Day Four: Landscape

The West Coast of Scotland? It rains a lot and we frequently do not get much above 20C. But it is pretty here and I have plenty to wool to keep me warm, so it works out. What I hadn't planned on was how much the landscape would inspire my colour choices..

Shades of pale brown mixed with grey skies and hints of mossy green. You can see the Campsies in the distance if you look hard enough!

Grey-blue lichen on trees. Bark an enticing grey-brown with  - yes - hints of mossy green. This photo was taken during a walk around Possil Marsh which was rudely interrupted by heavy rain.

Mossy green! Spawling across reddish brown! This sight is very common in the Glasgow Arboretum, just a few minutes from Casa Bookish.

What has all this to do with my knitting and crocheting? Quite apart from being overtly fond of mossy green, I am also planning a pattern collection of accessories all of which will be knitted in colours oddly reminiscent of the photos above. My poetic partner says that I am wrapping myself in Scotland. It is a nice thought.

PS. Yes, this was supposed to be about seasons. We often have four seasons in one day. Layers make sense.

You can find more blogs participating in the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week by googling 3KCBWDAY4. 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.

Short & Sweet

A short and sweet story: This morning I found a handknitted shawl in Glasgow City Centre. I worried because if I had lost a shawl, I would be absolutely heartbroken.

I picked up the shawl and sent out a tweet: Did you lose your knitted shawl in Glasgow city centre this morning? Nip into John Lewis Glasgow haberdashery dept & describe it!

A lot of lovely people retweeted me, but I still fretted. I posted on Ravelry too and though I got some lovely notes, I did not get any leads.

So, after work was done, I sat down to look through the Ravelry project database. The yarn was easy to identify: 218 pages of projects!? Ughr! I decided that it would be quicker to look through the Ravelry pattern database and thankfully the shawl pattern was fairly distinct with just 52 projects to its name. Using the combination of yarn and pattern I found the project - and the knitter.

The knitter is in Germany which threw me. However, I twigged it was a knitter with Scottish connections and I sent her a tentative Rav message: I know this is a long shot but..

And you know what? It was the right knitter! And the knitter's mum will be reunited with her handknitted shawl! Isn't the internet (and especially Ravelry) a wonderful, wonderful place?

Denmark 2012: A Bit of History & A Lot of Knitting (part 2)

Skipping some 2500 years ahead, we visited Dragsholm which is a local castle. We had one specific reason for visiting the castle: Mary, Queen of Scots. It is a very curious footnote in history.

Mary had a tempestuous life filled with lovers and husbands. Her second husband was found strangled - and she married the man who many believed was the murderer: James Hepburn, the 4th Earl of Bothwell and the last royal consort of Scotland only.

Mary was forced to abdicate the throne of Scotland and fled to England seeking protection from her cousin Elizabeth I. Elizabeth remembered how Mary had previously led a claim to her throne and had Mary arrested and eventually executed.

And the Earl was incarcerated (he was charged with bigamy in Norway after marrying a charming Norwegian wench!) and died at Dragsholm Castle.

The curious tale continues.

James Hepburn was not buried at Dragsholm Castle (lest we forget: he was a villain!). Instead he was taken to a nearby church in the village of Faarevejle.

Faarevejle Church is a tiny, traditional village church. Like so many other Danish village churches, it was built sometime in the 10th century on the highest piece of land in the neighbourhood (which is not saying much in flat Denmark).

Inside it looks like any other tiny village church. All but one pre-Reformation fresco have been painted over with chalky white paint (for pre-Reformation frescos in Denmark, this is a one fantastic website. Go feast your eyes). Nothing indicates that a colourful chunk of Scottish history is resting nearby.

So, we had some detective work ahead of us. Especially as the only sign of life we could detect was the local vicar(?) singing along to the top 40 pop chart somewhere in the vicinity.

Eventually we tracked down the local gravedigger in the nearby cemetery. A cheerful young woman, she was quite pleased to hear that her most famous resident had visitors. And she opened the door to the crypt.

