String Revolution

I was chatting to an online friend recently about creativity and blocks, and something she said made a little light go on in my brain.

“I looked at my writing,” says she to me, “the way I looked at a pre-schooler’s macaroni necklace, something that no one would ever pay me for…”

A pre-schooler’s macaroni necklace.

Yes! This perfectly encapsulates one of the big tangles I have in my personal string revolution (by which I mean the idea of building a living around this stuff, oh yes – watch me shrink it down and tuck it safely between parentheses). I am intensely twitchy about standing up and saying, “Hey, I made this, and I think it’s good.”
Continue reading Macaroni Necklace!

In December I went to the National Crafts and Design Fair in the RDS for the first time, which gave rise to some unexpectedly insistent thoughts about sales and marketing. (Who am I, and what have I done with the real Léan?)

The show was a complete sensory overload, and it didn’t help that I had only a scant hour and a half to spend there.

Despite the overwhelm, though, it was great to see such beautiful work, such creative energy.

As someone who is going through a bone-level metamorphosis with relation to business, I found myself paying particular attention to the pricing and marketing strategies as I raced around.

I saw various models, ranging from “How do they even cover their costs?” to “Whoa – I am so not in their target market”. Intricate jewellery for a few euros. Wall hangings for four-figure sums. Every conceivable price in between.
Continue reading Pricing at the Craft Fair (or, Magic and Mortgages)

Well, now. The holiday season has done its usual thing, muscling in, swaggering around, laying about it left, right, and centre with its distinctive brand of two-fisted festive cheer.

Halls were decked, carols were trolled, merry was industriously made. I even finished my sister’s Christmas present – with a day to spare. (Forgot to photograph it, mind you, but that’s pretty minor, considering.) I gave my parents the dragon.
Continue reading ‘Twas the Season

And what of those Spring Forward socks? Well, according to the above photo, they appear to be motoring along nicely. Indeed, I’ve started on the second one.

But wait a minute – started on the second one before finishing the first?

Yes.

Of course, plenty of people do this – they knit their pairs of socks simultaneously, on a circular needle using the magic loop technique. But that’s not what’s going on here.

My friends, all is not rosy in the garden.
Continue reading Spring Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

I do not, I think it’s fair to say, present as frivolous. All those words like frothy and frilly and frou-frou, they just don’t fit me. And let us spell it out: these words are associated overwhelmingly with that other f-word, femininity, which from an early age has been a problematic space for me to occupy.

I was a terribly earnest child, and now that I’m a grown woman you’ll rarely find me hanging around at the hyperfeminine end of the spectrum. I can glam up with the best of them, but when I do, the result tends to be more Lady Macbeth than Tinkerbell, if you see what I mean. (I reckon it’s a power thing.)

So let me tell you the story of my vanity case.
Continue reading Sparkly Glittery Things and Me

My review of October’s posts never got written, so this is for October and November. It’s been an intense couple of months, between bereavement and swine flu and the aftermath of our extension works. (Yes, still ongoing, thank you. Why, only this week I have been doing the familiar round of “Where in the Seven Hairy Hells are the Bloody Builders?” phone calls each morning, for we are going through the arcane and operatic process known as “snagging”.)
Continue reading October and November Got Away

Hardware! I love hardware. These are the accessories that came with my old Singer sewing machine, which I inherited from my great-aunts. (A Singer No. 201K, incidentally, with “rotating hook, reverse feed, for family use”.) Aren’t they marvellous-looking things?

I should confess straight off that I haven’t used a single one. When I was younger I found them quite intimidating, particularly the enormous contraption on the right, which if I’ve correctly deciphered the beautiful black-and-white halftones in the instruction booklet is The Ruffler.

(Also pictured: The Binder; A Combined Edge-stitching, Lace-joining and Piping Attachment; The Gathering Foot; The Adjustable Hemmer; The Bias Gauge; The Quilter; and some miscellaneous hangers-on.)

Nowadays, I’m older and braver – and what’s more, I’ve discovered a deep and abiding love of tools in all their guises (power tools! Rarrrr!). So I’m thinking it may be time to put these gleaming babies through their paces.

It’s always illuminating to look at how we present things to children. We tend (in the West, anyway) to portray the world to them in a kind of sanitised, round-edged, Technicolor version of how we believe it to be – or perhaps how we would like it to be – which says a lot about us.

I’ve been thinking recently about children’s clothes.

Clothes, of course, are practically a language all of their own: what we wear screams out information to the world (and this goes double if there are actual words on our clothes).

Do you buy children’s clothes? Have you noticed how insanely gendered they are these days? In some of the online circles where I hang out, it’s a commonplace almost no longer worth alluding to: if the fashion world had its way, girls would drown in a sparkly ocean of pink and lilac; boys would be engulfed in a tidal wave of blue, muddy shades, and military chic.
Continue reading Dispatches from the Gender Ghetto

Oh, friends, the swine flu thing has laid me low. (But not too low to start my post with an accidental iambic pentameter, I note.) I’m flattened. This is partly – even largely – because the Feaster has yet to shake the last few symptoms: he’s unusually limpetty, coughing and snotty, and sleeping like a baby … by which I mean, of course, that he’s up half the night, and hence so am I.

So it’s not too surprising that crafting activities around here have slowed to a crawl. Time to dig into the UFO files: that up there is a lace shawl in Rowan Kidsilk Haze, which I’ve been knitting since time immemorial, dammit.
Continue reading Lace Shawl in Progress

It’s been quiet around here this past week, because the household has been felled by swine flu. The Feaster and I got it on Sunday, the Oyster on Tuesday. Niall either had it two weeks ago or will be getting it some day soon.

It knocked me over, attacked my children and scuppered my birthday, but AT LEAST it didn’t prevent me from going to the Knitting & Stitching Show (though mind you, I was already feeling pretty urghy by Saturday, and I’m sorry to everyone I breathed near while I was there that day – I didn’t know!).

Of course, I added to my stash! The photo above is of some rather lovely Re Fa Baruffa laceweight from This Is Knit (I know, I can go there whenever I want, but their stuff is just so lovely). I’m planning to make it into the astonishing Forest Path Stole from The Best of Interweave Knits(here’s the pattern page on Ravelry). Entrelac lace! Yay!