Reclaiming yarn :)

(please forgive rather terrible photos in this post - I thought they were better than no photos)_

It's coming to the end of the month. I get paid soon (yay!) but not just yet (boo) ... and yet I'm sick of sticking to a tight budget (still paying off the netbook - as in, clearing the bit of interest-free overdraft I used to buy it). So it's reasonably fortunate that I found something fun to buy that was also cheap ...

In a British Heart Foundation charity shop, I found this jumper:

 

It cost me a grand total of £2.80. I definitely wasn't buying it to wear - it's several sizes to big for me and not really my style - but I rather like the colour (a dark pink leaning towards maroon or purple - it shows up reasonably well in the photo), and from the construction of it it looked like it could be unravelled to provide balls of thick 100% cotton yarn ... I thought it was worth the risk.

So out came the unpicker ... 

and it seemed to work! I found the seams and ripped them out with the unpicker, then found ends and unravelled and wound into balls :) and voila! Lots and lots of rather nice yarn for very cheap. There were a few bits where I'd nicked a couple of the strands and that's a bit of a pain but shouldn't really be a problem.

Unravelling things is fun ..

Now I've got to plan what to make with it. I'm thinking a very big chunky scarf, which will possibly end up being Hazel's birthday present (depending on how it turns out).

Yay for cheap awesome yarn! I am now tempted to do this a few more times (charity shops are bringing out winter knitwear at the moment so there should be some around for a bit). (Hm, I'm sure there was a knitty article on just this, but I can't find it ...) Things to look for: that the yarn's in good condition, that it's not too felted together, and most importantly that the garment is actually seamed (i.e. not cut and sewed or you'll end up with millions of bits that are 12" long each ... which unless you want to make miles of fringing won't be very useful) so that it can be unpicked into bits and then unravelled.

raaaagh.

Feeling knotty :(

I would say I'm not sure why, but truth is I can point to a couple of things it might be ... but things that I can't do much more about and probably shouldn't worry about. But worrying isn't a sort of thing that you can necessarily turn off.

Time for sleep, I think.

Blog post from yesterday (on the train)

Thoughts from a train:

1) Mary Beard's "It's a don's life" is really very good. (Started it when I got on a train 2 hours ago, 75 pages in so far)

2) Maybe I should knit lots of people klein bottles for Christmas. Thoughts?

3) I can't find my cupcake :( it's somewhere in my wheely bag (I've got a smallish wheely bag and then a rucksack as well)

4) The good thing about having a hard-cased bag with you is you can use it as a footrest (in one of those bits where you've got 4 seats facing to yourself). Sounds silly, but surprisingly comfortable.

5) If I'm lucky I'll be able to meet friends for lunch :) should start sending texts and saying I'll be around ... (*sends texts*)

6) I like this whole tiny netbook thing.

7) I think I still haven't posted photos of the netbook and a review. Bother.

8) Skillet (well, really Korey Cooper - who I think is gorgeous and awesome) has started an online book club. This seems pretty cool.

9) The Book of God (Walter Wangerin) is extremely good. It's the Bible in novel form - I'd seen it in bookshops and not picked it up because I didn't know what it was like from a scholarly point of view, and I didn't want to have to read it and keep second-guessing it. But last week I was recommended it by a friend who's a vicar and said that Wangerin is a Hebrew and Greek scholar who really is extremely good and that the book is excellent.

It really immerses you in the story - and it's a slightly disturbing read (or possibly a very disturbing one). I'm pretty well acquainted with all of the gruesome stuff that happens in the Old Testament, and it really is brutal ... The Book of God, at least in the early parts (I'm up to the beginning of David's time) reads like fantasy. But of course that makes sense - it's a story of a god speaking to people in cryptic ways and sometimes being (or at least seeming) capricious but demanding that they follow him anyway. I would highly recommend this book, for drawing a coherent narrative together that doesn't shy away from the crazy and really difficult bits of the Old Testament (like the genocide and the rape and the dude who cuts his dead concubine into 12 bits and sends her around Israel). If we want to understand the Bible we need to not just cherry pick the bits of the Old Testament that talk about love and respect, we need to read all of it*.

(*Having said that, The Book of God does leave some stuff out - for a start it begins with Abraham, and I think it misses out some of the side stories along the way e.g. I'm pretty sure I'm past the time of Ruth and she hasn't been mentioned.)

10) I want my cupcake :(

11) If I were to make Sierpinski triangle shapes out of two colours of Fimo, what could I make from them? In particular, could I make interesting Christmas presents out of them? How hard would it be to make cufflinks? (I guess you buy cufflink backs and just glue them on ...) Necklaces? Earrings? That could be really cool. I think I'd need to be able to drill through baked Fimo. I suspect that a Games Workshop drill (I have one ... somewhere) might do it.

12) Think I'll go back to my book. That's all for now ...

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(I did find the cupcake in the end ... it was in my bag, though I thought it wasn't ... it was rather squashed.)