Genevieve's Journeys

It's just as well I work in the sticks. I'd never survive the temptation of regular exposure to good shops.

I had 1 day to attend meetings in S. London near Waterloo. Waterloo stn, as every London knitter knows, is dangerously close to I knit London.

And so it came to pass that I entered the shop in search of a single needle, tripped, and fell into their bargain bin, dislodging my wallet in the process.



The thick yarn is blue faced leicester roving, 100g. The pink and purple is silk 4ply (actually counted 7plies, but never mind), 100g each. The Addi needles, nuff said.

The DPNs are the smallest I now own, 2mm and 1.5, for trying fine stockings.

Thanks to zmiya_san's loan of a yarn winder and a ball winder, I've been skeining and winding a lot of yarn lately.

Here's my 4kg of yarn now skeined, washed and wound, towards a major jumper project.

Thanks to my recent guest Gwendolyn, I now know how to wind silk successfully - on a toilet roll. Here's a couple I prepared earlier.



Lady Gwen is the EK visitor at DW last year, who did silk weaving, starting with growing the silkworms from scratch. When I first heard about her through Lia's posts and pictures I thought 'that's right off the scale' for craftiness. But Gwendolyn isn't mad...just really, really thorough. :-)

Today is hot for London, around 29 dec C apparently. Glorious, excellent for drying still more skeined and washed yarn.

...hate it when that happens.

Ink and Gold: Islamic Calligraphy is already wending its way, courtesy of the online-book-dealers-that-are-not-Amazon.

It's from a Sam Fogg exhibit: Sam Fogg being an exclusive dealers' gallery, where you buzz in to enter, and can browse the displays and fondle the books if you ask. It's like seeing how the other half (well, 1%) live: the neighbourhood is about as exclusive as it gets for shopping in London.

If you have to ask, you can't afford...

ETA: second time in 2 days. Now have 2 different fencing manuals en route.

Remember I said I ordered new Wolgemut CDs?

Here's the confirmation message. They have my business.

----------------

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing. Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, October 21, 2014.

We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...
We miss you already. We'll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
--
CD Baby
The little store with the best new independent music.
http://cdbaby.com cdbaby@cdbaby.com (503)595-3000

My first big order from Shetland wool brokers arrived this week, necessitating finding the right post office for picking up oversize packages.

A half-kilo of yarn and half-kilo of unspun stuffing, plus a couple of sample skeins of different 'heritage' yarns don't fit throught he mailslot, no way, no how.

Cue a 'missing Hackney' moment, where our nearest depot was a 5 minute walk; the Hyde depot for NW London is either a treacherous 20 min cycle uphill, or a 5 min bus + 20 min walk, plus n mins standing in line behind people who are waiting anxiously on packages they have to collect before their flights...

The 2ply jumper weight is finer than I thought, but it's spun assuming you're making fair isle sweaters that carry 2 strands at a time, thus doubling the thickness of the sweater.

I'll be using most of it for Elizabethan or Tudor flat fulled hats, following xrian's pattern, though I may try one in the reverse direction, starting at the brim not the peak. There was a recent weekend session w/ a historic knitter who taught brim-to-peak method, based on MoL collections, and that's Sally Pointer's preference too, and she knits a lot.

These types are fulled, though I'll use the lazy modern method of washing machine and hot dryer rather than recreating the medieval washerwoman with lye-damaged hands, as charming as it sounds.

At the same time I'm browsing for potential yarns for multicolour jumpers that are not all-wool, that are blends that might be more washable. I now have a file on DK, 4ply and sport weight yarns that knit on 3mm needles to 25+ st/inch, that won't break either the planet or the bank.

I'm open to suggestions from knowledgable knitters and fibre folk for favourite yarns for multicolour jumper knitting, either washable or hand-wash only.

I'm fighting the temptation to abandon my current project which is getting dull (1/2 hour per row!) in favour of knitting swatches to test the newly arrived yarn for fulling...must not...must...nottttttt...no more than 2 projects at once, already at maxiumum...m-u-s-t-n-o-t-y-i-e-l-d...

Last week I went to the opticians - I'd noticed I was stuggling to focus at the MoL and NPG when we've been to exhibits recently, bouncing back and forth between looking through my glasses and peering under them.

I tried a different branch of the opticians this time, b/c the local one was so crap - poor service, clumsy efforts at upselling me at every opportunity.

The verdict: I have a small change in my Rx, and perhaps I'd like to try varifocals.

I waffled, went back to reprice them...and balked. Nearly £320 for two pairs of glasses, or £250 for a single pair, with varifocal lenses and a moderately priced frame.

The 2-for-1 upsell pricing irritates me; for 'only' another £70 you can get a second pair! which suggests that the first pair is not worth £250, but closer to £70...or possibly nowhere near either price, who knows? There's no easy way to see the markup on lenses and frames.

