Category Archives: books

One List Shorter, One List Longer

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I’ve abandoned the woven cat food mats project. Slinky gets so enthusiastic about eating that he pushes his food bowl across the floor. I figured a woven mat might provide enough texture to stop it slipping. It was a project that ought to have been simple, but became ridiculously complicated.

(Alert! Technical weaving terms begin.) I thought I’d try warp-faced rep on the knitters loom using some Lion Brand cotton. The warp needs a small dpi – the strands are threaded closer together so only the warp shows in the fabric – but when I went to weave it the yarn stuck together and wouldn’t form a shed. I tried spraying it with hair de-tangling spray and using a pick up stick, which helped, but then I found the warp strands still weren’t close enough to form a completely warp-faced fabric.

So I re-threaded the warp to use plain weave, which caused a flare up of RSI. But because the weft in warp-faced rep doesn’t show, I’d used most of the yarn as warp – so most of it was now cut into lengths. I needed to buy more. (Alert! Technical weaving terms end.)

Well, it turned out there was only one shop in Australia that sold Lion Brand yarn. When I went to order it, they were going to charge me over $15 in postage, even when I reduced the order to one ball. So I went looking for similar yarns and found Sugar & Cream at Yarn Over. Two balls = $6 shipping & handling.

In the meantime, I decided that a non-slip rubber mat would do just as well for the cat. So I’m going to weave hand towels out of the warp on the loom, and concentrate on other projects on my list.

My ‘Books Read in 2011’ list just got longer. I finished two books, but I have to admit the one about bookplates was the shortest in my To Read List. Is that cheating? Well, I hadn’t read it and it was in the list, so I don’t reckon it was.

Small Steps

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I am SO looking forward to delivering this book to the publisher. Even though it means we move into the painful and annoying part of the process: editing (painful) and proofing (annoying).

My wrist felt like it was back to normal on Tuesday. The knitting was calling, but I resisted. Wednesday morning I re-warped the small loom (long story) and though it hadn’t bothered me the first time I warped it, I wound up with a sore and burning hand again. Not too bad today, though.

Slinky has gained a lot of confidence. Perhaps a little too much. He’s started being a bit naughty, scratching carpet and chewing on the laces of Paul’s shoes in the wardrobe just after I go to bed. But yesterday I finally saw him go down the stairs and yes, he does move a little bit like a Slinky. Front legs, back legs. Front legs, back legs.

I finished another book: Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, which was a biography of the guy who started the synthetic dye industry. Mauve led to many other inventions of modern chemistry, including cancer and malaria treatments. It’s the 26th book I’ve read this year, if you don’t count me rereading five of my own books in order to refresh my memory. I’m wondering if I can get to 30 books before the end of the year. That’d be three times the number of books I read last year. (At that rate, it’ll only take me under four years to read through my To Read List.) But I have one more of my own books to reread as well. Perhaps if I choose short books from the List…

And the List is still growing, as I tackle new sections of my book collection. I’ve added short story collections by single authors and more recent non-fiction purchases, which increased the List to 111 books. I still have to go through short fiction magazines and anthologies and my older non-fiction (collected when I worked for Oxford Uni Press) to root out what I haven’t read and/or don’t want to keep. I’m a bit dismayed to find that, of the 26 books I’ve read this year, only two hadn’t been acquired recently. I need to get some of the old stuff read. And stop buying books!

(update) I’ve now gone through the old non-fiction and found I’d missed the small collection of Fantasy Masterworks, and the list has now grown to 134 books. Eeep!

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned From Stash Busting

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Well, not everything…

Being a writer, the whole ebook thing is hardly recent news, but I’ve only recently started reading digital books for pleasure. I’ve been reading books on screen as part of my work for years, helping writer friends by reading their manuscripts and providing feedback. In fact, some years the only books I read were manuscripts, because for a few years there I found reading very difficult.

You see, I have chronic upper back issues that make reading while sitting up for more than half an hour painful – sometimes for days afterwards. The bigger and heavier the book, the worse it is. Physiotherapists tell me I should lie down to read, and I’ve found the Book Seat helps a lot, too.

