How I spent Sunday

First, thanks to readers who commented on my last post. It does make a difference to know there are readers, and an even greater difference to know there are readers who take pleasure from my blog. I was surprised by the number of comments on my travel posts and so have decided to try to write some posts about places I visit in my daily life. I love Sydney, and there are many aspects of it that it will be fun to write about.

Yesterday I had a quietly perfect Sunday. My daughter was briefly visiting Sydney and the day began with breakfast at a local cafe before she flew back to Brisbane (Sunday breakfast out is such a Sydney phenomenon - and one that I love). Then, a knitting excursion. Not just a knitting meet-up, but a meet-up that involves companionable travel to and from the destination. This was a very low-key, almost impromptu excursion, with Margaret, Fee, Zena and I - all clad in various knitted garments and accessories - joining the train at various city stations and then making the hour and a half trip to Wollongong - knitting all the while.




Often when you knit on trains or, more generally, in public places, you attract attention or comment, but our carriage seemed to be jam-packed with families too intent on a day's excursion to notice us, or, maybe, we were just too involved in knitting and chatting to be aware of any attention we attracted. Kylie met us at Wollongong and we went on to have lunch, and knitting, and chatting at a local restaurant that overlooks the beach.



I enjoy the rambling conversations while we eat and knit. I enjoy the perspectives people bring from their work lives, whether it's film-making, the law, academia, or engineering, and their passions, such as their families, cooking, reading, dogs, quilting or singing. And I particularly enjoy the way these conversations are regularly interrupted by comments about knitting or crochet patterns, or yarns, or alternative knitting techniques. What we have in common is our love of knitting, but over many of these excursions and meet-ups we've come to know each other so well that the conversations flow easily, companionably and supportively.



Then the train trip home provided the perfect book-end to the trip. I arrived back at my local station as the early winter sun was setting. I've long thought that the walkway over Redfern station is one of the best places to observe Sydney sunsets, and now I have an opportunity to include a photo of one in my blog post:

Sunset over Redfern Station


That's how I spent Sunday. How fortunate I am.

To blog or....

Earlier this month I passed my five year blogging anniversary. Unnoticed. Unremarked. A bit sad, really, when for so much of these last five years blogging has been such a taken for granted part of my life. I've also noted that it's almost a month since my last post, which is the longest time to have passed without posting since I began my blog. A bit of a hiatus. Seems to me that it's time for a reassessment and some decision-making.

The blogging world has clearly changed in the last five years. When I began my blog I can remember being concerned about whether I was catching a wave of blogging as it had reached its peak. Why I should have been concerned about this is a bit of a mystery - did I not want to seem uncool? Sad thought. Nevertheless, I think I was probably right that blogging was then at its peak of appeal and about to trend downwards. Developments in social media, particularly the 'short forms' of facebook and twitter, have a more immediate appeal that better serve some of the purposes blogging initially served. I have some friends who post nimbly across social media formats, including blogging, and engage a wide range of readers. One friend selects particular formats for particular purposes and uses the longer blog format for more reflective and critical writing while reacting immediately and often explosively through shorter formats. The majority of the bloggers I've read over the last few years are posting less frequently and often more perfunctorily, almost as if saying 'I don't really have the inclination to blog but I just want you to know that I'm still here'. There are some blogs I greatly miss as their writers wrote less frequently and then disappeared. Some of the knitting and craft blogs that originally inspired me to reenter the world of knitting and to begin my blog have long since vanished into the ether.