There are certainly specialist materials and skills involved in grinding lenses, but I suspect the process is now all done mechanically - if, as the pricing suggests, it's just as easy to get 2 pairs done at once as one pair, then they're not being ground by hand.

The frames are certainly not created by hand, except perhaps in assembly and fitting.

I cannot see what separates the expensive frame from the cheap ones, other than ugliness, and designer names. Only in a few cases there are extra features like hinges to prevent you from snapping the arms, or special materials like titanium. You can get expensive plastic frames as easily as cheap ones, and just as ugly.

So - buggerem. I walked out. I don't need the Rx change; my close vision is fine, though I had hoped that there would be an option to improve it; my current glasses aren't broken.

Buggerem.

Next step: better lighting for winter crafting and scribing.

...catalogue came this week!

I was thinking of zmiya_san when I saw the titles

• Ancient Textiles, Modern Science


• Textile Production and Consumption in the Ancient Near East


• Tools Textiles and Context: Textile Production in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age


• Ancient Textiles: Production Crafts and Society

For myself, or other scribes:

• The tres riches heures of Jean duc de Berry (£25, down from £65)


• Choirs of Angels: painting in Italian Choir books 1300-1500 (not quite my thing but some people swing that way)


• Italian paintings, 1250-1500 (£19.95, was £74)


• Women Manuscripts and Identity in Northern Europe 1350-1550 (also pricey but sounds fascinating)

And just cause:

Medieval Hunting, on sale

Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition (ceremonies! with heralds and stuff! whoo-hoo!), also on sale

Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing Hands 960-1100 (pricey pretty specialist! but I'm so glad someone cares enough to study it)

Click at your own risk!

Does anyone else find IKEA absolutely maddening to shop in?

First of all, every IKEA is in the suburbs. I think this is partly because they appeal to middle class shoppers and partly because they need cheap acreage for their enormous stores. You never find a 'local' IKEA. So every trip has to be planned, and even though they provide public transport directions, it's a tortuous trip every time. I think my last visit was about 2005, and I swore never again.

Last week I decided to go after work to visit IKEA. I need a new mattress, that fits the bed frame I have (landlady found the cheapest available model - neither bedframe or mattress model are still in the IKEA catalogue), and had done all my research online. I wanted to confirm which mattress to buy with a quick lie-down on the instore model before ordering.

TfL says it's 37 mins from my workplace Tube station. Liars. I takes over an hour, because the bus stops that are 'close' to the station nearest IKEA are close only for a given value of 'close'. The roads in this part of N London are in-city highways. One of the stops 'close' to Brent Cross is on the N Circular...that would be for the service that runs 3 times an hour and appears to be a milkrun for schoolkids, grannies and other 'local people'.

The return journey is worse; the bus route that took me there does not have a matching stop on the return route. Nooooo,  the return route stop is on the other side of said North Circular (picture a highway size of Don Valley Parkway, only with stop lights and turning circles where it intersects other major roads). This is a 15 minute walk at least.

Desperate, I hop on the next bus that comes through and end up on a scenic tour of northwest London via Edgware Road, ending at Brondesbury (close to my first flat with Robert) in Kilburn, where I wait for the next Overground. Overground is 3-4 x an hour, and is not as fast as the Tube.

I left work at 6pm, and get home at 9pm, with only 30 mins of that in the store.

Setting aside the location, what I really really hate about shopping at IKEA is the manipulativeness of the store. It is deliberately designed to make it hard to find what you want and get out; the design obliges you to meander through displays regardless of whether that's what you want. The signs point to different areas, but don't tell you how many other displays you have to walk through - the 'maps' are deliberately disingenuous by leaving out the details.

You think you're lost (did I miss them somehow? was the first display the entire display for beds?) but you know you haven't passed what you're looking for, so you have to forge on.

If you knew how far you had to go to find mattresses, for instance, you'd go through the 'exit' direction rather than the entrance, becuse the journey is shorter.

The only other place I find this manipulative layout is in the duty-free shops at Heathrow, where you have to wind around the perfume and booze store to reach the seating in the 'food court'.

All stores aim to distract, tempt and create associations between products based on where they position products, what height they're at, what they're next to. But the inability to find what you want quickly backfires, for me, in an IKEA and I'm irritated enough by it that I'm not cheerfully distracted by displays.

So it takes me about 15 mins of stomping before I reach the display of mattresses for lying on to test. I spend about 10 mins testing, and then another 5 minutes trying to leave the store.

The upshot: got my 10 mins of mattress-testing in, and have ordered it for delivery. And hope never to darken their doorways again.

