Flibbertygibbet

P the second...

P is for plum - one of my favourite fruits.  It's also for the Plum of the Month club - awards for Crafting Blog Greatness!  Go here and check out the nominees.  Just don't blame me if you don't get anything else done today.

So who can guess what today's Alphabet August post (coming later) will be about...?

P: Worth a thousand words

                                                      

Oh What A Beautiful Morning

Though it's due to be piddling down with rain by noontime.  But at the moment I'm home with my DH, the cats are scampering around the back garden, and all is well. 

In rather exciting news, my mum texted me out of the blue yesterday to say that they have a new puppy!  A black lab called Dusty (after Dusty Springfield, my father's idea.  This is the man who wanted to call me either Dawn or Robin - the nature vibe coming out that day, obviously).  All I want to do now is to hop on a plane home to see them all.

So as today's post is brought to you by the letter O,  it seemed doubly appropriate to open with something from Oklahoma! I think it's strange that it didn't feature in Radio 2's Top Ten Essential Musicals listing, particularly when you notice the unfathomable bias towards Andrew Lloyd Webber.  But then when you work out the show is hosted by Elaine Paige, it all makes more sense.  I think I might have to rewrite my own favourite list.  I did something naughty yesterday - I booked a ticket to go and see Wicked! here in London.  We missed seeing it in NYC for my birthday, poor planning, and I adore the book.  I'd been dallying about, trying to organise a group and realised the opportunity would just pass me by while we got numbers/dates/babysitters sorted.  So I'm going, by myself, to the matinee.  £8.75 including booking fee to sit in the nosebleed seats.  Binoculars, never mind opera glasses, may be required, but it will be such an adventure! Giddy giddy, can't wait!

I'm pretty certain that I've seen Oklahoma at some point in the dark distant past, because every child in Ireland was forcefed musicals on RTE every weekend, no doubt I saw it too.  But I don't remember a huge amount about it.  This, to me, is a gap in my social education.  (Mind you it's probably also a gap in my official education as I did a film degree - but it was more Goddard than Gigi).  So I'm going to dig it out of my musicals-on-DVD-bought-cheaply-in-the-sales pile and watch it tomorrow, snuggled up on the couch, (sofa?  couch?  whatever) while I draw out the designs for the Christmas decorations that I'm planning.  Because it's August so surely it's time to start planning for Christmas* - oy vay.  I was first taught a smattering of Yiddish by a great New York girl that I met in Maine, many years ago.  One of the great things about spending a summer up there was that most of the other green card Irish students were living it up in Cape May, and Boston, and you didn't feel like you were walking down Main St, Ireland (as another friend who lives in NY started to feel about Woodside after she'd been there for a couple of years - literally everyone from her class, the class below and the class above her at school followed her out there) but even way up in Bah Hahbah, there were two other Irish girls there - we got everywhere.  And when one of them was annoying me, I couldn't use my small selection of Irish swearwords to mutter curses to myself.  So Jessica taught me things like 'Oy vay, what a meshuggener' so that I could vent. 

A gap in the rain! It's taken me so long to write this that we've moved through a number of weather fronts.  I'm off to the market before I need wellies to get there.   

*planning and plotting is one thing - but this, I really disagree with.

Dolly

Jumpin' out of bed and stumble to the kitchen,
Pour myself a cup of ambition....

Well I'm in the kitchen alright and I do intend to have a cup of coffee very soon - the first song I heard this morning was Dolly Parton singing Nine to Five, for N day.  This is one of those songs that I remember vividly from childhood.  The movie came out in 1980, when I was only six.  But the real reason I remember it was because of my typewriter.  I had a children's pink typewriter (made by Mattel, possibly?) which was absolutely the bestest Christmas present ever, which arrived when I was nine, or perhaps eight, and the music in the TV ad used the intro and a parody of the lyrics from Dolly's' song, with the ching-chang clang of typewriter keys.  I was beyond thrilled when I opened it and it was used to bang out lots of short stories in anticipation of being a famous novelist some day.  (Don't chuckle, like most people I think I probably still believe I have "a book in me".  It just might be written in crayon and unfit for human eyes, but still.)

Only years later did I find out that it had been the subject of much heated discussion between my lovely parents.  Mum's take on it was that 'Well, this is what she asked for, so this is what we'll get.'  My dad's very sensible opinion was that 'It's essentially a toy - it won't last.  If she wants a typewriter, get her a proper one.'  Now if this or this had arrived - hell, I'd probably still have it, and see here for more wonderful pictures.  But I reckon Mum made the right call.  I don't think I would have been farseeing enough at that age to equate a real typewriter with lasting enjoyment, I would have wanted the pink plastic one. Even though it was horrendously difficult to type on.  A few years later, it was indeed forgotten - and I sold it to my mum's friend for her daughter.  They were hard to come by at that stage and I made a profit on the original price, and probably went out and spent it all on Sweet Valley High books, or was I a little past them by then.  What a productive youth.   