Some years back I had some kind of chronic fatigue thing set in, and every time I lay down to read I’d fall asleep. I also found it very hard to concentrate on anything for long. I barely read anything for a couple of years, and then even though I slowly got over the fatigue I found it really hard to get back into the habit.

Still, I’ve been gradually regaining my reading mojo. Last year I read ten books. Ten! This year I’ve read that number in six months. I may never get back to my 50+ books a year habit, but things are improving.

Unfortunately, there was a lag between the drop in my reading habits and the drop in my book buying habits. I have quite a big to-read pile of print books. In fact, my to-read pile is a to-read bookcase. And on top of that I admit to ‘hiding’ unread books among read ones in my other bookcases.

Like many people, now that I’ve decided I like reading ebooks, I can’t help looking considering those print books a little differently. I still prefer to read print books. They feel and smell nice, are easier on the eyes, I think a house full of bookcases is immensely comforting, and they don’t vanish the next time you update your iPhone software.

But reading them hurts.

So the other day I went through my main fiction bookcase and removed everything I hadn’t read yet. I added them to my to-read bookcase and counted a total of over 100 books. Oh dear. If I continue to read at a rate of ten books a year, it’ll take me ten years to read them all. And only if I read what is there and nothing new. There are always new books to read: books by friends, new releases by favourite authors, books Paul reads and recommends, books publishers send for me to read and provide quotes for.

I don’t want to take ten years to read these books and I need the space they take up. But how am I going to get through 100 of them any faster than that? Well, thinking about this, it occurred to me that there must be some wisdom in all that yarn stash busting I’ve done. So I listed the ways I could apply it:

First: cull
The easiest way to reduce yarn stash is to simply sell it or give it away. In fact, a stash bust can be an excuse to get rid of yarn that you don’t really like, but have been feeling obliged to hang onto for some reason. I got ruthless in the same way with my books, getting rid of the series by writers I met once or used to chat with on a forum, but never got beyond the first book (or chapter), the sympathy buys, and the guilt purchases. Sometimes having spend my hard-earned cash on these books is support enough.

Then there’s the bargain yarn. I’ve been as much of a sucker for bargain priced books. And gift yarn. Most of my ‘gift’ books are freebies sent by the publisher, and I need to remember that I don’t have to read them.

I will also be applying the ’50 page rule’. If a book hasn’t hooked me by the time I get to page 50, out it goes – and the rest of the series. Heck, if the first chapter has me wanting to claw my eyes out or rinse my brain, I’m not even going to continue to chapter 50.

Second: prioritise
There are definitely yarns that I’ve been dying to knit. Some I’ve been dying to knit for years. Same with the books. They went to the top of the pile. As did ones by friends that I want to read. There are also some books that I bought for research purposes. I’m intermingling them with the others, so I’m not reading all research all the time.

Though the ones I’m least interested in are at the bottom of the pile, from time to time I’ll pick something up to see if it passes the 50 page rule. If it doesn’t, then at least I can remove it. If it does then I’m reading a good book, so there’s nothing to lose.

Third: restraint
A total ban isn’t always practical. When stash busting I usually make exceptions and, looking back at my last Knit From Your Stash rules I can see plenty of parallels:

I will not buy more yarn/books except…
Yarn for weaving – Books for research
To make gifts – Manuscripts for friends or to provide quotes for
Extra yarn to complete a project – Ongoing books in a series I’m hooked on
Yarn from a special yarn store – To support a specialty bookshop
If I run out of yarn while on holiday – If I run out of books on holiday
Yarn given to me – Books given to me
Charity knitting – Books with proceeds going to charity

Fourth: encouragement (cheating)
Seeing a tangible reduction helps me feel like I’m getting somewhere. With yarn stash busting there’s one big ‘cheat’ that I don’t mind resorting to: I count the yarn by grams not meters. Mostly this is because some yarns don’t list meterage, whereas I can always weigh it. The ‘cheat’ within using this system is that the heavier weight yarns knit up faster so if you knit them first you get a satisfyingly quick initial stash reduction.

