Saturday, March 30, 2013

I hate being fat!

I saw some really pretty patterns at Ravelry...


Caro Sheridan's Vodka Lemonade 
(Vodka Lemonade is Thea Colman's pattern)




But these ladies are not size 52. 42 if even that. "Medium", what ever that means. (Most women are size US 12-14)
These pretty things won't look as pretty on me. The lines will be wrong, the pattern won't have right proportions... what looks good and nice and interesting and pretty on smaller women, will look... just wrong on me.
And what is even more saddening, is that *I* will look bigger than I am, fat and... just wrong.

And it will take more yarn, making it more expensive and time consuming for me to knit,
and the finished work will weigh more, making it more bothersome for me to knit and support the weight on my needles,
and possibly even quite a lot of twitching the pattern. Some designers do acknowledge that not every woman is size S-M-L. The two first ones are available to size 52 (US22) - chest 48", but Nora's pattern isn't even available that size.


I got "The New Atkins" from my mother, and in it I read about a woman, about my age and size (4 years younger, 4 kilos heavier) who manages to reduce her size from 56 to 38 in six months.
Yes, please! It would be really nice to be size 38 next winter... (I assume the sizes are the Scandinavian sizes, as the book was in Finnish... now, it was translated, so it's possible the sizes were somewhat misleading, nevertheless, the steps between sizes are the same, so if it was continental 56 to 38, it would be Finnish 54 to 36... I am Finnish size 52. So - if it works with me as it worked with her, I'll be size 34 in October. Now, I will be happy if I'm size 42. I think I was that size when I was 16.)

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Thursday, March 14, 2013

About scrapbooks and journaling

It's a week to Ostara. I haven't done anything. *sigh*

I waste time at Pinterest. Someone said it's like getting the best magazine at home, a new issue every day, and so it seems...
During my 27 weeks at Pinterest (27 weeks... Half a year... 190 days. Hard to believe it's such a short time!) I have pinned 56.000 things... some of them are doubles, even triples, but most are unique pins. That's about 300 new ideas A DAY! No wonder I feel like I get an amazing new magazine full of ideas for arts and crafts, every day!
There's no way I'll ever manage to DO something with those ideas! Or realize even a fraction of them!
That idea is partly scary, partly wonderful... I mean, there's so much to do in the world, I won't ever need to think "Oh, what would I do now?" (Not that that has ever been a problem :-D)
And with that many ideas - and many more emerging every day! EVERY DAY, GET IT? - why would anyone feel the need to protect their ideas? We are seven billion people on this planet, and on the internet about 10% of them, and about half of them use English, where ever on the planet they are. All one needs to do is to visit Pinterest - or any of those hundreds of Pinterest copies - to get plenty of ideas to fill blogs and magazines... It's so amazing, fascinating, wonderful...


Anyway, I'm saying this to speak about a discovery I made today. It probably has been obvious to everyone actually pottering with art journals and scrapbooking, but those two are becoming so close each other that it's hard to see where one ends and the other starts.
I felt I needed to create a new board, for art journaling. I had previously had that in my scrapbooking board, because I like the more artistic scrapbook pages, with journaling and not just photos. And while I was moving the journaling pins to the new journaling board, I noticed that "Project Life" is more journaling than scrapbooking, even though it is sold as scrapbooking...



And then I started thinking about the original scrapbooks - the albums where people were collecting articles from newspapers and magazines about something - or someone - they were interested of. The scrapbooks that were made in the beginning of scrapbooking as we understand it today, you know, those are actually photo album pages, with added flair and color, not scrapbooks...


I love that! Think how wonderful that photo album would be if people had actually written when the photos were taken, of whom, where, why and what was the situation...
How I love reading my mother's recipe collection, when I find small traces of her everyday life between the pages... like a receipt or a sliver of a package used as a bookmark... how it would be even more wonderful if she had written "Found this recipe in Ladies Magazine on June 1963, made it for John's birthday, we loved it."