What to do? I guess I, like many others, could just cease blogging. But I don't want to do this. Even though I don't really enjoy writing, I like the way it makes me discipline my thoughts and consider my opinions and judgments. I have a notoriously bad memory for past events in my life and find that writing about them better anchors my memories. Blogging provides an opportunity to link words and images so that at least some of the photographs I take can be viewed and contextualised, rather than being part of the muddle in a box of photos or on my computer. So I don't really want to stop. But I also don't want to continue blogging in the rather desultory way I currently am. I started blogging, way back in 2008, because of my knitting. Rather grandiosely, I wrote that I wanted to reflect on the context in which my knitting happens; how it fits around the rest of my life and into my relationships. Over time I think I've done this less and less. Now when I post about knitting it's usually simply descriptive of the project and my reaction to it. This is a bit ironic because across the time of my blog the relationships developed through knitting have become richer, more diverse, and worthy of reflection and comment. I predicted in my first post that 'inevitably, I imagine I'll also want to mention and try to sort out my thoughts about the other things that happen and are important to me - family, friends, books, theatre and films, travel'. I'm struck by the accuracy of my prediction - or maybe by the predictability of my life.

OK. I want to continue blogging, and my original ideas for the blog are still the chief concerns of my life. I just need to post more frequently and use the blog more reflectively. Pull up my socks (knitted or otherwise). In the past I've had some success with setting goals on the blog and reporting on my achievements, or lack, in meeting them, so I'll set a blogging goal. For the next two months I will post at least twice a week. In my most productive blogging year, 2010, I wrote 120 posts - more than two a week - so I think the goal is achievable. Keep your fingers crossed for me or, more practically, comment from time to time.

That would really encourage me.

Quilts

The ever-interesting Queensland Art Gallery currently has an exhibition of English quilts on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The quilts date from around 1700 to 1945 and include examples of patchwork, applique, embroidery, inlay applique and quilting. The exhibition focuses on the social context of the quilts and quilt-making, rather than on techniques of construction or elegance of design. Nevertheless, many of the quilts are visually pleasing, and you can't help but marvel at the skill and patience of those - mostly women - who made them.



The earliest quilts are elaborate - often made from silk or velvet fabrics, or printed cottons brought back from India. They were commissioned by or constructed within wealthy households and were often associated with significant events such as births or marriages, or were gifts to patrons. The example below is reputed to have been made for the marriage of Mary Parker in 1770, though most of the silks used for the patches are ribbons dating from 1720 to 1740. Fabrics were precious and hoarded. Quilts were often re-patched, or parts of a quilt were recycled into another. The patchwork quilts from this time use the 'English' method of construction with each patch shaped around a paper template. As paper was also precious, the templates were constructed from recycled newspapers, pamphlets, records of household accounts and letters and consequently are useful in dating the quilts and setting them in their social context.



With the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century fabrics became cheaper and more readily available and quilt-making was no longer the province only of the wealthy. I was particularly taken by the curator's comments about the Victorian belief in the improving quality of patchwork and quilting - for example, the patience, diligence and skill required to make the quilts was seen as an appropriate reforming activity for female convicts. As well as the borrowings from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibition includes the amazing, huge 'Rajah' quilt from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia that was made by women convicts being transported from Britain to Australia on the ship 'Rajah' in 1847. Patchwork, quilting and embroidery were also promoted as desirable activities to divert soldiers from drinking and other undesirable activities during the inevitable downtime of lengthy postings abroad. The geometrically complex and sophisticated quilt on the left below is one such quilt; constructed by a soldier or soldiers from tiny one and a half centimetre hexagons of uniform fabrics while in India around 1870.



The twentieth century quilts are, on the whole, more everyday and pragmatic, often made from scraps of fabric recycled from clothing or old curtains or furniture fabrics. The right hand quilt above, in a complex pattern of hexagons, was made in the immediate post-war period from the black-out curtains used during the war, together with fabric scraps scrounged from used clothing.

The most poignant cloth in the exhibition is incomplete. The simple hexagonal design was made by girl guides who were part of a group of British civilians imprisoned in Changi prison in Singapore during the second world war. They were making the quilt for their troupe leader when it was discovered and confiscated by the guards. You can only begin to imagine the sacrifices that must have been made to find both the materials and the time to sew the cover.



