Justification

In my darkest moments, sometimes I think that I might have too much knitting-related stuff. Actually, that's a lie, I never think that, but sometimes I think I should. There is a lot of stuff in my flat at the moment (not all of it mine), and if I didn't keep all my leftover half-balls of yarn, if I didn't have duplicates of every needle size, then maybe all of that stuff could look slightly more... arranged, as opposed to just stacked. (That's a big maybe. There's a lot of stuff.) But tonight I am justified. Tonight I knelt on one of the very beautiful wooden needles that I am currently using for the little tiny fox feet (see previous post), heard a small snap and had a moment of heart-stopping distress, before realising that, of course, I have another set of those needles. Broken needle changed for spare, job done, happy knitter. Plus I get to spend a happy few minutes buying more needles, so I have another spare for next time. Totally justified.

Oh, and even though my book collection probably takes up more space than the knitting stuff, there is simply no such thing as too many books. A book collection doesn't need any justification at all.

Meaning in mistakes

So, the current knitting project I said I'd tell you about. Meet the tiny fox feet.

The pattern is deceptively simple. On some rows you make more stitches, which gives you the 'lumps', and on other rows you decrease lots of stitches, which gives the furrows between them. These increases and decreases act to 'bend' each row, so a straight line of colour becomes a wavy line. Pretty cool, if you're a massive knitting geek and that kind of thing floats your boat (that'd be me, then). It's not actually particularly complicated to knit - it just requires a bit of concentrated counting in places. This, it turns out (fairly predictably), is more difficult with a head cold. So today I made a counting error, which left me with more stitches than I should have had. But that didn't matter for the next row. It was only when I had some spare stitches at the end of the row after that when I realised that something wasn't right. Cue much concentrated counting and muttering to myself (key knitter traits) and undoing of one of the more complicated rows, before executing a slight bodge to hide the spare stitches and fix the problem. The point, lest you be dozing off with boredom, is this: ordinarily having to undo a row would be cause to bookmark a project for a month while I knitted something else. But I like the little tiny fox feet too much to do that. And it turns out that the mistake was worth making. In the process of undoing and redoing I have discovered more about how the pattern works, and found I love it even more as a result. Oh, and the bodge? You totally can't tell.

Bookmarks

I started thinking about bookmarks last night, having found a rather beautiful promotional one in the shape of a feather inside my new book (The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton). I have a bit of a strange relationship with bookmarks. If I don't have one to hand when I start reading, often I don't use one at all, and then get annoyed every time I pick the book up and have to hunt for the page. I like "found" bookmarks - old train tickets and gift tags and shopping lists. I particularly like other people's "found" bookmarks, which they leave in library books by accident. And then I got to thinking about the concept of a bookmark. If you put a book down for 5 minutes, you don't really need one, you can remember the page number. They're handy for a book you only pick up at bedtime (most of the books I read fall into this category), unless you fall asleep with your face in the book and lose the page anyway. (Faces do not make for good bookmarks.) But I have a lot of books with bookmarks in that I haven't picked up for months. Years, even. I lose bookmarks this way, leaving them in books that live in piles of other books, forgotten. The bookmarks say "you were here", but "here", years later, isn't always a place you recognise. Often you have to start again, paradoxically, in order to work out where you were. Maybe the bookmark in that case just acts as a reminder that at one point you thought the book worth reading, or that you changed your mind and decided it wasn't.

I've realised that I bookmark knitting projects too, in a similar way. For the project I pick up every day (this never happens), I don't need a bookmark. Ones I pick up less often, it's good to have a note of where I was in the pattern, otherwise it's tedious to go back and count things and try and work it out. And other projects are like the half-read books on my shelves. I don't know that I will go back and finish them. Maybe I got bored or changed my mind. If I wanted to go back to one of them I'd probably have to start again, not least because in all probability I'd have appropriated the needles for another project and wouldn't remember what size I was supposed to be using. But I did start it, once. So it sits, bookmarked, in a collection of other bookmarked things. Pending.

Reasons

1. If you're going to start a blog, the beginning of a new year seems as good a time as any.

2. I've just finished a pretty good book (The Amber Fury by Natalie Haynes) and am in that lovely limbo of working out what to read next, so I can start a new book with a new blog and a new blog with a new book.

3. My current knitting project (of which more in a later post) makes me very happy indeed, and whilst my very lovely non-knitter boyfriend is doing an amazing job of asking interested questions and admiring it at regular intervals, a blog where I can post pictures and get all geeky about it might take the pressure off a bit.

4. My best friend convinced me it was possible to blog about both reading and knitting at the same time, which is almost like being able to actually do both at the same time. If you close your eyes and squint a bit anyway. It's all her fault.