Logic puzzles galore

First of all; happy pi day!
So what I thought was a while ago, but looking back turns out to be 2.5 years ago, I wrote about Sporcle. Sporcle is a trivia and quizzing website that is sure to keep you occupied for longer than you planned. I've been on it for almost 3 years now (44 days to go, as the website tells me) and after being a passive user for most of that time, I decided I wanted to actually contribute my own quizzes to the website. Partly because I wanted to 'give something back', but mostly because designing quizzes is almost more fun than making them.
(Warning: the rest of this post will contain shameless self-quiz-promotion.)
My personal favourite category (apart from some random great quizzes like TripAdvisor reviews of Middle Earth or Llama or duck (check out the URL on that one)) are logic puzzles. So I decided to make one of those, and to my great surprise there wasn't a quiz version of one of my favourite games, Werewolves (or Mafia, as it is also known). So I decided to make that; I created a field of 5x5 squares, gave the boxes a name, made some of them into werewolves, and designed a path through the quiz so it could be solved. And then I tried whether it worked, and I published it. Fun fact: people do not all think the way you think. As a result, they will not interpret the clues the way you want them to. Also, they don't know things unless you tell them. So, apart from the technical creation part (which is pretty easy, really) this first quiz was also a lesson in quiz construction. I got a lot of helpful feedback, I improved the quiz based on that, and it works pretty well now.
Now with the werewolves quiz, a player doesn't know all the answers before they start to play. There could be 5 werewolves, or 8, or 10. This makes the quiz more difficult and also harder to create. So next I decided to make a more 'closed' logic puzzle, in which all answer options are given beforehand. Picking a topic close to my own interests, I made a farm animal quiz in which each square contains a chicken, horse, pig, or sheep. I thought keeping it down to four animals would make it pretty easy, but as it turns out, the fewer options you have, the harder it is to design the quiz. But I got there in the end. Also, I like to put in a couple of jokes to keep things light, which you can more easily do when players will not interpret them as possible clues. And then I did some beta-testing. I asked a friend to try out the puzzle for me, to see how she would solve it, and where she would get stuck, and which clues she would find ambiguous. And it was a revelation. Hints that seemed blatantly obvious turned out not to be so, and squares I thought would be solved second-to-last were suddenly solved much sooner because I'd overlooked a shortcut. So I improved the quiz based on that feedback, and after I published it I got zero commentary on the workings and a 5.00 out of 5.00 perfect user feedback score. Nice!
These first two puzzles being done, I decided to scout around for other topics of my interest, to see what subjects hadn't been made into puzzles yet. Sporcle doesn't mind multiple quizzes on the same subject (there are loads of Harry Potter and ISoIaF puzzles) as long as they aren't exactly the same, but I wanted to do something original. As it turned out, both Gilmore Girls characters and Disney animated films hadn't been made into logic puzzles, so I quickly created those two. I also started making walkthroughs, to show the players how they could solve my puzzles when they got stuck. Not surprisingly, they have been the most played puzzles I've created.
At a loss for new 'open' subjects, I created three more 'closed' puzzles based on my own interests; a cheesy logic puzzle (filled with cheesy puns), a school subject puzzle (my only 5x6 puzzle), and another farm animal puzzle (with cows, donkeys, goats, and turkeys). And then I was kind of stuck for subjects, until someone mentioned Shakespeare. There were some logic puzzles about Shakespearean characters, and some logic puzzles which featured his plays, but none that actually asked about only his plays (can you believe it?). So I made a Shakespeare's plays logic puzzle, and it got picked up by the Shakespeare curator, and after a couple of tweaks (and some more tweaks as the comments started to pour in) I actually got picked by that curator to feature on the Shakespeare page! Wooh!
Yes, it is a small and weird world, the world of Sporcle, and small things can make you happy.
What really does make me happy is seeing the number of people that play my quizzes. The number of plays per day varies wildly, as you can see below. The spike on March 5th was 200 plays of the What subject? quiz on the same day, no idea why that happened.

Number of plays March 1 to March 14.

But the total number of plays is well over 5,000, and rising steadily.
The popularity of my quizzes varies wildly, with the Gilmore Girls quiz being the absolute front runner at 2,300 plays. The Shakespeare quiz, despite the curator pick, remains the least played.

Total plays as of March 14th.

