Home » Discussion Forums » Blog Post Discussion » My Life as a Bell Ringer
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| Re: My Life as a Bell Ringer [message #49754 is a reply to message #49753 ] |
Sun, 13 May 2012 20:54   |
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I wanted to change my name††† and run away.
††† Possibly to K MacFarquhar. Hee hee hee hee hee hee.
But Peter would be so sad to find that you'd run off to live in New Iceland in one of the Friendly Campfire’s cabins, flickering campfire or no...
I may still have a future as an abbey ringer. . . .
Hooray!
FairyTales - http://xkcd.com/872/
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| Re: My Life as a Bell Ringer [message #49757 is a reply to message #49753 ] |
Mon, 14 May 2012 00:40 |
EMoon
Messages: 663
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Hurray for still having a future as a bell ringer! Very glad for that!
I had a horrible day today as a knitter...having done something I could not figure out and having to rip back an unknown number of rows to get "below" the problem (it looked as if part had never been knitted, but there were the right number of stitches on the needles...just a big gaping space with a very long loop hanging out. No sign of a dropped stitch, though I tried to repair the mess by hauling horizontal strands up as if they were stitches, figuring I could knit 2 together later, but that didn't work. So the ripping back began. I tried to collect all the stitches once I'd ripped back, but could only snag a few at a time (it was in 2x2 ribbing) and now have about six needles and a peculiar J-shaped thing from my mother's kit holding them, more or less. I can't face it again until tomorrow or maybe three weeks from now. Maybe I should have ripped back to the cast-on row, or maybe I should have started over completely, but I couldn't face that either. So much for thinking I was now really competent at 2x2 ribbing.
Otherwise a good Mother's Day, as adult son agreed to clean the kitchen floor for me so I could lounge in bed knitting badly.
E
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| Re: My Life as a Bell Ringer [message #49759 is a reply to message #49757 ] |
Mon, 14 May 2012 01:10 |
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 Diane in MN
Messages: 2728
Registered: October 2008
Location: Twin Cities, MN, USA |
Senior Member |
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| EMoon wrote on Sun, 13 May 2012 23:40 |
Hurray for still having a future as a bell ringer! Very glad for that!
I had a horrible day today as a knitter...having done something I could not figure out and having to rip back an unknown number of rows to get "below" the problem (it looked as if part had never been knitted, but there were the right number of stitches on the needles...just a big gaping space with a very long loop hanging out. No sign of a dropped stitch, though I tried to repair the mess by hauling horizontal strands up as if they were stitches, figuring I could knit 2 together later, but that didn't work. So the ripping back began. I tried to collect all the stitches once I'd ripped back, but could only snag a few at a time (it was in 2x2 ribbing) and now have about six needles and a peculiar J-shaped thing from my mother's kit holding them, more or less. I can't face it again until tomorrow or maybe three weeks from now. Maybe I should have ripped back to the cast-on row, or maybe I should have started over completely, but I couldn't face that either. So much for thinking I was now really competent at 2x2 ribbing.
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I've had a similar weird situation, and I couldn't figure out what I'd done, either. And ribbing is horrible to get back on a needle--sympathy. But the last time I had to rip back to below a mistake (forgot to cross a cable--duh), I got smart and ran a piece of scrap yarn through the row I was ripping down to, then just picked the stitches up from the waste yarn. I wish someone had told me about that trick years ago.
The J-shaped thing sounds like a cable needle. But one uses what's handy to hold stitches, never mind what it is.
"The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough . . . " Louise Erdrich
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| Re: My Life as a Bell Ringer [message #49762 is a reply to message #49753 ] |
Mon, 14 May 2012 02:44 |
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equus_peduus
Messages: 437
Registered: September 2009
Location: France |
Senior Member |
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I was just writing to a friend that I’d bought a couple of books on basic origami to remind myself what folding feels like, for SHADOWS, since Maggie is a folder
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For me, origami feels like home.
When I try to think of when I learned origami, I can't. Based on the boxes and scapbooks/photo albums/etc that my mother's got, it must have been pretty young. But when I think back, one of my earliest memories of both origami and my grandfather (mother (who is Japanese)'s father) is of me sitting on his lap, and him showing me how to fold something.
