I currently have issues stringing a spoken sentence together, due to exhaustion. I spent this past weekend at a conference (if you know anything about medieval academia, you’ll figure out which one without me having to say), and I am SHATTERED.

Things I learned:

• Textile-loving people are awesome, regardless of where you are.
• An etsy-seller makes hair-swords. For buns. DUDE.
• I really need to get over  “OMG I TOTALLY CITED YOU IN MY DISSERTATION/THESES!!!” and remember that my heroes are, in fact, cool people with a shared interest.
• I can be a foreigner in my own country.
• People who study monsters are really sweet.
• Academic papers can sound like spoken word performances, if it’s the right paper and the right person.
• Someone will be obnoxious if your paper is rather spoken-wordy. NB: This did not happen to me personally, nor was I this person.
• You can live off of bad coffee and even worse wine.
• Dessert is a necessity.
• DO NOT TELL MEDIEVALISTS IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY. THEY WILL MAKE THE CAFETERIA SING.
• “Once Kalamazoo, always Kalamazoo.”

I will return when I have regained enough energy to both A) begin my fabulous research treks, and B) make something arty.

Oh, and by the way, SURPRISE I REDID THE LAYOUT. Relaunched the main site on 13 May, too. YAY.

Tags: academic,authors,conference,fandom,maintenance,medieval
Categories: Academia, maintenance
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Whoo. After that long post on BD, felt like I also owed a quick seperate post on the other things this blog deals with: actual crafting, and academia. On the crafting side, I’ve two things soon to come. First is my first home-made BD costume, finished last week. Secondly,  and currently “on the needles”, is a knitted bag made with my first hand-spun yarn (it will potentially be felted). Also, the Ravelympics are coming up, which means I’ll be knitting like a crazy person, and hopefully blogging about it.

Finally, a few knitting links. There are two sites that I can’t recommend enough. The first is KnittngHelp, which not only has instructions and illustrations for pretty much all the basic stitches, increases, decreases, and styles of knitting, but has VIDEOS. Wonderfully clear VIDEOS!!! The second (which is linked to at the side) is ravelry, which is a marketplace/database/social networking site for knitting, crocheting, spinning, and other fibre art. You can keep track of your yarn, projects, needles, and hooks, organize a queue of projects you want to do (and buy a lot of the patterns and yarn for them!), and wander about favouriting projects and patterns like a crazy person. Oh, and chat about knitting and your other passions in the internal groups. Which sometimes do secret exchanges. SO MUCH FUN. You have to sign up and wait for an invite to join, but it is TOTALLY WORTH IT.

That’s it. Lysse-bird out.

Tags: knit,maintenance,projects
Categories: knit, maintenance
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Whoo! Finally edited the links, though they’re mildly pathetic right now — can’t change TOO much, as I’m syncing my computer with my server.

Craftiness update: the bellydance sock was finished but a bust. My cast-ons and bind-offs are FAR too tight and made it almost impossible to get the darn thing on. Once on, if I stood it start to cut of circulation to the toes.  I’m going to retry the design, but with a cheaper yarn (possibly the stuff I frogged from a charity shop sweater, as that’s about the right weight). In the absence of a successful bellydance sock, I’ve begun a kit that my mother bought me eons ago, called “CAPpuccino” (a kit for a one-skein hat packaged in a coffee cup). Yeah. It’s going quite well, but slowly, as it’s a synthetic yarn. I love the color, but I really prefer working with woolens (and secondly cotton).

Crochet and maille have been bust, since I’ve been working on my novel and my dissertation instead. Ah well! There’s only so much time in a day!

Tags: knit,maintenance,projects
Categories: knit, maintenance, projects
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Finally got around to:

• buying a website/domain, and
• starting a knitting/crochet/etc. blog

One’s been a “want-to” for almost ten years now (certainly eight at the least), the other has only been for a year-ish.

Probably won’t be posting much until I customize this thing. Then we’ll get going.

Tags: maintenance
Categories: maintenance
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