I love the user feedback; some users will leave an appreciative comment about the quiz or the topic or the in-quiz jokes. Others will score the quiz on a scale from 1.00 to 5.00. I don't really know why my Disney quiz scores lower than the others, but I'm really happy with the 3 scores of 5.00 on the quizzes that took me quite some time and effort to create.
I've been hunting for new subjects for a while, but I haven't written anything since the Shakespeare quiz, which in itself took me almost 3 weeks to make. It feels as if the first outpouring of creativity has dried up, and I'm looking for new ways to make these quizzes. I'm sure I will make some more in the future, but this is not something you can rush, as with all things that require inspiration.
End of the shameless self promotion. If you try out one or more of my quizzes, I hope you enjoy it!

NaNoWriMo 2015

For those of you not in the know: NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which started in 1999 (wayyy before November became 'Movember' and all those other fancy scrambled month names) and has been going strong ever since. I've participated in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and I won (meaning: I wrote a novel of at least 50,000 words) in the last three of those attempts. Since then, I've been too busy with work (ironically, I started this blog in 2012 because I thought I'd have more time for creative pursuits, but that didn't really work out...) or travels to participate, but this year I will give it another go.
As with the 52 book challenge, I'm not hitting myself over the head if things don't work out, because the truth is that I'm still swamped with a lot of other things. But if you don't try you won't ever succeed, so this morning I 'created my novel', which means I picked a genre and put in a short working title and synopsis. My past NaNo experience tells me that the actual end result will probably be something only vaguely resembling what I wrote today, but the important thing is the first step.
If you've ever thought about writing anything but find yourself having (or making up) a lot of excuses for not actually writing, NaNoWriMo is for you. You have to write a lot, while turning your Inner Editor off: it's about quantity, not quality. December is the time for editing and fine tuning, November is the time for output.
Also, there's a really nice community of people all working towards the same goal, with online forums and real life meet-ups (Write-ins). So even if you don't end up with a novel, you may end up with new friends.
You can find my author's page here, but I'll keep you updated on my progress and word count as November comes around. And who knows; I may even post some excerpts!

Felt Christmas ornaments

So today I needed to do something completely different (without pulling any of John Cleese's faces). My dissertation-writing motivation has come to a grinding halt and I didn't feel up to any painting or re-discovering my knitting abilities.
So I made some felt Christmas ornaments.
I got the idea for these while browsing the IKEA Christmas page (they have some really really nice glass ornaments with spirals which I am definitely getting if we can fit a big tree somewhere), when I saw these cute felt Christmas trees. Nice! I thought. I can make those myself! I thought.
So I did.

And then, because just one ornament isn't enough, I made a star (which looks more like a flower, but hey):

I'd like to have made one of the bell shaped ones as well, but I only had white thread and I'd like the thread to contrast with the felt, so that will be for later (I'll probably stitch that one over the side, rather than following the contours, just to see how it looks). And more stars and trees, of course, the hypothetical future tree will be well-filled.
Please do note that I managed to get the ribbon on lopsided on both of them, even with fastening it to the felt before stitching it shut. I never said I was good at sewing, I'm just a time-for-something-different-and-relaxing sewer!

NaNoWri-NO!

Autumn has really arrived. Last Friday we had a full-blown autumn gale which threw all the chestnuts from my parents' chestnut tree and left many people wandering around with broken umbrellas. Now the atmosphere has settled again, no rain, no clouds, and the clear sky brings very cold nights and chilly but extremely fresh mornings. I love the crisp smell of autumn, maybe even more than the warm tinge that announces summer in May. For me, this holds the promise of enjoyment to come: my birthday, Sint Maarten, Sinterklaas, Christmas, all those bright and warm and happy gatherings.
Also, this air gets my creative juices flowing. Normally, I would be preparing for NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, by thinking up a plot and protagonist while translating their webpages into Dutch. But this year, I'm doing neither. I can barely keep everything together as it is, between my internship and dissertation and social life and committees and what not, so writing 50,000 words of prose is completely out of the question.
It's the first time in 6 years that I won't be competing. The first few years I failed, but I won (which means: I wrote a novel of at least 50,000 words within a month) in 2009, 2010 and 2011. I can't even remember what those novels were about, to be honest, but that's not the point, the point is to write write write until you can't write anymore.
But not for me, this year.
I'd fully resigned to this, and even sent them an e-mail stating that I wouldn't do the translation this year, but be back next year (in which I told them I was 'doing an intern' rather than 'doing an internSHIP', which must have caused some hilarity...), when people on Facebook who've never shown any literary ambitions before suddenly started posting "doing NaNo this year! First time!" and I started receiving emails from the Write-In group that I attend here in Groningen asking when we will first meet up, and stuff about the launch party and what not, and now I feel like I'm missing out on this really big and beautiful thing and I should try and do it anyway. And it's true, I am missing out on a great thing, but really, it's more the atmosphere of connectedness and striving together to reach this great, impossible goal that I'll miss, not the frustration and hard work and cold fingers and jealousy at those who finish within 24 hours while you haven't even started etc etc. But those are the things you forget, while the great people and great moments and great feeling when you've finished stay with you.
So for those who are not swamped with work this November, and feel like they could write a novel, or could be the sort of person who writes novels, or just want to join an amazing community that inspires people around the world: www.nanowrimo.org.
Next year, I'll be back.