I don't do origami much - unlike knitting, where I get useful objects out the other end, origami gives me mostly decorative things. I never learned to do lots and lots of figures from memory, but give me a halfway decent set of instructions, and I can make anything (well, I haven't tried any of the really complicated things, but I have yet to fail at anything I've tried). The last several years, I've mostly made boxes to put small gifts into (Tomoko Fuse has a fantastic series of books; my favourite is Joyful Origami Boxes - years ago, my mother and I taught a class from that book), which are moderately more useful than endless paper cranes and fish and bats and things.
I hadn't really thought about it til being spurred to write this post (which is getting long, and I'm sorry that it's probably kind of boring) - but knitting fills the gap that origami has left for years. I am perfectly content to have a stack of paper and a set of directions (or not, if doing something from memory) and choosing out a colour, lining up edges, making folds crisp, bringing folded edges together, re-opening the paper, etc. It's not meditative exactly - but it's something that takes a bit of attention, allows me to start with something very common (paper), have some input into it, and end up with a (hopefully) beautiful object at the end. The process of bringing the folds around and flipping and folding the paper and seeing the object take shape is somehow very satisfying. Knitting seems to be like that (take string, add some time and effort, end up with something hopefully beautiful - watching the stitches stack on top of each other, revealing their pattern - whether it be plain stockinette or garter stitch, or cables, or lace - and watching the final transformation of blocking - and seeing the end product).
But origami feels familiar to my hands and heart in a way that knitting doesn't. I learned to fold paper longer ago than I can remember. I learned to knit once when I was seven, and again last year. The movements are familiar, the feel of the tools and materials is comforting... but it's not the same, just as any pumpkin pie recipe that's not my mother's can be good and tasty and wonderful - without being the "real thing."
I now have an urge to go fold something. I don't have any origami here... I wonder if anybody in Toulouse sells any?
(folding regular paper just isn't th
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| Re: My Life as a Bell Ringer [message #49763 is a reply to message #49753 ] |
Mon, 14 May 2012 03:05 |
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equus_peduus
Messages: 437
Registered: September 2009
Location: France |
Senior Member |
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When I first moved over here one of the things I missed the worst was all the wild critters I was used to.
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I've been here in Toulouse a little over three months.
I can see and easily identify from my apartment - pigeons, magpies (the normal kind, apparently), Eurasian collared doves, blackbirds. There's a bunch of little twittery birds I can't see well enough to figure out what they are. I think I saw the silhouette of a black kite soar overhead yesterday.
The magpies and the doves are throwing me off still. I got used to central California magpies - the yellow-billed kind, which are only found in California's central valley. They have (as one would suspect from their name) bright yellow bills, and a lovely blue iridescent sheen on their black feathers. The birds here are bigger, and more black, and less iridescent, and their tail shape is wrong. It's disconcerting. The doves I hear more than I see (though I see them a lot) - and instead of the lilting uplift-and-drop song of the mourning dove, which I grew up with, these guys have a kind of monotone that is almost but not quite the same timbre as the mourning dove, and almost, but not quite, reminiscent of the mourning dove's song... without the melodic line. They're monotone. It's really really weird to my ear. I keep expecting them to do what mourning doves do, but since they're not, they don't.
And while I don't live somewhere that I would expect to see kestrels, even if they were native to this continent, which they're not... I miss seeing American kestrels. Sigh. (I don't know if the common kestrel, which is what I would see here if they live around here, which I'm not sure they do, have the same kind of tail-bobbiness and mannerisms the American ones have. I do know they're significantly bigger).
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| Re: My Life as a Bell Ringer [message #49765 is a reply to message #49762 ] |
Mon, 14 May 2012 10:19 |
Birdreader
Messages: 48
Registered: August 2011
Location: Chicago |
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There is a site on the internet for oragami - www.happyfolding.com
It had instruction videos and is indexed for difficulty.
I never progress to far, my most complex that I learned was a jumping frog.
Birdreader
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| Re: My Life as a Bell Ringer [message #49832 is a reply to message #49825 ] |
Thu, 17 May 2012 13:09 |
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equus_peduus
Messages: 437
Registered: September 2009
Location: France |
Senior Member |
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Yes, I think that's fascinating too.
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