Blendoku shawl

 The yak silk shawl is now designated the blendoku shawl because it reminds me of the colour scale mobile game of that name. 

And it's done! More than a week ago in fact. Pattern is coming. 

I used a total 199g of yarn in 12 colours. Also coming: a pride rainbow version, because the resistance to current populist trends should be visible. 

Yak silk shawl

 Back in June I bought a lot of yak silk blend on a sale. The colours are fadeable, much like the game Blendoku, remember that? In total it's 12 colours, doubles of some. 

The yarn is Fru Valborg Silky Yak Singles (65% Merino, 15% Yak, 20% Silk). Since it is a single ply it is not suited for socks, or even sweaters, because it won't hold up well to friction and it will likely pill. But for shawls and hats and such it's perfect.

I wanted to use the entire fade I put together of them, so I decided on a shawl. Here's nine of the colours, arranged in order in a zig zag in the bag:

I spent a lot of time doing maths, I wanted a specific shawl shape rather than a plain sailing one, and I wanted the stripes even in width. The point of a shawl knit sideways need to be a much longer one in rows compared to the other stripes to look similar. 

Here's a sketch of the shawl I am planning:

I already begun knitting, and it looks like it'll work out as planned. I am keeping careful track of how much yarn I use.

Want to make a similar shawl out of 12 colours you have? I am planning to post the pattern here when I am sure my math holds up. 

Socks

 I have been talking to some knitter friends about socks, sock fit, foot shape, and such most of the week and in the end I really wanted to knit socks, so I knit these. In reality I knit one sock Friday, one Saturday, and one Sunday, because I had to construct a pattern for my feet in this yarn weight (dk yarn). It's not perfect but 95% there. 

I have some idea that I might make some blog posts about sock knitting and fit. That's a work in progress as in I am working it over in my head.

Fountain pen inks in felt tip pens

 Around 2017 I wanted to refill felt tip pens or brush pens with fountain pen inks, but was met with blank stares in shops. Since then both new stuff has hit the market and experimentation has happened.

Platinum is the short answer to my solutions, but there might be others out there. I'd be happy to hear about your experience. I'd love to find a refillable bristle tip brush pen.

Bullet tip marker

Platinum released a Preppy in felt tip format, the Preppy Sign Pen. It has a bullet felt tip. It comes with a black cartridge, but can of course be used with any Platinum cartridge, or a converter. 

Brush pen

The Platinum Japanese Brush Pocket Pen, or Platinum Fude Pocket Pen (it has different names in different shops) is a felt tip brush pen with a long and flexible tip. It comes with a black cartridge and there are special cartridges sold for it, but they're the same format as regular Platinum cartridges, so in addition to the range of cartridge colours you have the option of a Platinum converter. 

Brush pen inked with Diamine Blue Velvet

Platinum also sells an adapter that lets you use international standard cartridges, or a slim converter (for instance if you have a Jinhao converter lying about). Cartridges can be cleaned and refilled with bottled ink using a (blunt) syringe, so the sky's the limit.

Adapter

Brush pen

Converter

Cons

Cleaning felt tip pens to use other colours goes so-so, so consider that before you ink for the first time. Shimmer inks won't work well with the felt tip which will be clogged by the shimmer, but felt tip pens are generally wet enough to work well with sheen inks. 

Places to buy these things:

(I am not affiliated with any of them nor can I guarantee that stuff is available, but it's where I mostly shop)

• Cultpens.com (UK, ships to the EU without additional customs, also ships internationally)
• Jetpens.com (US, ships internationally)
• Penstore.se (Sweden, ships internationally)

Olivia

 Olivia likes the house and has become much tamer (and much more talkative). We still live in a chaos of moving boxes, but both cats are settled and happy.

Where did all the posts go?

891 of some 1480+ posts are now hidden, deemed irrelevant by yours truly. It's the first step in a move to pick up blogging again. What I'd really like is to move all this to an archive page and start over, but I am not finding an easy way of doing that. Instead the purge. I am slowly going through and updating tags on all the posts to make things navigable. The label based navigation will be hit and miss until I update it all. 

Why this renewed interest in blogging? 

2020 Ravelry did some updates to their webpages that causes physical harm to some people, me included, I get migraines and tics in one arm from spending more than a few minutes on their site. They proceeded to gaslight a lot of people and made fun of disabled people. We do not like Ravelry and do not support them.

Much of my online activity moved to twitter and to a discord for one of the smaller rav-groups I was in. Mostly my knitting stuff was on twitter. But twitter is getting more and more problematic, and I choose to not spend much time there and have deleted my history (which wasn't an easy choice but felt right). 

I spend some time in the fediverse on a mastodon server (ping me if you want my @), but unless you actually follow me there you likely won't see my posts. I also feel like I have things to share about knitting in particular, both technical knowledge (I talked about yarn types and what they are suitable for with someone and it got attention and I realised a lot of people might not know and want to know - there are voices but I could be another), and where, as a scandinavian, to buy yarn. And patterns, if we don't do ravelry!

I don't know that this will turn into a yarn/knitting/fibercrafts only blog, it feels unlikely. It'll probably stay random. Not the least because I make other types of art as well. And there's always gardens, photos of stuff I see...

And finally, a personal update: I have moved to the countryside, bought a house and stuff. Totally overwhelmed, and living in a labyrinth of boxes still one month in. Today I got internet! Small steps of progress. The cats both love it here. 

Snow

 We finally got some snow, and I've spent a week far more outdoors than I usually prefer. It's so nice, I just walk. I am still rehabbing myself and I shouldn't yet walk much more than 4km, and I'm not walking fast, but I'm just out, rambling, wonder where this road, this path goes. Looking for darkness, too - places without streetlights. With the dense cloud cover reflecting light from the nearby city back down, and the snow reflecting the light back up again, it's not dark even technically away from artificial lights. 