With books I’ll be counting each tome, not the pages. So reading the shorter books first will make a bigger initial impact. But there’s still an advantage in reading bigger ones. They’re more likely to be the first of a series, and if I end up disliking it then I could get to cull 3-7 books.

Fifth: Rewards
I don’t like to set time limits on a yarn stash reduction these days, instead I give a little cheer whenever I get the stash down to a set round number of kilos. Call me crazy, but that’s reward and motivation enough. With books the aim is to read more of the books I already own as well as make space, so I think I’ll be pleased whether I read more of them or simply end up with more space free on the to-read bookcase. For the next six months I’ll see what works better, then see how I want to proceed next year.

The Devil in the Retails

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You know how it goes. To buy something hard to find (in my case, ink for a fountain pen) you end up at a big shopping mall. While you’re there you discover a sale on at a shop that’s closing down, and an intriguing new stationary chain, and suddenly you’ve swapped some of those thin rectangles of plastic (paper if your local currency is low-tech) for some pretty stuff.

I didn’t know there was a Borders at Doncaster. Well, not for much longer. It was having a closing down sale. Along with some novels and a book on art, I picked up these for 20% off (which probably equals 5% off considering that Borders prices were usually hiked up by 15% to begin with):

The finishing techniques one actually contained a few tips/techniques I didn’t know, so definitely worth getting. The other two ought to be polar opposites – classic vs latest fashion – and yet I found more than a couple of patterns inside both that I thought I might actually knit.

The stationary store was like Smiggle and Ikea got together and had offspring. Cute things, but lots made out of pale wood, pastel colour schemes and prices so surprisingly cheap for this sort of thing that the words ‘mass production’ and ‘third world sweatshop’ whisper at the back of your mind. I couldn’t resist these:

Today I found Interweave Knits Spring issue at my local newsagent. I asked him what happened to Interweave Knits Winter since I hadn’t been able to find it in the five or so newsagents I usually look for it in. He looked it up and discovered that, while they’d been ordered, the stock had never arrived. So I wasn’t imagining things. That issue never did show up locally. Which is annoying because I usually only buy the autumn and winter issues.

Trying Something New

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Yarn magazine mainly because it contained a tutorial for making baskets out of scraps of yarn and raffia. I reckon these baskets are made with the same method. I decided to give it a go, using loom ends and some thick acrylic yarn my Mum used to make a hooked rug out of in the 70s.

I didn’t like the method. The main pro was that I could use up loom ends, the main con was that the constant joining in of a new bit of yarn and the sewing was time consuming. I kept thinking that I could probably do this using crochet, with one continuous strand. Then yesterday I saw a book reviewed over at Craft Leftovers that looked like it might be about that sort of thing. As I always do, I ignored the link to Amazon and went looking for it on Fishpond.

It is there, though with a much less appealing cover. I spotted something called Google Preview and discovered that it shows you the first quarter of the book. Unfortunately for the publisher and author, that first quarter contains all of the technical instructions. I only wanted to confirm that the method was the sort of think I was thinking of. Now I don’t need to buy the book at all.

Hmm.

Anyway, I looked at my macrame supplies and there were two thicker kinds of rope that would work well, in natural and black. What to crochet them together with? I grabbed some linen thread from my bookbinding supplies. It was originally purchased for weaving, then turned out to be great bookbinding thread, and now it’s being used for crochet basketry:

I’m really pleased with the result. It’s faster than the sewing method and I like the look and feel of the ‘fabric’ it’s making, which is flexible enough to mould into shape and stiff enough to hold it. I’m not sure what I’ll make this into. A bowl? A matching pair of waste paper baskets for the bedroom? A trivet for the dining table? I can see potential for plenty of projects: table runners and place mats, lidded boxes, carry bags…

And there is so much potential for using other materials. I’m thinking it might look interesting to match the black rope with the leftovers from the Peri Peri Floor Rug:

I could be even more adventurous, and substitute the rope with strips of paper or card, fabric, wire, or even electrical cord. The crochet thread could be any kind of string-like thread, from yarn to thin wire to audio tape. Most of these things have been tried already, somewhere.