And this is where it gets very poignant.

The 4th Earl of Bothwell. The Duke of Orkney. One of the key figures in Mary, Queen of Scots' life.

And he lies in a damp and dark little crypt in the middle of nowhere. A plaque on the wall (sponsored by the Danish-Scottish Society) was the only indication that anyone remotely important was resting here. The coffin - a modern one - was covered in dust (I think you can tell from the photo).

My partner, the Scotsman, grew very quiet. "How odd, " he said after a while, "to think of him here almost forgotten." I do not know what we had expected but we all left the crypt quietly and did not speak for some time.

Denmark and Scotland. Our two countries united in a very strange, poignant way. Maybe that is why I keep thinking about that afternoon.

This Bit of Glasgow

It has been a very long month. While January is seldom a cheerful month, this month has been a never-ending stream of tight deadlines, late night working, and battling post-flu malaise. Today I sent off one pattern submission that may or may not go into print (these things always depend) and it was so, so nice to be able to tick that one off the list. Now I just have to tackle the other entries on the to-do list.. Between deadlines, flu and whatnot I have found time to start work on a new shawl pattern. It's a really relaxing knit - one I can do late at night when my brain is too wired to sleep and too tired to focus - and I'm really pleased with it so far. Tonight I have been tweaking the charts and I had a really satisfying moment when I solved a particularly nagging row. I hate hate hate transitions that do not stack or flow into one another - unless I can see a clear reason why they do not stack, they just strike me as laziness on the behalf of the designer - and this one row just did not look right. The solution was right in front of me: moving decreases from the centre of the pattern repeat to the edges. Hooray!

My favourite bit on the interwebs this week? Reel Scotland speaking to John McKay who directed my favourite Sherlock Holmes-related BBC drama. No, not that one. Nor that other one. This one. The article is full of interesting takes on film-making, on working in TV, and on making things happen in Scotland. And then there is this great throw-away line that just made sense: "..this bit of Glasgow, our San Francisco."

My other favourite internet bits this week? This fantastic collection of Soviet science-fiction magazine covers. This grey airship bag from Etsy. And you can learn the most interesting feminist lessons in very surprising places.

Well Still Pretty Good Year

First task of the year: sort out the wardrobe. I should probably not use the word 'wardrobe' as that word implies system, thoughtfulness, and coherence. Most of my clothes stem from the frantic days of arriving in the UK with a suitcase of clothes and needing workplace-suitable attire. As a consequence, most of my wardrobe consists of cheap clothes bought in a state of panic.

Nowadays I lead the charmed life of a freelancer working within a creative industry with ties to fashion. Interestingly this means two things: 1) I have a great collection of pyjamas because I spend a lot of time working in my jammies, and 2) I have discovered that while I do not care much for fashion I do care a lot about style.

So I went through my wardrobe and threw out everything that did not fit, that needed a degree of mending that was at great odds with the intrinsic value of the item itself, or which had been too fashionable when I bought it and thus no longer stylish (I think of style as something which cannot pinned down to a particular time nor place - rather it transcends time and place).

Verdict: I need tops and trousers somewhat badly. I need basic cardigans. And I am not allowed to knit myself any scarves or shawls because I have a lot (note the phrasing: ..knit myself.. which means I can knit for others or for design purposes). I can sew some of the things myself, but what I really need is a focused shopping spree.

I hate clothes shopping.

My neighbourhood made national news yesterday after the recent hurricane felled a few trees, made several chimney pots collapse, and ripped roof tiles off. The police have closed off one street due to unstable masonry. I was safely ensconced at work but was troubled by the amounts of roof tiles I encountered on the way from work. One of the big trees in our back garden has fallen too. It is still blustery out there, but the worst has passed. In case you are curious, I live very close to where the fourth photo in this series was taken.

Knitting-wise: I'm swatching for a few designs. Reading-wise: I have finished two books so far this year, although the less said about the second book the better (it was not my idea).

Longing

Only three more days until Winter Solstice..