In a week when our now (sadly) former Prime Minister was being denigrated in some quarters for the supposedly frivolous and pointless pastime of knitting it was ironic to see both the popularity of this exhibition of traditional, mainly feminine crafts, and the serious and well-researched approach taken by the curators.

All askew

I'm going through a very unsatisfactory knitting time. After I pulled the needles out of my Viajante shawl (poncho, poncho!) and left it languishing while I tried to figure out how to unravel and rewind about a kilometre of yarn, I searched for a suitable project for the beautiful Shilasdair yarn I'd bought at the Breidag while I was in the Netherlands. I have four 50 gram skeins of the yarn, which is a most luxurious mixture of cashmere, baby camel, angora and merino lambswool. The air miles associated with this yarn are a bit horrifying as the yarn is sourced from Peru, then dyed in the Shetland Isles. I bought it in the Netherlands and then it flew back to Australia with me. But then, particularly if you live in Australia where Australian-grown wool is usually sent off to China for processing, then to Italy for dying and distribution, the air miles associated with most yarn are disturbing.

My four skeins of yarn are four different colours that shade into one another. I had difficulty finding a pattern that I could adapt to feature the yarns and subtle colour changes and eventually decided on Lisa Mutch's elegant Askew shawl/scarf. A friend had already knitted this pattern and I liked the asymmetrical draping of the point of the scarf as she wore it. So I worked on the shawl/scarf, loving the yarn as I knitted. I decided to work through the spectrum of the colours I had, merging one into another by using stripes interspersed with plain colours.



Maybe the name of the pattern was a warning. My old Oxford dictionary tells me that one of the meanings of 'askew' is 'wrong; awry', as in 'the plan went sadly askew'. A perfect description of what happened. The scarf/shawl that results from the pattern is quite deep for its width. It sits well as a scarf, but is not so suited to wear as a shawl, and the amount of yarn I wanted to use to best display the colours I had resulted in the shawl growing deeper and deeper. I played around with varying the increases to make the shawl wider but eventually gave up and unravelled my knitting. The plan went sadly askew.

So the search for a suitable pattern began again. I remembered what the colour and texture of the yarn reminded me of - Kate Davies' recently published Colours of Shetland. In particular, the Northmavine Hap.



Perfect, except that I don't have enough yarn. So, a bit reluctantly as I counted the air miles again, I've ordered more yarn. My justification is that it's more sustainable in the long run to have a shawl of lovely yarn that I will wear than one that lies unused in my wardrobe.

That time of year

It's that time of year. The Sydney Film Festival.



The SFF gives me such pleasure. It's an opportunity to immerse myself in films for 10 days or so, indiscriminately overloading on ideas and images and world views. It's rather like visiting the great museums of the world and having the opportunity to 'get your eye in'; to see relationships and trends and influences and begin to make judgements about what's good and what's less satisfying.

I'm more than halfway through the Festival and have seen about a dozen films. Choosing the films to see is always a bit chaotic, determined by convenience and availability as well as what appeals from the brief introductions and descriptions. This year the choices have been so much easier because I've not had to fit my film-going around work commitments, though I think I rather miss the rush and bustle of previous years as I fitted film viewing around the busyness of my work life. I'm already wondering how I managed it!

For the past few years I've written posts with brief reviews of the films I've seen. For whatever reasons, this year I decided not to do so. It's not that the films have been less interesting or stimulating, and I am rather regretting my decision because writing about a film, however briefly, does push me to think more deeply about my responses. However, there are a couple of films I do want to mention. I'm mainly a fiction reader and a 'fiction' film viewer, but this year at the Festival I've chosen to see quite a few documentaries and two of them, in particular, have so far provided my best viewing experiences.

