Where are they now?

 

There used to be a programme on TV called 'This Is Your Life', hosted by a genial Irishman called Eamonn Andrews. His job was to surprise celebrities as they went about their fabulous days, doing fabulous things, and present them with a big, red photo album.
"Famous celebrity," he'd intone, with a twinkle in his jovial Irish eyes, "This is your life!" And the celebrity would coo and squeak and wave hands about, all a-flutter. Me? Me?? Really? I am not worthy - well, all right. If you insist.

The ensuing programme would display carefully-selected highlights from celebrity's life, usually told from the point of view of an invited guest:
"Father O'Shea, Tom Celebrity was instrumental in the airlifting of urgently-needed medication for ailing babies in the Congo, is that not right?"
"Indeed it is! We were desperate, so we were, but Tom Celebrity here just loaned us his private jet so we could fly in 20 tonnes of antibiotics for Congolese children. The man is a saint!"
Celebrity does his best to look modest: Aw, shucks. It was nothing. It was for the kids, man.

Good grief, where am I going with this?
Oh, yes: today's question - where are your finished objects now?
Finished projects: this is your life!
Ahem.
Sadly, I don't really know where more of them are. No idea. Or, at best, a vague idea. See, I like making stuff. But my finished objects need to find homes or we'd disappear under an avalanche of hats, scarves, afghans and baby blankets. I wrap them carefully and nicely in cellophane, with the vague idea of selling them on Etsy or Artfire - where I'd comandeer designer prices and would be able to give up my day job to sit at home and crochet. Then some Good Cause comes along and, filled with guilt because I have the means to sit at home crocheting and watching sitcom reruns while there are people out there - scarfless and mittenless and maybe even blanketless - I give them all away. 
It's for the kids, man, I say, in my best celebrity voice. I'm doing it for charidee!

That might make me sound altruistic, but it's also kind of practical: I need space. However, there's something kind of vaguely exciting about sending stuff randomly out into the world, without knowing who'll get it or where it'll end up. It's like a message in a bottle, really. An injection of good karma into the cosmos. Yeah, man!

This, and half a dozen other baby blankets, ended up in the US about three or four years ago. A woman on another forum posted about her local hospital in Denver, Colorado, where babies from low-income families were being sent home in towels and torn-up old bedsheets because neither the families or the hospital could afford to provide proper blankets for the babies. It struck me as particularly sad to think of a newborn being sent home wrapped in a threadbare hospital sheet. Goodness knows, life had already dealt them a pretty rubbish hand, but starting it off in hospital cast-offs seemed somehow terribly unfair.

At the time, I'd been experimenting with Irish crochet motifs and I had these three odd colours: coral, deep peach and raspberry. Although they were individually quite nice, I simply couldn't match them to anything else, so they ended up in a blanket of their own.

 

God knows where it is now. Being realistic, the chances are quite high that it was tossed or disregarded or ended up in a thrift store or bin. But there's a teeny-tiny chance that the person who got it appreciated it. Liked it. Maybe even loved it. Perhaps there's a three or four-year-old out in the world somewhere who owns this blanket and fingers the flowers and counts the petals, the way I used to do on my sister's crocheted flower blanket. That would be nice.
I hope so.

Oganisation Schmorganisation

This is just a quickie - quick wave to say hello - because I have spent the evening wrestling with student essays and the little wretches have sucked the creativity out of my brain. However, today's task is:

How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.

Oh, the mirth involved in contemplating an answer to this question! Organised? Haw, haw.

But I pulled myself together.

How do I keep my yarn organised? Frankly, I don't. It's everywhere. I recently found a skein in my knickers drawer - and it was a nice cotton/acrylic mix, too. I was pleased to find it again (it seemed to have made friends with a pair of tights), but I still have no idea how it got in there. I'd like to believe that it has a mind of its own, but a more likely explanation is that I swooped it up when I was sorting out my laundry. I find balls of wool all over the place, and when I stand up to get a glass of water, I usually leave a trail of yarn that stretches from the living room to the kitchen. I'm turning into a Half-Woman, Half-Spider, as I seem to be weaving woolly webs wherever I go.

