apparently via Vientaine Lao PDR!
A few months ago I blogged that I had found a Stirling silver ball point pen amongst my Dads work-tools, and rescued it. Then Bear offered to buy me a matching Parker 75 fountain pen and sourced one on line. It duly arrived and was blogged but had a medium nib rather than the fine it was advertised as having. No problem the seller had several for sale and they were all good, and obviously had picked up the wrong one and so sent off a slightly different one. In all other respects it was as advertised, so rather than return it and wait for another I paid a little more and had a xtra fine nib sent at a very good price. That was over 4 weeks ago .. and I had begun to wonder if my parcel had gone missing. Turns out it has traveled to New Zealand from Virginia via Lao! As the seller said when I told him 'Crazy!', so next time your mail takes longer than it should .. perhaps it has taken the scenic route?
There has been some knitting this week, a wee bit on the super secret project of which I can not blog, I worked my first ever Nupps. I totally agree with all that I have read about these things, you really do have to work the nupp stitches very very loosely ... very very very loosely. So far I've only managed Nupps with 5 loops, I will attempt at some point ones with 7 or 9 ... but not yet. Five is fine for now.
My spiral bound sock grows, these are a little snug on me ... I suspect they will become elder cubs as he has leaner feet. Shush ... don't tell and I can make them Christmas stocking presents.
Monday night I spun about half of the scrappy swap fibre ... I'm not sure if this will be as ugly beautiful as M's or just plain ugly. I am trying to spin it from deep blue at one end, thru purple, reds, into orange, and rust then yellow, to green and finally pink. The idea is a stripy blanket or hat or scarf .. but only time will tell if it is a wild experiment with a weird outcome or a good thing to do.
And it is 'that time of the year again' - where I can point you at the end of year show work of the schools students. I'm just going to leave you to look if you want .... I mostly teach the Year threes, the graduates .. and as usual they are all individuals. Which is exactly what one wants in a design graduate ... unique outcomes.
Besides as an 'insider' to the process, I do tend to loose a little focus, remembering how far the student has come, or the risks they took, or all the little out of their hands dramas that may have shaped their collection. Those can range from the wrong type or colour or amount of fabric being shipped, to dyepot disasters, to commercial printers letting students down, to models arriving for fittings and then departing before the show and the replacements not being a similar size or look. As usual - its a team effort, the students and all the staff, and every one almost without exception did amazingly - don't you think?
take care ...
and don't trust the international postal service for directions :D
na Stella
A few months ago I blogged that I had found a Stirling silver ball point pen amongst my Dads work-tools, and rescued it. Then Bear offered to buy me a matching Parker 75 fountain pen and sourced one on line. It duly arrived and was blogged but had a medium nib rather than the fine it was advertised as having. No problem the seller had several for sale and they were all good, and obviously had picked up the wrong one and so sent off a slightly different one. In all other respects it was as advertised, so rather than return it and wait for another I paid a little more and had a xtra fine nib sent at a very good price. That was over 4 weeks ago .. and I had begun to wonder if my parcel had gone missing. Turns out it has traveled to New Zealand from Virginia via Lao! As the seller said when I told him 'Crazy!', so next time your mail takes longer than it should .. perhaps it has taken the scenic route?
There has been some knitting this week, a wee bit on the super secret project of which I can not blog, I worked my first ever Nupps. I totally agree with all that I have read about these things, you really do have to work the nupp stitches very very loosely ... very very very loosely. So far I've only managed Nupps with 5 loops, I will attempt at some point ones with 7 or 9 ... but not yet. Five is fine for now.
My spiral bound sock grows, these are a little snug on me ... I suspect they will become elder cubs as he has leaner feet. Shush ... don't tell and I can make them Christmas stocking presents.
Monday night I spun about half of the scrappy swap fibre ... I'm not sure if this will be as ugly beautiful as M's or just plain ugly. I am trying to spin it from deep blue at one end, thru purple, reds, into orange, and rust then yellow, to green and finally pink. The idea is a stripy blanket or hat or scarf .. but only time will tell if it is a wild experiment with a weird outcome or a good thing to do.
And it is 'that time of the year again' - where I can point you at the end of year show work of the schools students. I'm just going to leave you to look if you want .... I mostly teach the Year threes, the graduates .. and as usual they are all individuals. Which is exactly what one wants in a design graduate ... unique outcomes.
Besides as an 'insider' to the process, I do tend to loose a little focus, remembering how far the student has come, or the risks they took, or all the little out of their hands dramas that may have shaped their collection. Those can range from the wrong type or colour or amount of fabric being shipped, to dyepot disasters, to commercial printers letting students down, to models arriving for fittings and then departing before the show and the replacements not being a similar size or look. As usual - its a team effort, the students and all the staff, and every one almost without exception did amazingly - don't you think?
take care ...
and don't trust the international postal service for directions :D
na Stella
1 comment:
Yikes! If I ever travel from Virginia to NZ, I'm definitely going to *not* use postal directions (although these days, flying out of the US is probably just as likely to find one where they thought they weren't...!)
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