Long-term British film-maker Ken Loach has made The Spirit of 45 - a film about the hopes and realities of achieving a more equitable society in Britain in the aftermath of World War II. Loach has no intention of disguising his left-wing political affiliation, and in this documentary he is (as ever) brilliantly empathic and able to evoke the emotional impact of political choices. The film intercuts evocative and apposite historical documentary footage with interviews. Loach is served so well by the people he has chosen to interview, mainly articulate working class people now in their 80s and 90s. Some of the most moving parts of the film are recollections of people who survived the horrors of childhood in pre-war slums in Britain, and then strove, passionately, to better their world after fighting in the second world war. The political achievements of the 1950s in creating a welfare state are celebrated - education, safe working conditions, and health (also noted in the popular UK television series Call the Midwife). The film goes on to document the unravelling of these achievements through the Thatcher years and implicitly is a reproach to those of us who have allowed such hopes for improvement to be dashed. I was weeping by the end of this film. Though it's about Britain, its relevance to Australia is clear.

Another sort-of documentary The Act Of Killing, by US/Danish director Joshua Oppenheimer, is just as politically committed as Loach's film, but very different - and more modern - in its method of story-telling. Oppenheimer has made a film about the horrors of the 'anti-communist' killings in Indonesia in 1965 when around three million people were killed by gangs of thugs sanctioned by the Indonesian government, and by Western governments in countries such as the USA and Australia. Many of the politicians who are currently in power either directly participated in encouraging these murders or now collaborate with or benefit from the acts of the killers. Oppenheimer initially decided to interview victims of the 1965 purge, but they felt unsafe in collaborating. He then chose the even more powerful path of allowing the killers, who boast openly of their actions, to tell the story and even gave them access to his film-making resources to tell their tale in film. So, as well as the most bizarrely self-incriminating interviews with the killers, there is a film within the film - an even more bizarre pastiche of musicals and film noir that the central character uses to tell his story. At about two and a half hours I would think the film is far too long for successful commercial distribution, but the story itself and the method of story-telling are so convoluted that it would suffer from being too compressed.

I also went to hear Joshua Oppenheimer talk about his film with DH Lawrence's advice to 'never trust the teller, trust the tale' in the forefront of my mind. Sometimes film-makers, like writers, are not the best people to tell you about their creations. But Oppenheimer was excellent. He didn't try to interpret his film for his audience, but rather gave background and information on his methods of film-making. Like Loach, he wears his political heart on his sleeve, though his 'message' is a very complex one about moral choices within a global community.

Today I'm off to see a French movie about a mother/son relationship with a score by Nick Cave(?) and an Indian thriller called 'Monsoon Shootout'. You can see why I love the SFF. So many opportunities to view the world.

What's in a name?

It's ages since I posted about my knitting. It's not that I've abandoned knitting. I still knit most days. But somehow, I've accomplished little. Sensibly,I realised that I would inevitably purchase yarns while I was travelling, so on my recent travels I took with me only one pre-planned project - Martina Behm's Viajante shawl. 'Shawl'. That's how I was thinking about and describing this project to myself and others. It seemed ideal for travelling. Not only does 'viajante' mean 'traveller' in Portuguese, but the pattern is composed of vast expanses of stocking stitch - ideal when I needed something that required little concentration. It's a perfect project for a huge skein of Wollmeise lace-weight yarn (a kilometre and a half of yarn!) and I had a lovely deep green-blue in my yarn collection.

So I knitted and knitted. Inevitably I was a bit distracted by other projects, but I knitted and knitted. On my way home from the Netherlands to Australia I stopped in the Philippines to catch up with my son and grandson. My son is absolutely uninterested in and unknowledgeable about fashion and dress more generally, but he did ask what I was knitting. By now it was clear that the 'shawl' was rather unusual, as it is knitted in the round. 'Oh', he said, 'you're knitting a poncho'. He was right. I was knitting a poncho. It's an asymmetrical and beautifully designed poncho, but a poncho nonetheless. I wore ponchos in the seventies. In fact, I knitted and crocheted the ponchos I wore in the seventies, but if there is one style of garment I now regard with horror, it's a poncho. I kept knitting. I tried to ignore the fact that the project on which I had spent so much time was really a poncho. A couple of nights ago I made a minor error in my knitting and as I pulled the stitches off the needles to remedy the mistake I finally found the courage to abandon Viajante.



