The little things. It’s the little things.

 

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WE INTERRUPT THIS WAS-WORKING-JUST-FINE-THANK-YOU-MICROSOFT-YOU-PIECE-OF-**** BLOG POST TO ANNOUNCE THAT I’VE JUST SPENT ABOUT HALF AN HOUR TRYING TO FIND OUT WHY MY IDIOT COMPUTER WENT PING ON ME AND NOW EVERYTHING IS RED AND UNDERLINED AND IN SOME KIND OF EDITING (?) MODE THAT I CAN NEITHER FIND NOR TURN OFF.  AND IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT OF COURSE SO IT’S NOT LIKE I CAN RING UP AN ARCHANGEL AND SCREAM.  I EVENTUALLY COPIED AND PASTED ‘TEXT ONLY’ INTO A NEW DOCUMENT WHICH APPEARS TO HAVE SOLVED THE IMMEDIATE ISSUE . . . BUT I HAVE TO PUT ALL THE BOLD AND ITALIC BACK IN, DON’T I?  AS WELL AS REVIVE THE LINKS.  I ALSO HAVE TO GO TO BED.  SO THE FOLLOWING MAY END A LITTLE ABRUPTLY.

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Why are the cutest, the very CUTEST, the DIES FROM CUTE/GORGEOUS* knitting needle cases/rolls/organizers ALL FOR SHORT NEEDLES?  CRUMMY LITTLE DPNs AND FRELLING CIRCULARS?**  AND CROCHET HOOKS.  CROCHET HOOKS!

Ahem.  I’ve been wasting time on Etsy.***  Generally speaking I avoid Etsy† but . . . one of the frelling knitting frelling sites I’m on the (frelling) email list of had a TWENTY PERCENT OFF EVERYTHING sale for the bank holiday.  Twenty percent.  Off EVERYTHING.  Now I pay attention to twenty percent.  I will look at fifteen percent . . . but twenty percent, I’m doomed.  And so . . . I was doomed.

I’ve been eyeing up Rowan Big Wool for a while because everybody seems to love it and I’m a bit of a wannabe Rowan junkie although their magazines make me crazy, all those undernourished tragic Pre-Raphaelite-haired women†† wearing clothes that I don’t even understand how to look at let alone be able to read the blasted pattern and make the things.  But then there was this:  http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/heartbeat-3 †††

I want to make this.  Well, I want to try to make this.  I wasted an INSANE amount of time this weekend, The Weekend of Twenty Percent Off, trying to decide what colours to (try to) do it in.  The other thing is . . . needles.  GIGANTIC frelling needles.  12 mm and 15 mm needles.‡  They look like police truncheons.  The little needle case I bought long, long ago ‡‡ is, ahem, full, and the addition of police truncheons is not a viable storage option.  Hence Etsy.  . . .

To be continued.

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* Of course I want a dies-from-cute/gorgeous knitting needle case.  I could keep them in a plastic bag if I were a plastic bag sort of girl.  I’m not.  I’m amazed you’d even ask.

** Which all look like garrottes to me, okay?  Cooperate, you yarn, or I’ll garrotte you.  And DPNs just scare the grrzmph out of me.  I subscribe to way too many knitting magazines, and the bottom end of these give you FREE GIFTS!!! every issue.^  Cheezy plastic DPNs and ditto crochet hooks that weren’t broken out of their mould properly so they have little catchy rough places that I’m sure will contribute to the crocheting experience significantly, are popular.  They are not improving my attitude toward these outliers of knitting at all.

^ Just by the way the modern coinage ‘free gift’ makes me NUTS.  Here, have a gift with strings and caveats.  Have an unfree gift.  WHAT?  Of course ‘free gifts’ that come as part of the PURCHASE of a magazine or a box of cereal or whatever the flapdoodle aren’t free by definition.  So what ‘free gift’ is, is the double negative that makes the positive, or in this case the double positive that makes the negative . . . all right, all right, it’s late and I’m mushy-brained.  Still.  I think there may be a principle here.

*** http://www.etsy.com/

Enter at your own risk.  It’s the biggest indie-stall craft market in the universe.  It will eat your days, your brain, and your credit card.  You will also, slightly depending on what category you’re browsing, be caught up short by . . . amazing things that people have (apparently) made and are (apparently) expecting other people to buy.  You know, as in spend money on.  Amazing.  There are a few of these even in the relatively harmless knitting supplies area.

Which brings me to Regretsy, a site honouring—if you want to call it ‘honouring’ which you probably don’t—all that people should not have hung out there in public with a price tag.  However I am not going to give you a link to Regretsy—you can look it up—in the first place because the general tenor is RUDE and the opening page is . . . well, it’s not family friendly, and in the second place because she seems to have shut it down?  The archive is still there—and jaw-droppingly fabulous reading it is too if you’re into that sort of thing.  I find I start feeling as if I’ve eaten too much cheap chocolate too quickly but still . . . wow.   You can look her up too—April Winchell—who has a web site that is a sort of very large Regretsy-style collection of the bad, the awful, and the seriously squicky, whose boundaries know no, uh, bounds.  You want people being jerkfaces?  Go there.  She’s very funny.  But . . . rude.  You were warned.

However, on the subject of the successful deployment of rude, one of the shops on Etsy is http://www.etsy.com/shop/beanforest

which I discovered because FOR SOME REASON people kept sending me a link to this button:

http://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/62701160/footnotes-are-great-pinback-button-badge?ref=shop_home_active&ga_search_query=footnotes

Which I still haven’t ordered because every time I try I find myself running up a tab of about thirty quids’ worth of kitchen magnets (of course I want them as kitchen magnets) and . . . no.^  For example, upon further investigation of the deep luxuriant richness on offer, this one makes me fall off my chair laughing:

http://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/62553873/life-sucks-have-some-candy-pinback?ref=shop_home_active

. . . Okay.  I’ll behave now.  Probably.  But speaking of FOOTNOTES which I OFTEN AM like NOW^^, several people have sent me a link to a recent xkcd post:  http://xkcd.com/1208/   Be sure to do the mouseover thing.

^ My refrigerator isn’t large enough.

^^ I’m sure it’s all very meta-whatsit to be talking about footnotes in footnotes.

† For all the reasons detailed in footnote *** above.

†† Most of the Brotherhood however would be appalled at the starved-teenager look.

††† Is anyone else getting a little cranky about the months’-old THIS JUST IN!!! opening page on Ravelry trumpteting three million users?  Fine.  They have three million users.  I’m impressed.  But I was impressed a long time ago and I think they might take the ‘just’ out.

‡ Heartbeat only requires 10 mm, but http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/may-2

is 15 mm.  I thought I might finally try a hat.  Especially a hat with none of this circular nonsense.

‡‡ Two years, I think?  It was two years ago this past winter that Fiona tied me to my chair and showed me how to knit and purl and cast on and off while I begged for mercy, wasn’t it?