Of lucets and lino

On Saturday, jousting was scheduled to take place at Linlithgow Palace.

Note that stripey tent – evidence of the merrie scene which was to have been.

The clerk of the weather interceded, probably to no-one’s surprise.  So the palace was full of children running about, undeterred by soaking weather, and mostly clutching plastic swords; or, in some cases, modelling balloon swords.   Also of people in varying degrees of mediaeval costume, valiantly putting on a show for the not overtly disappointed crowd, offering up educational tit-bits, ‘darning’ chain mail, whittling axe-shafts, and generally doing the sorts of things mediaeval people probably did do on beastly wet days.

Among their number was this lady, who kindly permitted me to photograph her – alas, rather blurrily.  I seem to have rather shaky hands.

The tool she was employing was a lucet; and the technique pretty much a two-pronged version of French knitting.   It rather gave me ideas: after all, even a mitten on double-points is a little over-large to be stuffed easily into a pocket, and the current lace scarf is looking a little battered, from being stuffed into bags and hoiked out of bags and soaked when my bags are caught with me in a downpour.  Besides, exciting, cool, mediaeval-ish craft!; and the lucet itself looks comfortable to the hand.

The plastic fork version in the google image results rather amuses me, and ‘though the materials may be hardly authentic, there is certainly authenticity in adapting whatever one has readily available.

(Image lifted directly from google, because it seems to have disappeared from the source.)

.

.

Curiosity led me, via Arabesque Braids, to you-tube:

I have no craft foam in stock, but I do have a supply of lino off-cuts.

Since the result of keeping up with an energetic 7-year-old for several hours is that I am too stupid even for stocking stitch, a few hours of hypnotically mindless repetition on Sunday produced a good foot of heraldically gold-and-red braid, purpose (and, indeed, final length) currently unknown.

That ought to scratch the “pocket craft” itch, if not quite the “tactile tool” itch, and has the added appeal that when fascinated children enquire,  it’ll be easy for them to try for themselves.  Never quite the case when one’s knitting lace.

Oh, and the scarf of my previous post is long done, and ready to be despatched.

A gratuitous last picture from the palace:

Current reading: nominally, Our Man in Rome – the last few days have seen me get to bed, pick up my book, and fail to make head or tail of even a paragraph.  That’s what I get for consorting with children.

Getting excited and making things

I intend that on the day when I have an actual craft room, this will be on the wall:

All the same, there are times when the desire to Make Things, Now seems a touch perverse; particularly, when it manifests itself as the desire to have made new and (therefore) exciting things, Now.  Immediacy is, after all, not really consistent with how making things works; certainly not the things best worth making.

Reason, confronted with a slight migraine and wild illogic, suggests that the desire to make things might reasonably be satisfied by having completed the TGV scarf of the past few days, having made a pot of soup and set bread to rise, and being almost-imminently about to complete a baby jumper.

Reason is met with something more than scepticism.

Reason, rather in a corner, represents that an inch of collar and some sewing up will take no more time than the knitting even of a chunky scarf, will result just as surely in having made something, and will furthermore put us one stage closer to the next ‘real’ knitting project.

Reason is over-ruled:

Reason, beseiged but not routed, also represents that persons who have just started scarves and who sew by hand might be wary of emulating decorative ideas involving difficult fabrics, even if they do happen to have some old bits of towel and pillow-case lying around unused.

Reason is over-ruled:

As a friend of mine would lugubriously say, “It’ll all end in tears”.  Tears and a scarf, however.  The desire to make new and exciting things is appeased, for the time being.

Reading: The Crossing Places, by Elly Griffiths.  So far, so gently enjoyable.

Frivolous summer sewing

Thought I might as well put up the results of that sewing in post no. 1, just to prove to myself that I haven’t only made scarves and toddler jumpers this year.

Left to right, in all their un-ironed glory: quilting fabric and poly-cotton poplin; decorative side and lining of old curtain; remant and old sheet; backs of two cigarette-burned men’s shirts; backs of two other cigarette-burned men’s shirts; quilting fabric and old sheet; quilting fabric and another old sheet.  Much as I like the quilting fabrics, it’s always pleasing to generate something a little decorative for the cost of a few lengths of thread and a yard of ribbon.

The shirt-fabric bags were cut out and finished in one go (the exciting new fabric stage of things – a jumble of someone else’s old cast-offs becomes my fount of possibilities), and the rest had been sitting partly made up for months.

And, because these have only an ephemeral place in my life, unless they’re inadvertently ugly, or like the tiny ones on top, awaiting a tiny present to go in them, the current pile, folded ready to fit into its box:

Doesn’t look terribly many.

Summer, Scottish style: take two.

Or, the path not taken:

It’s a well-mannered little burn, which in summer generally trickles mildly along, chuckling gently over rounded stones.  Yesterday evening, when I walked over this footbridge, the water wasn’t running so high that I noticed it: today, even the canal, tributary-less, was high.

Current reading: The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester.  Naturally to be paired with The Surgeon of Crowthorne, the American edition of which appears, a mite drearily, to be entitled The Professor and the Madman.

Knitting: TGV scarf in a gloriously deep, peacock-like green.

Summer, Scottish style

10 days ago, there were early grasshoppers stridulating in the nature park.  4 days ago, the swallows were back, flitting under the trees on a rainy evening.  Yesterday, the hawthorn blossomed.  It can only be summer.

Today, because this is Scotland, after all, and I’m nesh, there’s this:

(The yellow theme is entirely accidental.   Never my favourite colour.)

And this, and this:

Adding up to this:

A much needed day of calm.