Fish painting

I finally have an example of one of my painting with clingfilm post (which proves to be one of the more popular) techniques to show you. I've been writing essays for the past two weeks, and am now waiting for someone to return a book that I really, really need to the library. To take my mind off things, I started to paint again.

Yes, crappy picture, I'm aware of it.

The photo does not show you the colours very well, but at least you can see some of it...
Now this painting was originally something else, which didn't work out, and then I turned it into a green sea-scape with one skeletal fish. I thought it might work well as a companion piece to the bird painting from my first paintings post, because they're kind of looking at each other...

Bird fish combo.

For those still interested in painting with clingfilm, this is what I did:
I first painted the background, let it dry, and then I drew a sort-of fish shape on a separate piece of paper. I scrunched up a bit of clingfilm, unscrunched it, pulled it flat across the paper, and with a small brush painted the fish figure on to the clingfilm. I then scrunched that a bit (not too much, or the paint would've run into each other even more, as it did with the first top 'rib') and put it on my canvas. I let it dry for about an hour before pulling it off.
Now I thought the white contrasted a bit too much with the rest of the painting, so I filled it in with some green, not too much, just a bit on the bottom. You can't really see it in the picture above, but here's a detail:

Even crappier picture, slightly out of focus.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out, even though it does give me a bit of a Greenpeace / save-the-seas / we-humans-are-destroying-the-planet feel. I feel like I could have added some yellow or something, but I didn't, and it turned out a bit darker than I would have anticipated, but maybe that's okay.

Anyway, I've been working on two non-vague, non-abstract, figurative things, which hopefully will be done before my essays are due, because I happen to paint better when I should actually be doing something else. Weird, I know. So, to be continued...

Painting with clingfilm

I've been doing some painting in the last week, and because I heard it was a good method to get some nice effects, I've tried painting with clingfilm. I tried to find a good tutorial online, but the online things I could find (apart from some very stoned YouTube clips) were discussion boards on what-to-do-with-small-children-websites, where mums say that it is an easy and mess-free way to paint. Well, I must be doing something wrong here, because it is definitely not mess-free.
Anyway, I've discovered that there are basically three ways of painting with clingfilm, which will give you three very different effects. Because there is so little to find on the subject online, I'll add these three methods below, so hopefully someone else can benefit too. I don't have any pictures or a finished painting yet, but I hope you can follow me through these descriptions.

1) Take a big piece of clingfilm, at least the size of your canvas. Squirt some paint onto your canvas (one colour or several), scrunch up your clingfilm to get some texture, unscrunch it, put it on top of the paint, and start moving the paint around. You can create nice texture effects, ripples, and let the colours run into each other. When you are done (you can sort of see the effect through the clingfilm) leave it to dry for a looooong time (a day at least, because the paint does not dry very quickly under the clingfilm) before pulling it off. You can pull it off earlier, but then you run the risk of ruining your effect because you pull up paint that isn't dry yet. This way, you can cover the whole of your canvas in colours and textures.

2) Secondly, take a smaller piece of clingfilm, about the size of the area you want covered. Again first scrunch and unscrunch your clingfilm, and then paint directly on it the rough shape of what you want to have (using just one colour or more). Remember that this will be the mirror-image of what ends up on your painting. Then press it onto your canvas, again creating some texture with the clingfilm. You have less control over what happens here, because the paint will either reach the canvas or not, and if you flatten out all the ripples then you might as well have just painted a uniform layer on top. So the end result will be more of a surprise. Leave it to dry for at least an hour, and then pull the clingfilm off (your hands will still be covered in paint after this). This way, you do not paint an entire layer, but you can add some smaller areas of paint. Because of the texture in the clingfilm, you do not get a uniform layer, but in some areas the background colour will come through.

