had a cheap knitting machine for a while. It did colourwork surprisingly well (I had a young friend, the nephew of an old friend,
I haven't done a vast amount in the way of cake decorating. My mother was always the expert on that (she doesn't do it any more, being 86 and not too steady on her feet), and she used to do some real show-stoppers. However, this isn&
A top-notch professional singer can sing through anything short of laryngitis without wrecking their voice, or even sounding particularly off (though they might have a bit of trouble with their high notes and have to transpose down a little). I once heard d'Artagnan singing Handel in London, and
For over 25 years of my life, I couldn't physically knit because my wrists were shot. Well, you see, it's like this. When I was unable to finish my degree (I won't go into the details of why, except to say that it was
One of my aunts has a spinning wheel. She and my uncle live in the middle of Nowhere, Cumbria (oh, wait, it's not Cumbria now, is it? I'm not sure whether they're now Westmorland or Lancashire), in what I think probably used to be
There are so many things that nobody ever tells you about earrings. And I'm learning them all, at some speed, unexpectedly late in life. Let's be clear: I do not in any way regret having my ears pierced. I was never going to, but having tried
There's only one thing I don't like about latch hook rugmaking, and that's the fact that you can, after all, use only so many rugs; and, these days, I can't use rugs at all, or at least not the thick and luxurious
I'm not sure where I first came across the art of zhostovo painting. It is true that my Porthos is half Russian, but I don't think I heard about it either from him or from his redoubtable mother, who was born in Siberia and made good
Before I start talking about dress forms... yesterday's post didn't go down too well, did it? My own fault; I used the M-word in the title, and a lot of people are unduly frightened of maths. The reason for this is almost always poor teaching at