The book went onto my wishlist at Fishpond. Though I don’t need it, it did have some good project ideas in it. If you’re curious, follow both the link to the Fishpond page (and Google Preview) but also the Craft Leftovers review.

One Piece Wearables & Canvas Remix

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I ordered these two books from Fishpond recently, having seen them both on blogs.

One Piece Wearables is a book of garments made from one pattern piece (and the patterns are supplied within a pocket in the cover), using ties or elastic and avoiding zips and/or buttonholes – though I did spot one zipper. Having one piece of fabric make up a garment is meant to keep the process simple for new and time-poor sewers. I’m not entirely convinced that the patterns always achieve that, but most do and, well, you don’t know until you try them out. The book uses illustrations rather than photographs which is nice, but while some illustrations are well done, others aren’t as successful and it detracts a bit from the book overall. There’s also a theme of men fawning over women that’s a bit cheesy. Still, the approach of the book is interesting with a range of patterns to try, and there are definitely a few garments in this that I’d like to make.

Canvas Remix is a book written by Alisa Burke, an artist whose blog I follow. I’m drawn to her bold, painterly style with its graffiti inspired spontaneity, and the book explains her techniques well and has a range of tutorials for fun projects. I want to explore the layering demonstrated in this book, but I can’t decide whether I want to produce fabric to make things with, or paintings. Maybe both. I’m thinking that, either way, it has all the satisfaction of playing with texture and layers that attracts me to art journalling, without the journaling part that doesn’t interest me as much.

Russian Book Bag – Finished!

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The last few stages of my book to bag conversion involved attaching the magnetic clasp, hand sewing the base to the sides, removing the tape from the handle (there was tape sewn onto the braid so it could be sewn to cushions, etc.) and sewing it to some cotton tape. Then the gluing began: first the cotton tape to the spine and then covering it with lining:

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Then finally gluing the bag body to the cover. To my relief, the magnetic clasp lines up perfectly. Here is the finished bag:

Front view, closed:
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Front view, open:
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Back view, closed:
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Overall I’m very happy with it. The process was rather fiddly, but I’ll happily go through it all again because I have to make a bag for myself out of the cover with the chain-mail bikini-clad warrior woman. As for the other two… we’ll see. I need to streamline the process a bit more. I reckon I could eliminate some of the sewing.

Russian Book Bag WIP

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Before I even saw Playing With Books, I’d come up with the idea of turning some of my excess foreign edition books into bags. In particular, these Russian editions, which have wonderfully cheesy covers:

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(BTW, there are no chain-mail-bikini wearing women or Nordic-looking warriors in my books.)

I found a few tutorials on the net. All, as well as the instructions in Playing With Books, have you use a hardcover book cover as the body of the bag. This means the width of the book defines the size of the bag and how much you can fit into it. I had other ideas:

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I pictured the cover becoming the back and flap of the bag. This meant that the the bag could be wider than the spine at the base, and I’d gain a bit more space inside. It also meant the bag would be a bit more secure. I’ve always referred to bags that are open at the top as ‘pick-pocket’s delights’.

I found some fabric for the lining and exterior – both which I’d conveniently already made some book cloth out of. And card to stiffen the bag and elastic for the sides:

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Cutting the pages out was easy:

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I cut two cardboard panels the size of the book and a base that looked ‘about right’:

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Then I cut out fabric and lining, adding some pockets:

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A bit of glueing and sewing later, and I’d got to this point:

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When I had to stop, because I needed to buy a closure and a handle before I could continue. These I now have:

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I’m just waiting until I have the time to put everything together. Then I have the perfect event to wear it to, this coming September.

Smaller is Better

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Though my book pear looked fine in photos, in person it was much too bigger-than-life-sized. So I cut the template into two smaller fruit shapes, then carved up the big pear.

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I like these even more!

Funny thing about representing objects at a different size to reality. Smaller than life size is fine, possibly cute. But if the representation is going to be bigger than life size, it kinda needs to be a LOT bigger. Just a little bigger looks odd and unsettling.