I've not quite abandoned it. I haven't yet unravelled the knitting - mainly because I can't figure out how to deal with the kilometre or so of yarn I will have to re-skein or rewind if I do so. But I'm no longer knitting and knitting on it, and it's a relief.

So what else did I knit? I blogged about my visit to the Breidag (knitting day) in the Netherlands and my discovery of the unusual and wonderful yarns at the Bart & Francis stall. I purchased some silk shantung yarn - that's really thread. It is so fine that I would never have realised it could be knitted except that the stall had an example of it knitted up rather loosely. I fell in love with the texture. So, I'm knitting a simple Baktus scarf in grey with random darker blue stripes. Slow knitting as the thread is so fine and prone to tangle upon itself. But it's not a poncho and I know I will enjoy wearing it.



And I actually finished a project while I was in Amsterdam. My friend Mieke rode her bike to visit me one cold day. As she offered her cheek for the very Dutch three greeting kisses, her skin was icy. I decided to knit a cowl for bike riding. Mieke dresses very stylishly, but most individually. Lots of black, lots of stripes, and shots of vibrant colours. A perfect recipient for one of Veera Valimaki's graphic patterns. So I chose the Simple Sprinkle pattern and bought some black, white and deep bright blue Rowan aran weight yarns in alpaca and wool. I liked the outcome, and I think Mieke did too.




In the last day or so I've begun a new project to distract me from my failed Viajante. But it's a bit of an experiment and I'm not sure it will work. It seems a bit like tempting fate to share it just yet.

Crochet...and some knitting

Look what was on the wall of the apartment I first stayed in in Amsterdam:



An extremely accomplished crochet art piece. At first sight it seemed rather threatening, but over time I found it comforting. It's a piece of art that relies on expert craft skills for its achievement - something I admire. One day I visited the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam to see an exhibition titled Hand Made - an exhibition of beautiful Dutch craft objects across many centuries that implicitly posed the question of what constitutes craft, and what art. I found this piece in the exhibition:



Clearly, it's by the same artist as the piece in my exchange apartment, though this time it's two female figures titled 'Twins'. The artist's name is Johanna Schweizer. She's now 65 but has only recently gained a reputation for her wonderful work.

This was also in my first Amsterdam apartment:



The apartment had a number of teddy bear themed art pieces or objects, but this must have been the original one. I asked my house exchanger about it and apparently the bib was knitted by his mother when he was a baby. A great design in typical Dutch colours.

Some random knitted and crocheted objects from my travels:



Top row, left:
Crocheted rugs for sale in a very trendy vintage / recycled store in Haarmemmerstraat

Top row, right:
Exhibit in the Rijksmuseum - woollen caps worn by Dutch whalers, discovered in 1980 by archeologists investigating the burial places of 185 Dutch whalers who had died near Spitsbergen during the seventeenth century.The skeletons were still wearing their knitted woollen caps. Each cap was individualised and the museum information claims that the men recognised one another only by the pattern of stripes on their caps as they were bundled up so tightly against the fierce cold that only their eyes were visible.

Bottom row, left
Phone cover made by Meian (ravelry name) of the De Pijp knitting group in Amsterdam. I've forgotten the name of the technique she used, so if you're reading this, Meian, can you please remind me?

Bottom row, right
Crocheted car. This one's for Jane (and Connor)

And finally, a frieze of knitted mice (at least, I think they're mice. Maybe they're not. Maybe they're something from popular culture of which I'm completely unaware) decorating a very upmarket shop in Antwerp. There must have been at least 30 of them, each one individualised.



Lots of these pieces are quite inspirational. Clearly, knitting and crochet can be used in creative, individual, and appealing ways.