...lazy days with my sweetie, who started the weekend right by asking what I'd like to do on my birthday. Lucky for him I had a list. :-)

- errands (cat food, new contacts from the Specsavers-I'm-never-visiting-again-ever)
- trip to Holborn station to hit Cornelissen's
- return via Patisserie Valerie for lunch, and take-home cake
- go home on bus, because Central line is once more a sweaty sardine tin. Spotted one of the new Boris-buses, on route 38 (Victoria to North London), presumeably a route with high visibility across the tourist centres.
- laze with a book on the sofa
- eat said cake and tea before dinner, just like you're not supposed to
- dinner of curry and poppadums courtesy of sweetie who has mastered poppadums at home. He's awesome.
- continued laziness surfing for new 12th and 13th c manuscript resources, listening to Guy Fawkes firecrackers. The whole of October and November is blighted by firecrackers, but on the weekend closest to Nov 5th I'll forgive.

Tomorrow: scribing, running, more scribing. Can't wait.

Again, scrolling through Ed Yong's 'missing links' and he's pointed to a terrific article in the NYT called 'How companies learn your secrets'.

It's about marketing data, how and why we form habits, and how (large) companies are using your purchasing records to guess when you will change your habits and develop new ones - in this case, when you find out you're pregant.

There's also a sizeable discussion about forming, and reforming habits, learned from behavioural psych.

It's sad that most of this research is currently going into figuring out how to make us buy more products we don't need, rather than helping us make more significant decisions - forming healthier habits, challenge our kneejerk reactions that hurt us or others.

It says a lot about 'free will' - that we're not nearly as free as we think we are, and much more governed by internal habits than we care to think.

Anyway - I think the habit-forming discussion would be of interest to larmer and kes_zone - two of the most habit-forming people I know. :-)

Lovely Indian-summerish weekend in Thamesreach.
Started with shopping in Shepherd's Bush, meeting Dragana, a recent arrival to Thamesreach from the fair lands of Avacal, An Tir. Despite Tube 'planned engineering works', the biggest hassle was the football fans congregating at the station - fortunately less of an issue on the return trip.
As often happens, I didn't come home with what I planned to buy, but still managed to spend money on fabric - a beautiful light herringbone linen in a madder-orange-red, and an astonishing silver-and-blue diamond woven silk, which I think will make stunning trim on anything cool-coloured - white, blue, black. I bought the rest of the bolt. Dragana found a gorgeous burgundy wool which, if I didn't already have in spades, I'd consider buying myself. 
Happily, one of the favoured run of fabric shops now stocks haberdashery, which is a first - usually fabric and notions are separate in this corner of London.
We also stopped at the firetrap, to buy me some towels.
At my favourite shop, we found out that the properties along Goldhawk Road are being 'redeveloped' - the shop management is not keen on it. I found the relevant planning document on the Hammersmith and Fulham council website, which says (emphasis mine):

Talk about being damned with faint praise - 'poor visual quality'?? Why not just say, 'ugly'?
But frankly, if you think Classic Textiles is ugly, you haven't looked at the rest of the market frontages. This is not Knightsbridge, for pete's sake.
Seems their resistance may be overruled - most recent chance to comment closed on 11th Oct.

Back home Robert was being clever with metal bits (photos to follow eventually), and we found a weekend-long Star Trek moviethon to pass the afternoon, puttering on our respective projects. HIGNFY has started a new season, but was slow to warm up

I've finally finished a couple of knitting projects enough to block them (one is still drying); stitching up is next.

Sunday was a lovely day, and I took a risk and headed to London Archers' range at Kensington Palace. Unfortunately, the club seems a bit shaky on communications - they're not very good at letting people know when outdoor shooting is on through the autumn and winter. It's usually on, unless it's off, sort of thing. It was so beautiful out, though, I felt safe taking the trip to find out.

Sure enough - sunshine, not a breath of wind, intermittent cloud. Spectacular for long-distance shooting, and I spent a very happy hour or so trying out Dad's bow. It's longer than mine, and is marked 38 on the handle, which is probably 38lbs at 28" (archery equipment uses a mix of Imperial and metric measurements, depending on what it's for). I very carefully strung it (don't know when it was last strung!) and took it for a spin.

Wow. I don't have a huge dataset for longbows, but this one is beautifully smooth to draw; the extra length means the sharp increase in draw weight towards the end of the draw doesn't happen to me. It's probaly lighter than my own (couldn't carry both to the range) but it was a joy to shoot.



While I didn't shoot for long (don't want to strain me or the bow)...it was one of those days when I feel centred and All There while shooting - fully in my body, in the experience of shooting, and have just a glimpse of what Buddist monks hanker after by taking up archery - moments of perfect stillness untroubled by anything outside the moment. 

I beamed all the way home, wrestling with the very long carrying tube on the Central line, and then on the bus - it's too long to stand upright on the Tube. It blocks traffic one way or another.

Afternoon and evening were quiet - laundering assorted fabrics and projects, more knitting, dinner with Robert, still more knitting while watching the new ITV 'Upstairs, downstairs' drama thingy, Downton Abbey. Beautifully made, and Maggie Smith is excellent. I love Edwardian fashions. I see ITV now has an online catchup player as well.