Writing

I’ve recently discovered Tomorrow Museum, which helpfully describes itself “collection of images and speculative essays exploring how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts” (helpful, as I find succinct definition entirely beyond me tonight). It is deeply interesting and engrossing, and so far every link is worth following. The most recent post, Caring for Your Online Introvert, especially resonates with me.

Project Gutenberg and Google Books are excellent resources for plenty of free books, but I recently found the Chawton House Library collection of early women’s writing, which features rare and little-known works “which explore such broad-ranging themes as satire, slavery, marriage, witchcraft and piracy [and] signal the rich texture and innovative character of women’s writing in the period 1600 to 1830″. I’m enjoying the preface to Romance Readers and Romance Writers: a Satirical Novel, in which the author gleefully exposes some of the awful writing in romances she dislikes.

Music

The Headphone Commute podcast (here’s the FeedBurner link) has been supplying me with sound for some months. My particular favourites are Intelligent Breakcore, Ruckspin – Ranking Studio mix, and Bop – Micromixes. If you are at all inquisitive about “electronica, glitch, idm, drum’n’bass, breakcore, dubstep, trip-hop, modern classical, post-rock, shoegaze, ambient, downtempo, experimental, abstract, minimal and everything in between” (thank you, about page) you should try one or more of these mixes.

Here’s a recent piece of spindle-spinning.

90 metres and 34g of 3-ply Masham yarn, chain-plied on a 34g Bosworth midi spindle.

Truth be told, although I have not lost my love of creating, my creations have not been working out very well lately. I think I am doomed to never be happy with something until I have knit it twice. This applies doubly to anything that I design myself, though I follow the advice of my design books with zeal and measure everything three times. The mistakes seem so obvious with hindsight, as mistakes are wont to seem. As such, I have a growing pile of things-to-be-unravelled. The silver lining in this paragraph of gloom is that knitting practically invites unravelling, and no harm is done (save to my knitter’s confidence, of course).

I’m playing it safe at the moment; I’m only slightly (ha!) modifying someone else’s design. It’s Fay by Kim Hargreaves, and although I’ve changed the yarn and the stitch pattern and therefore the stitch count and I’m not sure it’s the right size and I’m a little concerned that the waist shaping may turn out to be too severe… despite all that, I’m hopeful that it will all turn out well and that I won’t have to add this one to the pile, too.