3) Lastly, take a piece of clingfilm that is the size of the area you want covered, which can be your entire canvas. Paint whatever you want to do onto another surface (preferably non-stick), put the scrunched clingfilm on top, press down hard, take it off, flatten it out, and then press it down upon your canvas. You can see the effect here, because you can see which areas will have paint on them an which are just see-through. You can leave it to dry, but you can also take this off quite quickly, because all the paint that was on the clingfilm should be transferred to your canvas anyway (again, you'll get a lot of paint on your hands). This way, you will not see all the paint that was on the original picture, but some scattered elements.

I personally prefer the second method, because I do not have enough patience for the first and the third method uses up a lot of paint that does not end up on your canvas but gets thrown away with the surface it was originally painted on. But it all depends on the effect you're going for!

Hopefully, I'll soon have a painting to show you!

ETA: 21 June 2012: I have now added a fish painting that I made using the second technique.

Hearts and Stripes

As announced, I have knitted another mobile-phone cover, and this time it was a blue one with a purple heart. I did some measuring and tinkering with the instructions, and arrived at exactly the right measurements for my phone (a HTC Desire Z, in case anyone is interested). Which was good. Unfortunately, due to my new design some small holes appeared in the thing, exactly at the point where it was the narrowest, and every time I put my phone inside it snagged and the small holes became bigger holes. This must be the reason they suggested you line it with another fabric. Hmmm.
It did not work.
So I decided to make a Third and Ultimate phone-cover-pouch-thing, this time dispensing with any hearts or girlyness, but just making a nice stripey one. I prefer stripes anyway, and there was no chance of pulling any holes in this one. So here we are then...

Three little phone-cover piglets.

You can see how big the first one is by comparison, that would really never have worked with my phone. You can also see how much the second heart is still pulling in the middle, and how the third one has loose ends all over the place. Ah well, I didn't even sew one side together properly, but who cares, it's something I'm going to use, not something I (or anyone else) will put up on a pedestal to admire.

Anyway, in case anyone is interested in how I made the last one; cast on 15 stitches, then alternately knit and purl until you have 76 rows. If you want the stripy thing I did, change colour every 4 rows. Then you knit the first and last stitch of every knit-row together until you are left with 9 stitches (still purling another row after every knit row). End by casting off and sewing the sides together (with more patience than I did). Done!
I dispensed with ironing or pressing this time, because the curly sides go on the inside anyway, and although it makes sewing them together a bit more of a challenge, it is more of a hassle to get your ironing board out than to pay a little attention to what you're doing, I think. And then my final discovery of the day; after doing 3 of these, you get kinda fed up with them!

Paintings

So in one of my first posts I mentioned that I occasionally paint, and I don't think I've ever said anything about that afterwards, apart from the fact that I am often unsure whether a painting is "done" or not. That is, as you will see, one of the main problems I have when painting.
But first, a short history.
My mother took a arts class when I was still very young, and I was very jealous of her, because she could draw an apple and it would look like a real apple, while mine would look like circles coloured in red and yellow with a brown line sticking out. I was never any good at drawing, but I did do it a lot, I even had my own comic book "series" (inspired on the Donald Duck magazine), which involved all the cats in the neighbourhood. This drawing-craze died out when I came into my teens, but when I went away for my studies I took my mother's (who had stopped doing anything years before) big box of painting-things with me and started doing watercolours, mainly because they're cheap (once you have the paint) and easy and it dries fast. I mostly made some fantastical children's-book-illustration-like images, some of which I quite like. I was really never any good, though, and soon I didn't have the time/energy/inspiration anymore (see The Creative Side), so I quit.
And then about a year ago my mother started taking art classes again, and she has become really good. I mean really good. She knows composition, and colours, and she paints a painting that would take you and me days in about 4 hours and then sits back and enjoys it. At first she also did some watercolours, but she quickly moved on to acrylics and oil paint. She does figurative things, and abstract, and blends, and everything! So every time I got home there would be another painting to see and like and discuss, and I got more and more restless again. I wanted to paint too! And in acrylics!
So I bought a lot of paint and some brushes and some cheap canvasses (it always starts with spending loads of money) and started to paint. Now I have always been very figurative in my paintings, I cannot do abstract and much as I love them, I could never do impressionistic paintings because they require you to paint something up close that does not really make sense until you are 3 meters away from it, and I need to see what I am doing. So I painted things. My first paintings were really childlike, looking like neatly coloured-in images, and so far removed from what I wanted it to be that I became frustrated and stopped doing it.

