The best-laid plans

I was going to talk about filet this time. By now I'd planned to have the netting secured to a piece of stout card and the pattern marked out underneath it; but it didn't work like that because my shoulder was giving me far too much grief. Another inconvenient consequence of that was that I couldn't install my new air cooler. I need to move a large pouffe in order to do the job, and I am not dragging furniture around (not even light furniture) with my shoulder blade screaming at me. So the air cooler has been sitting in its box in the hall, waiting patiently for me to be in a fit state to schlep stuff around. Thankfully it's not unpleasantly hot at the moment; it's been mild for the time of year, but not air cooler weather. Yet.

Fortunately, we have Ukrainians; and one of our Ukrainians, as it turns out, is a whizz at un-knotting muscles, so I decided to have a chat with him on Sunday morning and see what he could do with the worst muscle knot I've ever had in my life... which would have been great, except that just for once he wasn't in church. We had a cracking good sermon but I sat through it in agony. So I e-mailed our Ukrainian friend (who lives in the next village) to see if he'd be around here in the next few days, and he said no, he was on holiday at the moment; which proved, in fact, to be just as well. I couldn't wait till he got back, so I went to the doctor this morning, at which point it turned out that "the worst muscle knot I've ever had in my life" actually wasn't a muscle knot at all. I have shingles. The doctor has given me something for it, so we'll see how long that takes to kick in; in the meantime, the headrope is exonerated, at least.

So... no filet just yet. Thankfully I can still knit, so I've been beavering away on the pair of green socks I started on my birthday; but I think you've had enough sock posts for the time being, which meant I had to think of something else to talk about. Which means you're now getting an unscheduled post on craft clubs.

I'm in three of them. I've already talked about the Cashmerette Club and its concomitant PDF patterns (and I think we can now reasonably say it's paid for itself, because this month's free club pattern turned out to be something I really wanted - a waistcoat! Built for curves! So now I don't have to go to all the trouble of reshaping the Belvedere for myself; I just need to get it to fit d'Artagnan, who has his own interesting fitting issues but curves are not one of them.) I haven't, however, said much about the other two so far.

These are the Minerva Craft Club and the Totally Spoilt Club (the latter is at Spoilt Rotten Beads). They're quite similar; in both cases you pay some amount up front in exchange for a regular discount, and in neither case is it a subscription. You join, manually, as it were, for a year, and then if you want to continue you actively have to rejoin. I've been in the Minerva Craft Club on and off for several years, but when I wasn't actively sewing I didn't rejoin, and then I did when I got back into it. (The Minerva Craft Club also has the nice feature that your discount applies immediately: put a club membership into your trolley on the site, and you get your club discount on everything else you're ordering at the same time. And last time I rejoined it was when I was buying a dress form, among a few other things, so my membership pretty much paid for itself instantly.) The cost for this is £20, and your discount is 10%, but that's on top of any other discounts... and it's off the original price, not the discount price. So if they're offering 30% off selected linen fabrics this week and you're in the club, your discount is 40%. Nice.

With the Totally Spoilt Club, you pay £30, you only get a 5% discount (still on top of any other discounts), and you don't get that discount on your initial order... but... you do get a welcome pack, and that's very nearly worth your subscription fee at the retail prices. This means that whether or not I can be bothered to join it depends very much on what's in the welcome pack. I didn't join last year because I didn't want whatever it was they were offering, but this year it's perfect. You can see my haul of goodies in the feature photo. We have a nice beading board (my home-made bead dish is great for larger beads, but it's a bit awkward for seed beads, while this is very well suited to them; it's got a slightly fuzzy surface so they're easy to pick up). We have an additional side tray for projects with a lot of colours. We have quite a generous bag of small seed beads in a purple mix; and we have a small bag of actual gold-plated delica beads, which are almost certainly going to end up in spectacle chains (delicas are wonderful for that).

If you do a lot of sewing, the Minerva Craft Club is very much worth joining; they have a superb range of fabrics, they're adding to them all the time, and there's usually an offer on something every week (sometimes more than one offer), so if you buy at the right time you can save quite a lot of money, especially with your club discount on top. Totally Spoilt, though, is really all about how much you want the welcome pack. With Minerva, if you spend more than £200 a year on sewing supplies, you'll save by joining the club; but with Totally Spoilt, if all you really want is the discount, you'd have to spend over £600 a year on beads to make it worth while... and, while some beads can be quite expensive, that's still one heck of a lot of beads. I'd be happy if they did an alternative option which was more like Minerva - no welcome pack at all, but lower price and higher discount. I do quite a lot of beading, and I would probably be tempted to join that in the years when I didn't fancy the welcome pack for the regular club.

All of which reminds me that I have finally got round to replacing my bead loom. And the new bead loom has arrived with no instructions at all, other than a series of five rather ambiguous photos on the box (it comes from China, so they possibly weren't confident about translating the instructions into English accurately; and, having seen a number of instructions translated from the Chinese, I can't blame them if that was the case). So I need to remember/work out how to operate the thing, which could well end up becoming another post. Time alone will tell!