N is also for Nice.  Again harking back to the same time period, I had a rather strict teacher who outlawed the use of the word 'nice'.  "Nice,' she told us, "says nothing at all.  The trip was fun, or the cake was delicious, or the weather was glorious."  With a glint in her eye she declared that nice was a "lazy" word.  A lesson that I've ever forgotten, and she not only broadened our vocabularies but imbued a subtle literary snobberty that has remained.  A bad thing?  Certainly not!

Somewhere over the rainbow...

...there's a leprechaun waiting to give me a large pot of gold.  And when I find him - I'll be going straight to the Ribbon Jar.  I enjoy torturing myself so I subscribe to their newsletter, which arrived today, and their special collections are so utterly divine...but I haven't actually ordered anything from them yet.  Yet, hah!

As an addendum to the letter M, I just have to share my love for the Muppets.  The epitome in family entertainment (plus I was pretty much raised on Sesame Street).  Remember Pigs in Space? The Swedish Chef? And Miss Piggy, of course.

One of my favourite trivia questions is:
Name the two guys on the balcony who heckle everyone, but mostly poor Fozzie bear?
And for bonus points, where do their names come from?
Answer here.

So come on, which one are you?  Apparently, I am...

Fozzie Bear!

"Wocka! Wocka!"
You're the life of the party, and you love making people crack up.
If only your routine didn't always bomb!
You may find more groans than laughs, but always keep the jokes coming.

Do leave a comment to say who you are...

Oh lordy, it's almost midnight.  Time to flee up to bed with my ballgown rustling before I turn into a pumpkin.

Meh

Meh.  I love that expression - it encapsulates the feeling when you're so utterly unengaged by a situation that you can't even be bothered to look for the right words to express your dissatisfaction.  I kind of felt that way about posting today because the first thing that sprang to mind when I though about the letter M was Money.  It's a little lacking at the moment.  But that would be moaning - in keeping with the letter of the day, but not the spirit of things.  And really, life is good. I have everything I need, and more.  So why on earth should I moan, as John said (or was it Paul?)

So less of the Meh, and more of the Munkeepod!  which you can find out more about here, but this lovely lady's sheer excitement, as posted here below, made me think...

   

Guess what.  Guess whaaaaaaaaaaattt!!!!   

    I am officially a registered, legal, self-employed, small business owner, professional artist/crafter!!!

I CAN HARDLY CONTAIN MYSELF!!!

    ...Anyway, that's what I did today. Hope your day was as exciting as mine! I feel like I'm entering a whole new era and it's all a dream!
    *don't pinch me! lol!*

She also made the point about getting some stock ready - and I'm thinking that's a rather good idea.  I've been dallying with the idea of an Etsy shop...and some Christmas markets.  Ooooh, how exciting!  Hell, why not.  Time rich and cash poor, as I've said before.
Oh how mind-wibblingly exciting...tee hee hee hee [Flib allows small Train of Thought to shunt out of sidings and chug slowly towards the track...]

Although it's only halfway there, the top of the quilt is done.

Thank you so much to all the people who popped in to unanimously vote for the first version (if it ain't broke...) It's not perfect when you look at it closely but I'm hoping that will be overlooked.  Made with love.  If not with a huge amount of expertise.  It will be interesting to see how the actual quilting goes.  I've bought lots of large safety pins.  I should warn the neighbours to ignore the screaming later.

And the extra jewellery supplies arrived.  I have lots of plans... time to go do, rather than just letting small creative notions boil over inside my brain and explode out into the ether without capturing them for posterity, and rendering them into actual fripperies.

So it turns out after all that M may actually represent Motivation.  Momentum.  Moving on...

Any thoughts?

I made my first blocks!  Very simple Roman Stripe (I thought this was called Rail Fence, then read it has four stripes and Roman Stripe has three.

I don't think anyone is going to read this in the very near future, but if you do - what do you think?  Which one would you go for?  I've got to do some more squares, so there are some missing but this was just the trial run, on the bed.

I think I like the first one best, even though it's not very 'quilt like', if you know what I mean. I'm sure I should have paid more attention to colour values etc but hey, I'm just a beginner. BTW for some expert quilts, look at Rhubard Patch's flickr set - I've left so many comments on her beautiful works that she probably thinks I'm a stalker.

Any comments would be most welcome...

Life long learning

Some days I think I'm getting a little wiser as I get older - other times I feel like I know nothing at all.  Like I know that I have forgotten everything I ever knew about maths, which of course I studied in school, up to the age of eighteen - I mean, that's approximately thirteen years of education that has just evaporated! Poof!  Gone!  Actually I know I'm really stressed when I dream that I have to resit my Leaving Cert maths exams.  Luckily that doesn't happen so much anymore.