But then one day I was looking at one of the arty cards I got, and I realised I had been doing it all wrong. You see, in watercolours, if you don't want the colours to run into each other, you have to wait for the first layer to dry before you add the second, and you can have colours run into each other, but you can't really mix them, because then you end up with a big brown-greyish mash. But in acrylics, you don't wait for the bottom colours to dry, because then you get those bordered-off areas that seem to float on top of each other but do not relate to each other. You paint the first colour, let it dry a bit, and then you paint the second colour, and it's no problem if they mix a bit, because they will keep their colours or become a nice blend, but they won't turn all greyish. And then I got a big load of very nice small brushes for the Postcrossing-Sinterklaas thing I did, so I could paint smaller things, and then I started painting again.

The first thing I painted you can see to the right (I am putting up quite bad quality photos from weird angles, with flash marks and bits of background showing on purpose, because I have seen stuff stolen on the Internet just a bit too many times. I could scan them and give you a high quality nice image, but I'm not gonna). It is not very happy, clearly, but it kinda looks like I wanted. But it isn't finished. I know it isn't because something is missing, and I think that something is colour, but I'm not sure, it may also be the fact that the statue seems to be floating and the bushes in the background look unrealistic, but I don't know how to fix that. I am really happy with the statue though, and with the tree, so that is good, although I am unsure whether I will ever finish this one. I would need some good advice or tips on how to do that without destroying the things I already have and am proud of, so I may write this off as my first "real acrylics" painting.

And then this morning I painted something else. I wanted to do something colourful, if only to contrast with the sad dreary painting, and something simple with a bird and a tree (birds and trees are my thing, don't ask me why). I painted this in about half an hour, which seems oddly short but felt quite right. The problem is, I don't know if it's finished. As you can see, I didn't paint the tree, which was going to be on the left, running out of frame, and I am not sure whether it needs the tree. I was going to add some blue or purple colour in the bottom, but I'm not sure whether it needs that either. I am really happy with what I have, the bird looks like it is falling over at first, but when you look at it longer you realise it isn't, and the background came out just like I wanted it. But is it finished? I don't know! With the first one I'm sure it isn't finished but I don't know what to add, while with this one I do know what I want to add, but I don't know whether I need to!

Argh, the frustration!

Now I have ruined paintings in the past by doing or adding too much to them (something my mum is also suffering from), so I am just going to leave this one for the time being. It is kinda funny, because my class got cancelled today and I have the whole day to paint, but now I will stop doing it after an hour. That's just the way it goes. Inspiration is a fickle thing.

But if any of you have any good ideas or tips please please leave them in the comments. You don't have to do art or know about art, because neither do I, and really, I could use all the help I need!

Mobile love

So you may all have thought that I had forgotten about my knitting craze, but I can assure you that that is not true. I was veeery busy with an important school assignment, which took more energy and life out of me than I would have thought, and left me without any for colourful pursuits. But that is handed in now, and I have some time on my hand, while my newest project was laying ready to be put together.
Now there are a lot of fashionable things in the "Knitting for cool girls" book that I will never attempt to make or even see the point of (a cardigan for your dog, to name the most obvious example) but there was one thing in there that I had been looking for for ages; a mobile phone case. I keep my phone in an old sunglasses-protection-bag (refusing to pay 25 Euros for the ugly fashionable one that fits my phone), but that doesn't work very well and in the book there was a great example of one. Now it does have a heart on it, which will immediately take 10 points off my IQ and condemn me as a girly-girl in many eyes, but I tried looking for a star-pattern (which I would really like) and couldn't find one. So, green case with purple heart it was.
The knitting went great, apart from the fact that I didn't leave enough thread on the back when doing the hearts, so that they look kinda squashed together. I may have to do another one just to satisfy my ego on this point. Here is what it looked like post-knitting:

A phone-case sausage.