I haven't met much people at all in the past ten months, and I'm losing pretense at civilisation despite living in the suburbs of a larger scandilander city. This started affecting my clothes sometime in the fall when I started working in sweatpants for thr first time in my life (yes, even from home), but I think the new low was when I went to the post office and then for a walk dressed in my long underwear and a pyjama hoodie (and warm shoes and a knitted hat). With just a couple of degrees below freezing that was perfect. It's been colder before yesterday. It's easier to dress for proper cold weather. Today it rained, and the snow along any roads are already grey salty powder, now turning into slush. 

I've been painting inspired by my walks. I have been thinking a lot about my own sense of identity and whether I live up to that. I think that, with disability and absentmindedness and time passing faster and faster and many more things, I only have a partial match, and it's been like that for a long time. It means I cannot effectively explain who I am. 

I had initially planned to attack this by finding out who I am now. What things do I actually do, how do I actually live, what things do I still actively care about? 

But somewhere in that thought process I also realised that some of that identity, the lost parts, are things I identify with because they give me joy. I might not have done them much but they give me intense joy. So I decided to start reclaiming those identities instead. Being outside is part of that. I have always loved being outside in autumn and winter. I hate insects, this is perfect. So I'm outside walking. And just sitting, down by the lake, with a thermos of tea. 

I'm painting more and more, because that is also something I miss. It is a creative activity wholly unlike the slow methodical approach my textile crafts demand. I am still working with yarn too, it is soothing. But I am also trying things outside my comfort zone. In many many ways. And I have an ambition of continuing to challenge myself, find my pain and joy points more actively than I have done for some years. 

Sometimes I am my own worst enemy

 I have for some time wanted speakers in my bedroom so I can listen to music here too. I finally got around to setting up some ok speakers that were surplus in my livingroom, and I put on a record I haven't really listened to as a whole before. I usually listen to music as I fall asleep. 

I...  think I've sabotaged my sleep now?Having decent sound rather than my phone speakers... is distracting. LOVELY. But lying in the darkness listening to music I get caught up. I am not sure if I am a genious or my own worst enemy.

End of the holidays

Despite rumours to the contrary, I do decorate for the end of year holidays. Yule goats, space animals, and a decorated succulent to prove my point:

Tomorrow it is back to work. I'm looking forwards to talking to my coworkers again. Today I'm removing most traces of yule from my home - it is time to move on. 

2020 - Finished Knitting/Stitching

While I have plenty of started things I haven't finished, here's the majority of knitting and stitching I actually finished in 2020. I might squeeze in another finish - we'll see... 

 

Five years

I have decided to resuscitate this blog, for a whole host of reasons. Most of them can be found in why my posting died out. Maybe chief among them, I found an online "home" on the Ravelry boards. Since Ravelry has, in 2020, been revealed to be ableist assholes who exclude a whole lot of people from their site, I am no longer active there. I have retained a lot of my community from there in other places, ie fb, twitter, discord and more, but I miss a place to braindump, a soap box on a street corner of the internet to yell into the void. So this will be my soap box, where I can write longer, more or less cohesive texts not fitted to the format of the sites mentioned above. The title Random I expect to still be wholly applicable. 

What has happened in five years? 
In a more or less chronological order, I present some important things from the life of the Sil: 

• After a year of financial freedom and recuperation from a total burnout (I was so lucky these two things happened at the same time so I didn't have to fight for financial survival) I got a new job
• I discovered Seigmen had reunited and released a new record
• I bought my first fountain pen
• I met who I thought at the time was the love of my life, moved together, got pregnant, got dumped, had a miscarriage, thought it was the end of the world, but it turned out it wasn't, just lifelong freedom from someone who had lied a lot to me. Thus it ended the best way possible.
• I got another new job (back to management, and it was great and fun and all that, but it was also always just gonna be a year)
• I bought some more fountain pens
• I got yet another new job - back to IT, whodathunk?!
• I dyed my hair into a complete rainbow
• I threw off some anxieties from that year at art school and started painting and turns out, I'm ok at it after all

• A pandemic arrived and at the same time I got a new position at work (still IT), and because of said pandemic I have never met most of my team and never together. 
• Ravelry fucked up badly and gave me migraines and weird tics in my arm
• I got some words and explanations for why my body is such a mess. My disability has names. I feel seen. 
• I cut my hair into a mohawk, tho it is still so long on top that it isn't obvious. I plan to shorten it, eventually, and spray it up into a tall standing 'hawk. I just haven't felt cool enough yet. That is to say, I can't be arsed to care. 
• I now have more than three dozen fountain pens, and an ink collection to match
• I turned 40 and I am proudly sporting some shiny white hairs on my temples and in my eyebrows
• I bought a cd player and some 30 cds in one month
• I really like working from home
• I knit something like eight pair of socks during the pandemic, so far, socks are nice and soothing, especially plain socks just round and round and round
• I am getting to terms with the fact that I have too many hobbies and start too many projects and never become really great at anything. It's ok to play the fiddle like a novice, paint ugly flowers, sing falsely, abandon a thousand started art or craft project, forget I have that expensive console for half a year. As long as I do things that give me joy and distraction in the moment I don't have to be good at everything, and definitely don't need to turn things into hustles. I am, and will always be random. I love too many things, and too many colours, and too many creatures. And it is good. 

Selfie with a cat

Alasdair wanted to take a selfie so we posed. I am sleepy and wearing no makeup. He looks like he is having fun though.

Samhain celebrations

There was a party and hanging out with friends, there were also walks to churchyards.

I hope y'all had a peaceful holiday!