Recently I've been learning lots about new crafts and creative things - quilting, crochet, dressmaking -  or ones that are new to me, at any rate, and also about tech stuff.  For example, I found out what a permalink is.  Now I know how to refer to this post, which ostensibly would have been perfectly appropriate for the L post in Alphabet August but of course I couldn't wait - and it seems like a cheat to say "Oh well I'm just doing some of them out of sequence". I've been playing about with Flickr and I was really peeved to think that I had almost run out of space for this month after loading a small group of photos, as I can't quite justify upgrading to a Pro account (it's not a high priority for my limited budget at the moment).  Then I took the time to ferret about a bit and worked out how to resize the photos - so while the five 'Green is beautiful' shots gobbled up 35%  of my allocation, the next one I posted took only 1%.  Result!  I should be able to complete the rest of the 'Year of Color' weeks for August with my lickle slice of bandwidth.  So it's worth taking the time.  There's also joining groups, following 'conversations' where someone has replied to one of my comments etc - and I think there's a lot more stuff to be found under the 'organize' tab... and one of my most lucrative finds to date has been following links.  From lists of favourite sites and resources on blogs that I like, from people's profiles in Flickr to their own blogs, and from the lovely people who've left comments on here. (Can I just say how much I appreciate it, that you took the time? I get ludicrously excited when I get a little Typepad email saying [this great gal] left you a comment...) 

Pixie's blog is lyrical, cheerful and thought provoking.  Her post entitled 'Raewyn' made me think about loved ones and how I have some lapsed friendships, where I've let time pressures and general laziness get the better of me when it comes to meeting up with people and how sad I'd be if I found they weren't around any more to be my lunch buddy, or my email* pal, and how important it is to address this.  Coincidentally, over the past week I've called up or got in touch with four old friends that I don't see so much anymore, and of course it has been rewarding.  So dig out the address book/the email contacts/the stored numbers in the mobile and get in touch with someone you haven't seen for ages.  Just because you can. 

*Can I lament the sad demise of the letter?  Nothing makes me happier than to get 'real' post and even though I've been guilty of it myself, I've tried to start writing letters and cards again rather than using email or the phone.  Heavy stock stationery, (I can dream) a Cross fountain pen with purple ink, a postage stamp with a pretty image - how can an 'inbox' really compare...

N is for... no, wait a minute

Knitting!!! It's K day today, of course. 

I'm not a great knitter.  My mother is, but she claims she's bad at finishing so gets a bit frustrated when she knits something and the invidual pieces look great, but then the final put together garment looks like it was completed by someone wearing mittens. I think she's exaggerating.  The other difficulty she has is actually sourcing wool. All those little drapery shops that would have stocked it are long gone, and I can't convince her to get online (since their home computer got a virus and ran up the phone bill - she doesn't believe in Macs, which seem to be less targeted, or that a decent virus checker would help).

She loves to remind me about how I learned to knit in primary school (on those little coloured needles) and let's just say that I was a little impatient about the lack of progress.  I was sitting there with 'a face' on me, and when Mum asked what was wrong, she was greeted with a wail: 'But I want it to grow down!'  As you can imagine, this has popped up many times in the twenty-five odd years since. When I was buying patterns in John Lewis the other day, I got to talking with the woman beside me. She lamented the fact that nobody learns to sew these days, and I said I was taught hand-sewing, embroidery, patchwork and knitting in primary school - I didn't realise that went out years before in the UK.  She was really surprised and said that here, her daughters didn't learn anything like that.  I feel all the more grateful to Mrs. Clarke now.

So far all I've made are scarves.  Probably because they 'grow down' quickly.

 

The silver one is just miles of a now discontinued Rowan wool.  I just kept going with that it - and in fact I think I might frog it and reuse it.  But I'm not sure if it would knit up ok for a second time.The black one is velvety chenille stuff interwoven with velvet ribbon from London poshest (i.e. most glorious and correspondingly expensive) trimming shop, VV Rouleaux,   The green one is a deranged project that was sort of based on a Knitty pattern, which I knit on enormous needles, size 20 I think.  Buggers to handle.  I was going home for Christmas and decided to take it with me, to get Mum to help me finish it off (hadn't quite learned to cast off I think), and knew I'd have a problem taking the needles on the plane.   So Mum said, 'Don't worry  [Matha is heya], I've got lots of needles, just bring it home.'.  When she actually saw it, she said 'What the hell did you knit that on, broomhandles?'  So my Daddy went out and cut two willow branches, stripped the bark and made me needles, and then left them by the fire to dry out for a day.  They were fantastic, and we got it finished.  Then Dad used them to light the next day's fire - no pride in his workmanship, that man.

I'd like to knit something I can actually wear, but my problem is that I'd like something lacy, delicated, soft, fluffy - or as it's also known, 'Advanced'.  I always want to run before I can crawl.  And I'd crawl here on my hands and knees if only I had the cash to buy anything when I actually arrived.  Mind you, it would probably be quite good exercise. 

Who's afraid of the big bad quilt?

Me.

It's not even that big.  It's only intended for a baby's cot.  I've cut out some strips and I'm deciding what to do with them.  I know I'm being irrational - but if I don't start it, I can't mess it up, if you know what I mean.

So as a spur, I've arranged lunch with the baby's mum on Tuesday.  Do you think it will be done by then? Oh dear, what have I got myself into...