So obviously it needed to be pressed (which basically means ironing it with a moist cloth between iron and wool), and there were instructions for that in both knitting books (I bought another one!) I have, although the one said to put the good side facing up and the other to put it facing down. Knitting really is just like baking a cake; you get a load of conflicting instructions and just try to make sense of it. You can see which option I chose;

Hideous background, aka our iron board cover!

Now this may be the very first time in my life that I actually used pins for what they were meant to be used for. I have two small boxes of them, but I only used them to tack posters of boy bands on my wallpaper when I was a teenager (my mother despaired of having no pins left, which is I have to boxes full).
Anyway, the case was pressed, dried, pins removed (although one book suggested first removing the pins and then letting it dry), and then I sewed it together to form (still not following any method, I mean, the stitches will be on the inside anyway);

Mobile love, baby!

Done! Okay, it is way too big for my phone (which you can't see in this picture, because the picture was taken by my phone, but take my word for it). But it's the effort that counts, right?
Oh yes, according to the book I was supposed to sew an inner pocket first, as a lining, and then sew the two together using some weird form of dark magic (or at least a very incomprehensible set of instructions). Not going to happen. I do not have the patience to sew one thing together, let alone two. Also, I am supposed to put a little heart-shaped button on top, but if you think that I happen to have heart-shaped buttons laying around you clearly do not know me. So I guess it is done. Whether I will actually use it will be another question.

My next project will depend on whether I can get the right wool and needles I need. The little wool shop in the city centre is very expensive and the woman working there does not understand what I'm talking about, so I may have to resort to online-ordering, which is annoying because then I can't feel the texture of the wool or see whether colours work together properly. I may just do another phone case first, because this one is too big and the hearts are clearly pulling on the threads in the middle and I am getting less satisfied with it the more I look at it. Which is good, because as I said, frustration breeds creativity! There are some neat patterns in my new knitting book which I can try, and in this day and age, one can never have too many phone accessories!

Stripy Sensations

(Two posts in one day, within 2.5 hours of each other... What has the world come to?)

So I was getting at the intermediate Innocent hat level, which is no more difficult than the beginner level, in my opinion, it is just more of a hassle with having two balls of yarn attached and moving them around so that you do not accidentally knit in a thread you're not supposed to (did not happen, but might have happened if I didn't pay enough attention). I choose the "thirsty caterpillar" colour combination from the website, because it looked cool, and then I wanted to do some sort of "piggy in the middle" thing, but the pink thread was so much thinner than the green thread that it would have looked really odd, so I just went for purple and light blue. Safe to say, these took me somewhat more than half an hour;

Ugly picture, macro is not my phone-cam's thing!

Yup, the second one is taller, which gives it the impression of falling over. It looks less hat-like, but it was easier to do, so I may just keep doing that (look at me, changing a knitting pattern with less than a week's worth of experience... I can feel this going down the "baking" route).
So the whole "sewing together" bit is still going a bit wonky, there must be some simple trick to this that I am missing, but as the point here is knitting and not sewing I can't be bothered to look up how to do it. And some of the hats I got from the bottles have far more thick and grotesque lumps on their insides (yes, I checked the insides of the other hats, I am that obsessed).
So next up is a more fancy and difficult pattern on one of the hats, and I think after that it is time to check out some other things, because I have the feeling that this whole hat-knitting thing is going good enough as it is. I do still have to make the little pompoms for the top, of course, but that I did in primary school, so how hard can it be? Time to check out my "Knitting for cool girls" book to see what cool things I will be knitting next (looks like a contradictio in terminis if I ever saw one)!

