I would love to be able to claim that all my crafting time looks like this: sitting at a table sipping delicious tea out of a 1950s retro-futurist tea cup whilst a lovely tea pot matches my knitting. Sadly that was just today.
Like many other knitters and crocheters, I tend to make things whenever and wherever. I knit on public transport, when I'm waiting at the doctor's, during my lunch hour, and even very occasionally at work (I work within the knitting industry so many people assume that means I sit and knit all day. Ha!). Oh, and at knitting groups! I love my knitting buddies.
My favourite place to knit is my bed (which is also my favourite place to read). I prop myself up with pillows and blankets, get my iPod out and just relax into a current knitting project. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts rather than music. My brain is wired to it learning as much as possible so unless I am knitting something horrifically difficult, I do not listen to music.
Lately I have been listening to:
- In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg. A BBC Radio 4 radio programme with heavy emphasis on the history of ideas, the arts, and humanities. I really enjoyed the programme about metaphors (I used to excel at hardcore literary theory and this programme really took me back to my smart days) and I'd also recommend the programmes on Aristotle's Poetics and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (I cannot find a viable link to this one, but it is available on iTunes. It is fun in that particular way anything about Lord Byron is fun).
- Philosophy Bites - tasty morsels of philosophy presented by enthusiastic podcasters/academics. Martha Nussbaum on the Value of the Humanities is sadly far too topical in these university cut-back days, but I also recommend the podcasts on Neuroscience, Socratic Method, and Humanism. I have several their podcasts lined up - including one on Jacques Derrida and Foregiveness which I'm really looking forward to.
- Stash and Burn. My favourite knitting podcast although I actually prefer their early episodes to their more recent ones.
- Georgette Heyer's "Friday's Child". More P.G. Wodehouse than Barbara Cartland, this was a delightful lightweight soundtrack to many of my recent projects. I had to stop myself from laughing out loud on public transport.
- E.M. Forster's "A Room With A View" was also good, although it certainly didn't live up to my memories of reading it when I was 17 (nothing is ever as good as it is when you are 17).
Today I finished my Catcher in the Rye shawlette (pictured next to that marvellous tea-cup above). Looking back, it was an underwhelming knitting experience but I think I burned out on making shawls during last year's 10 Shawls in 2010 knit-along. I have already cast on my next project: I now have six rows of 270+ stitches in Kidsilk Haze to rip back because I did not swatch (gulp!).
Wish me luck.
You can find more blogs participating in the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week by googling 2KCBWDAY7. If you have come here as part of the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, thank you for visiting. I'll still be here once this week is over and I'm usually blogging about arts, books, films, language besides all the craft stuff. Do stick around.