Handwork – Page 52 – Deborah Makarios

November 29, 2014

It's New Year's Eve!

No, it’s not December 31st just yet. (Did you give the calendar a panicky look?)

Tomorrow is St. Andrew’s Day (he’s the patron saint of Scotland) and also, this year, the first Sunday in Advent and therefore the first day of the new ecclesiastical year.
Question: why is it that people paint themselves green on St Patrick’s Day (even if they don’t have Irish blood) but they don’t paint themselves blue on St. Andrew’s Day, even if they’re Scots?
I mean, if you have an ancestral tradition of painting yourself blue, why not go for it?

I did actually paint myself blue once (although not on St. Andrew’s Day) with blue food colouring mixed into my sunscreen. I figured if it was safe to eat, it was probably safe to wear.
Rather disturbingly, though, it sank into my skin regardless of how many coats I put on, and I ended the day a pale silvery blue.
And then I leaked blue into my clothes for a week. Next time I might just rub myself with woad, or its nearest antipodean equivalent. (Tips?)

Anyway, regardless of what colour you are planning on being tomorrow, it’s the first day of Advent, the Season of Anticipation, when the church looks forward to celebrating Christ’s first coming, and remembers to anticipate his second. (N.B. If you are not looking forward to Christmas, try staying out of shops. It helps.) Advent is by its very nature a forward-looking time, and it can be useful for more than just preparing for Christmas.

You see, with traditional New Year’s Resolutions, the serious (in fact, crippling) downside is that you make them in the holidays, when everything’s out of routine. That’s the absolute last time that works for starting something new. If you start with the ecclesiastical new year, on the other hand, you get three to four weeks head start before the holidays whip the carpet from under your feet.

The other problem with the usual New Year’s Resolutions is that you don’t get any time to get yourself organized. You’re just plunged straight into the new year, everything’s closed, and by the time you’ve missed a day or a week or so, it seems a bit late for a fresh start that year.
Again, Advent to the rescue! Advent can be a time for getting things together, getting focused, and getting your head in the game. (Odd expression. There aren’t many games that are improved by sticking your head into the middle of things. Trust me.)

So, in the Adventular spirit of Looking Ahead, what’s coming up for you this year? Is there something you want to accomplish, something you want to quit, or any other kind of change to make?
Now, I know some people are staunchly anti-resolution, often because they know that resolutions seldom stick. I don’t make resolutions myself, for that very reason. Why make yourself more reasons to feel guilty?

But how about picking a theme for your year? The Year of Friendship, the Debt-Free Year, the Year of Moving On?
This year I’m going with a theme of Finishing Well. I have so many unfinished things in my life; so many projects from so many years ago, and some of them hang round my neck like millstones. So this will be my year of Finishing, and Finishing Well. Time to start planning how I’m going to make that happen.

What about you? What are you Looking Forward to this year?

November 22, 2014October 19, 2017

How is a Novel Like a Sock?

They both have heels? No?

I was re-reading some old posts the other day and rediscovered my Master Metaphor: knitting a sock. The big long-running effort in my life at the moment is finishing the accidentally-epic first draft of my current Work In Progress, working title Tsifira. So naturally, my mind turned to considering it as a sock. A purple sock, of course.

Writing a sock is actually a lot like knitting a novel. Getting started is fiddly, and sometimes takes more than one attempt. After that you seem to be just going around in circles for a very long time. Then it gets more complicated.

There’s a lot of going back and forth, the pattern changes, and what used to be sideways becomes up, and vice versa. You have to pick up a number of threads you thought you’d finished with, and then you’re going in circles again. It’s not til you look back you realize that you’ve turned the heel.

Then, just when you’re thinking there will never be an end to this interminable circling, you realize you’ve got so far that it’ll be too long if you don’t start tapering toward the end.

This is where I am at with Tsifira at the moment: shaping everything in to the end. And once that’s done, there’s only a bit of grafting the loose ends together and it will be finished.

Jabberwocky-sock — Not quite how I expected my sock to end.

Of course, this is a first draft, so there are all kinds of mistakes I don’t even know how to make with a sock: surplus beginnings, several heels (and quite a few turns!), extra length where not required (okay, I definitely know how to do that one) and the toe shaping could well turn out too pointy or too blunt.

But that’s a first draft for you: messy as, and looking like nothing on earth. And this is where the sock metaphor falls down a bit (hur hur), because it’s really very hard to rewrite a sock. Either you undo the whole thing and start over (not recommended) or you cut and paste (definitely not recommended).

The point of the master metaphor is not, of course, that one thing is analogous to another, but that having done one thing that seemed difficult or impossible, it is possible to do another. And so with this.

A great deal of rewriting lies ahead, no doubt, but one day I shall hold my finished ~~sock~~ novel in my hot little hands, and that will be awesome, even if it doesn’t keep my feet warm.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some toe-shaping to do.

What’s your Master Metaphor? Know any good metaphors for rewriting? How is a raven like a writing desk?

November 15, 2014

Wardrobe Cheats: The Doily Cap

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when you rely on a simple solution, you will find at the last moment it won’t work. Last weekend, I hosted a Pride and Prejudice marathon for a few friends – the BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, naturally – and I thought I’d dress up a bit.

Not being the kind of wonder-woman who can whip up a full historical outfit in a day or two (while writing a best-selling self-help book and raising a tankful of orphaned cuttlefish), I decided to wear the Empire-est clothes in my regular wardrobe, and Regencify the accessories.

Being in possession of a bonnet, my thoughts naturally turned first to that – but no sensible Regency woman would wear a bonnet indoors, in her own home. What she would wear, especially if she was a respectable married woman such as myself, is a cap. White, lacy, frilly – you get the idea.

Actually, even unmarried ladies of A Certain Age would wear caps – going bareheaded was a sign of being in the market for a husband. And from the Regency point of view, I am a lady of A Certain Age already, having passed the grand old age of twenty-seven. Jane Austen herself took up wearing them at about that age, “and they save me a world of torment as to hairdressing,” she wrote in a letter.

The classic cap-cheat is, of course, to simply plop a large round doily on one’s head. Nothing could be easier! Until one reaches the charity shop and finds there are no large round doilies to be seen. Clearly, there has been a lot of dressing up going on in these parts lately.

Desperation drove me to purchase a large rectangular doily, rejecting the genre/gender-bending little-old-lady yarmulke look suggested by the small round doilies on offer. Like Lydia Bennet, I would have to tear it apart when I got home and see if I could make it up any better.

After one or two false starts, I found a simple, suitable solution. The moral of the story: do not be abashed by staring at your reflection with a doily over your head. You look a fool; it will pass.

I pinned the two short ends together and sewed it up into a tube which would fit over my head. Then I realized my mistake and unpicked nearly half the seam.
I then turned it right-way out and ran a ribbon (all right, a shoelace, but I’ve replaced it with a ribbon) through the doily at the end-of-seam line, pulled it tight and tied a bow.
Now I had a sort of lace beanie with an enormous frill hanging off the top – a frill nearly as large as the cap itself.
This I arranged over the cap, and voila! a lacy cap with two rows of scalloped edging, and a bit of ribbon dripping down the back.

It’s so soft and comfortable I find I keep putting it on – as Jane Austen noted in her letter, it’s just the thing for a bad hair day.

What are your secrets for wardrobe short-cuts? Please share!
And remember: dressing up is not just for fancy dress parties, Hallowe’en, or cosplaying at ComicCon. Dressing up is for eccentrics.