I had a whole other post planned, but Life intervened and it didn’t happen. Or not enough of it happened, so it’s languishing in Draft-land. Sorry post: at least you are not alone. Some of my best posts are there.
I have spent most of the last couple of days trying to recover from the builders. Everything is covered in a layer of dust so thick it looks like Pompeii, only less grand. Kelvin at least appears to be still breathing, which is a minor miracle, and he deigned to produce a plate last night, and I managed to swathe it in three times its weight in bubble wrap and escort it to the post office in time to make the last post. The way the last few days have been, I’m counting that a major triumph. Major. It reminds me that I need to expand my cherry blossom range: it’s the closest I come to popular. Also I have a cone of the world’s most obscene pink sparkly acrylic sitting (where else?) on the printer, waiting to be knitted into swatches for round two of the glass knitting experiment.
The builders have cleaned the floor. I have cleaned the floor. Several times. It still looks as though it has not been cleaned since 1993. Go figure. Well, at least for the forseeable future, whenever the house gets a dose of dusting or hoovering, it will be a job worth doing. Not a maybe, not a 50-50, not what my dear mother always wearily called “a lick and a promise” (though that may in fact be all it actually gets). And there is virtue in that: I like to clean when I can see where I’ve been, although I realize that notion may strike a shudder into more house-proud hearts.
Two things to note: we are indeed into the long half-life period I mentioned earlier in the week. We paid the builder; he was supposed to come back today; we had a phone-call yesterday evening and… you’ll have guessed the rest. We wait, but with neither conviction, nor hope, (like a prisoner of corrupt regimes).
Second thing: I still hate the french doors and wish I’d spent the money on something else instead. Stash. Or a diving holiday in Bonaire. Or the dining table that would go perfectly with the Welsh dresser we bought recently. Or, indeed, nothing, which would have been the most sensible choice. But not those french doors. What was I thinking?
On the other hand, a while back I bought 46g of laceweight cashmere on eBay (OK, so it was cheap, with something else I was already buying, and included in the same postage). When it arrived I thought it was loathsome, partly because it was a foul shade of lilac, and partly because it was distractingly put up in a cake, like string, and it looked very tough and chewy and not at all like my mental image of cashmere. I was considering my options for getting rid of it (no Mary, knitting that into something for someone else was not an option: too fiddly, and too ugly at the same time) when a magical thought occurred to me: dye.
I have always been a fan of dye, amongst other transformatory tools. In general I am not one to give up on things easily, or throw things away readily, and have been known to make the long-sleeved short, and confound the plain with chunks of appliqué, and the like, but it must be said that dye is often the easiest, cheapest and most gratifyingly complete transformation that can be effected on a garment. Or, of course, on an unsuspecting skein of wool.
Previously, I’ve used Dylon (and I even colored my wedding dress with it, at home, in a bucket, and wore it to the Oscars, no less, but that is quite another story), but I fancied the kool-aid/food coloring techniques I’ve seen on Ravelry. I like the food-safe aspect: no looking for special utensils or worrying about dangerous chemical spills within reach of small children. Ravelry being what it is, a kind American offered to send me some supplies (thank you Jenn!), and I was – shamefully – unable to resist even a day after my selection of Wilton icing dye arrived. As I was cooking curry, so I was furtively winding that lilac horror back into a skein, giving it a mad-scientist-attack and throwing it in the steamer basket. Wow, wow, wow. It’s not perfect (there are a couple of purple speckles that should not be there), but I love it to bits. The funny thing is that it’s now also apparently much softer than before. I’m sure that is not the case, but the effect of the more cuddlable skein format compared to the rather boxy cake (kind of the formal business-suit of yarnwear, don’t you think?).
Just look at this, and weep. 400 yards. Any suggestions?
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