My container of preference is a basket - simply because this house was full of them when we moved in (for recent readers I should add that we moved into a house with a bizarre inventory: here's one of our favourite pieces.) Sometimes my yarn looks like a big, tangled mess but I'm proud to say that it also sometimes manages to look like this - a thing of beauty and a joy for five minutes.

Baby Realta

I actually finished this last week but I just haven't had the chance to post it. This is the same pattern as the Realta afghan, but done in worsted weight yarn and in more demure colours. It's destined for my new niece as a ... um, what do you call them? Blankets that you plonk gently lay babies on so they can flail around wave their little limbs about? Let's just call it an extra thick blanket for the sofa or the floor.

Anyway, same pattern, different colour combination:

An Award for Me!

Renee over at East of Eden has presented me with this award. If you don't read German, it means 'Favourite Blog'. Isn't that kind?

 

You have to pass this award on to people with blogs with fewer than one hundred followers. Which was the case with me when I was given this award, but in the past 48 hours, the number has burgeoned. Oopsie!  I now have over a hundred followers, which really should make me feel very honoured and empowered, but instead makes me feel very nervous. A bit rabbit-in-headlightsesque. Or hand-in-cookie-jarish. Or finger-up-noseistic. You're all (whispers) watching me.

Anyway, it only took a year but I finally figured out how to follow blogs. There's a button for that, did you know? It has FOLLOW on it and when you press it, it gets added to your reader. Yup. Snazzy, eh? Before that, I used to manually seek out people's blogs via Google. Oh, ye of little technosavvy. So here are a few of the blogs I dip in and out of. In no particular order:

Hookin' It With Mr Lick Lick. When this name first appeared in my comments, I was rather nervous, thinking I was being targeted by Chinese spammers. The reality is a lot less dramatic - a very nice lady in Georgia hides behindthe name, - but you have to find out yourself who Mr Lick Lick is ...

My Name is Not Gracie. No, it's not. Really. If I ever need to lust at people making far more sophisticated yarn purchases than me, Non-Gracie is your girl. Go and have a little lust at her yarns. Lovely wool, lovely projects. She's also a teacher, so she shares my pain.

Useless Beauty Not only does Susie have an Auntie Kath, who (I suspect) is my Auntie Maureen's separated-at-birth twin, she also shares my love of quality romantic fiction. And her quilts are too die for. One of them that she promised to me without knowing that she did is temporarily resting at her mother's till I pop by and pick it up.

A Snippy Girl - You have to visit Erica's blog if only to see the picture of the beautiful Irish crochet dress she has in her last post (she didn't make it, but I'm sure she could make one just like it.) Lovely crochet projects and loads and loads of yarn. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Growing Things And Making Things because that is exactly what Rachel does. She grows things (lots of things, she's in the process of planting a garden. I can't keep a pot of basil alive) and makes things (she knooks! She even made her knook-hook all by herself!)

Is that five already? I could add another five! Maybe next time, these were at the top of the blog roll (now that I've figured out how to use it.)

One Year Older, One Year Wiser

 

How much progress have I made in crafting terms this year? Goodness, I'm a veritable crafting diva now. Haha. Or not.

I discovered that I don't knit funny, I knit combined continental. Yes, it is a thing. And it looks like perfectly normal knitting, thank you very much. I knit two hats and a cabled scarf, plus I did half a sock (but, sadly, no photo to prove it.)

I crocheted tons of stuff. Really, I did. I can't begin to show you all the things I crocheted last year or I'd be commited to an asylum. However, more importantly than the actual crocheting was learning how to write a pattern. Write a pattern that other people could follow. Uh-huh! It's not as easy as you might think and it requires all kinds of mathematical skills that I thought I'd left behind when I skipped down the avenue of St Mary's secondary school on my last day of school, waving my school tie in the air in glee. If my long-suffering maths teacher, Sr Helen (now working out the Pythagorean equation beyond the Pearly Gates) had realised that little Miss Gingerbread would be employing the basic principles of geometry, trigonometry and algebra of her own free will and in her leisure time, she would've exploded with joy.

In any case, despite great leaps and bounds in my mathematical education, I continue to be plagued by lapses of discalulia, guaranteeing that I shall never be placed between Newton and Archimedes at a celestial dinner party. But I keep on writing patterns, using my trusty 99c calculator to help me work out stitch repeats and hexagon angles.