ZAUBERBALL!

Oh, Zauberball, how do I love thee?  Let me count the ways…  No, too many ways to count.

But wait, there is something even more charming that was also part of the giveaway.  Stephcuddles has recently turned to polymer clay modelling (a love I can understand as it is another favourite past-time of my own) and as part of her blog competition asked entrants to name a favourite animal and fruit/vegetable.  Well, I was never going to say an animal other than monkeys, was I?  And fruit…  Surely there is only one companion fruit that a monkey would even consider…

Monkey and banana stitch markers by Stephcuddles

Can you believe how cute and well-formed these little guys are?  I have been awaiting autumn so that I can cast on for a very special Monkey Scarf with my monkey knitting needles and now these stitch markers will definitely be used for possibly the most monkey-ish project ever to be conceived.

A second ring of the doorbell heralded the arrival of a box I had been awaiting:

yarn

Lots of fresh yarn, ready for dyeing.  I opened up the box and plunged my head in for a few seconds, like one big meatball in a bowl of yarn spaghetti.  Now I have regained my senses I have lots of dyeing to do.  Once I have finished for the day I shall just sit and admire my zauberball for a bit and try to imagine what it should become.  I have decided to wait until I have finished my two current works in progress before casting on any more, and then I think I will be putting Lisa’s Shalimar sock and Stephcuddles’ crazy zauberball forward for two sumptuous and indulgent new projects.

Stephcuddles has a lovely little blog here so do drop by and say hi to her, she’s rather lovely.

Monkey knitting needles

When a friend who seeks to know you well, even if you are separated by hundreds of miles of ocean and continent, they pick up on the things that make you you.  The needles above have come from the kindest of friends, though we have never ‘met’ who realises that I love monkeys and knitting alike, saw these and realised how much I would love them.  And I do.  They arrived with a beautiful bumper box of bounty which I am sure will all make an appearance on my blog over the next few weeks, bit by bit.

A box of friendship and yarn sent from across the waves

I have received a gift of yarn before, when I hit upon a few hard times and a friend sent me some of her unused stash.  I still have some, because I always thought it too lovely for me to use, and I have been saving it for ‘best’.  I have tried and I have failed to knit this absolutely gorgeous Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn before now, before deciding that whatever I knit wasn’t going to be beautiful enough and re-balling it up for when I was a better knitter:

Cherry Tree Hill - saved for a year for when I can knit 'better'

But, really, I shouldn’t be scared of gorgeous yarns. I have become so entrenched in the ways of buying only what I can afford at the low end of the yarn spectrum that these special yarns seem like an indulgence I do not deserve.  I treat them the same way as I do my food.  When I eat I start with the least appealing, least tasty item on my plate, to ‘get it out of the way’ as it were, to save the most tasty item which I most look forward to until the end, at which point I am inevitably too full to eat it.  What joy can my friends who have sent this beautiful yarn for me to use find if I am scared of it and keep it sealed away?  So, once my £1 a ball Kaffe Fassett socks (even though I do love this cheap and cheerful yarn which seems to be on perpetual sale) are finished I will cast on with something lovely, because friends that have thought ‘Mimi will really enjoy that’ are always right, and sometimes I have loved something too much to think that I am worthy of it.

So, when a friend knows that you love Dick Van Dyke so much that they buy you a Mary Poppins Bert doll for Christmas or when you come home from hospital and your medication makes your skin so sore and tight that they send you some soap that they have hand-made, or when someone shares with you some of their stash because you have none, or when someone gets some powdered drink and thinks ‘I’m sure my friend could put that to some crafty purposes’, or sends you some left-over denim yarn because you are daft enough to want to make a pair of monkey jeans, don’t be scared to enjoy what you have received, because you will smile every time you knit a stitch with a pair of monkey needles, or feel that extra special yarn as it passes over your fingers, or say ‘Hi’ to Bert as you pass by him every morning.

these are a few of my favourite things

The embodiment of monkey physical perfection - Giantmonk

So… several people (ok, two – the beautiful and intelligent Getknitics and Mooncalf) guessed that yesterday’s blob was a leaf!  It was a fig leaf, to be precise – a pattern taken from Lesley Stanfield’s ‘100 flowers to knit and crochet’ which arrived in the post on Saturday. This was a book that I’d wanted pretty much since I started knitting, but wasn’t sure if I could justify spending £10 on a book about ‘frivolous embellishments’, because it was hard to see how they might have any practical value, until I realised the obvious and pressing need for crocheted, felted fig leaves:

Michelangelo's David? No! It's Monkeyangelo's Giantmonk.

For those astute viewers that might rightly note that the original, slightly less magnificent statue by Michelangelo does not actually figure a fig leaf, this is quite true.  However, in reserved British style, one was made for the cast of the statue at the V&A museum after Queen Victoria expressed shock at the sight of the statue.  Nowadays, however, David usually likes to be a bit more free and easy, much like Giantmonk when he’s not trying to help me justify buying a book of crocheted and knitted flower patterns.