The Mad Hatter Knitter

Somewhere in my first post here I let drop that I wanted to learn to knit. Now I know that knitting and "wild knitting" or "Yarn bombing" are very popular and hip and trendy, (which you can also see from the title of the knitting book that I got for Sinterklaas, which involves knitting for "cool girls" with advise for how to set up your own "knitting group") but that wasn't the reason I wanted to learn how to knit. No, it was those little Innocent hats. "Everybody" was making them, and we have about 8 in the house because my boyfriend kept bringing them home to me, and I kept getting more frustrated that I couldn't make them myself. And I think that frustration breeds creativity, so no other excuse was needed; I wanted to know how to knit!
Now I could have learnt how to knit in primary school, but I didn't want to, because I preferred doing things with wood and glue and paint (not that I was any good at those things, either). I could have learnt how to knit like most little girls do, from their mother or grandmother, but as all of use have very little patience, don't want listen to anyone's advice, and I was not one to sit quietly for 2 days, stitches slipping away, hands cramping, without poking one of my needles into someone's eye, it made sense not to learn it that way.
But lo, I learnt it myself! Well, with the help from several instructive YouTube clips and knitting website, most of which were in Dutch, because the knitting jargon is confusing enough as it is, and I have heard of "recht" and "averecht" and "insteken, omslaan, doorhalen, af laten glijden" before, but not of "purling" or "the long cast-on". And it worked! Well, not immediately of course, and I dropped a lot of stitches, and there was some swearing and hissing, but I got there in the end. I still miraculously keep having more or fewer stitches than I start out with, and I have no idea where they are coming from, but I now feel experienced enough to deal with that in a calm manner instead of throwing everything across the room. I cannot read a knitting chart or anything, but I can follow the beginners instructions on the Innocent website, and thus create.... (drumroll)

The colours are much nicer if they're not killed by the flash of my phone-camera!

Hats!
Now the first one was a disaster, because I had the wrong number of stitches to begin with, and then when it came to the decreasing of the stitches, I suddenly did the purling the wrong way around (don't ask how) and I ended up with the mess on top you see there. The second one went fine, but the thread kept unravelling as I was stitching it together, so I had to cut off pieces to thread it through the needle again, and I almost ended up with an open-bottomed hat (and we wouldn't want that!). The third one went eazy-breezy, no problems at all, and took me about half an hour! That must be some sort of record!
Next on the agenda, the intermediate hats! Stripes! New methods! More that can go wrong!
I'll keep you posted!

Gerberas

Right, short but colourful post today!
Yesterday someone asked me which template I used for the background of my blog, and then I realised that I haven't said anything about photography in general or my background in specific! So, to add one more "creative persuit I don't have any time for" to the list; yes, I also like to take photographs! I used to do main nature/landscape shots, until my boyfriend introduced me to macro photography, and now that is my main addiction.

Now the background I used for this blog is a picture I made of a white gerbera:

White gerbera, 3 november 2010.

I turned it black&white, as you can see, but as I am a Photoshop-noob I did nothing else to it.

I love gerberas, they are my favourite flower, and as such I get a lot from people which I can then use in my photographing persuits! So here are 2 more colourful gerberas to brighten up your day:

Red gerbera, 8 april 2010

Yellow gerbera, 3 november 2010

All of these (and more) can of course be found on my DA profile!

The creative side

Right, time to stop meta-posting and start to actually tell you something interesting!
I have some "hobbies", or things that I like to do when I am not doing my "official" thing, which is studying. But I used to have a part-time job next to my studies for the last 3.5 years, which took up about 16-20 hours of my week. During this time, I did very little else (productively speaking) but study and work. I don't want to complain, it is not as if I did not have the time to do anything else (paint, bake, write, blog), but more that my head was so filled up with this 60 hour work week that there simply was not enough space (in my head) to do anything else (apart from reading, interestingly enough, I always have space in my head for reading).
When I came home from selling overpriced sandwiches, the only thing I wanted to do was eat my dinner while watching TV, preferably some stupid semi-reality program which does not require your full attention and makes you feel good about yourself, or some quiz-like program (I loooove University Challenge) where you can shout the answers at the screen and make you feel good about yourself in another way.
However, I quit that job as of December 1st, and now that the very busy month of holidays and birthdays and celebrations is over, I can already start to feel more space inside my head. This blog is an example of that, but there are other things as well; I did some serious painting for the first time in years yesterday, and I am doing some baking again, and I am planning to learn how to knit soon. No writing ambitions as of yet (still busy with essay writing), but I will try to revise my NaNoWriMo 2011 novel and send it around to those who have asked for it (or maybe post it here? Not sure yet!).
The only thing I have been steadily doing for a year now is Postcrossing, where you send a card (a real, physical postcard) to "a random person" (who is still a member of the website, of course) and then receive one from another person. I love doing this, because it shows so many different cultures and customs, because I love writing and reading long messages, and because it shows me, again and again, that humans the world over have the same dreams and wishes and hopes and fears. A man from the United Arab Emirates wrote on his profile "this project shows me that there is still hope in the world, because people can still communicate, even if their leaders cannot", which I think is very true. Not sure if this would count as "creative thing" for everybody, but it does for me.
So that is the way things are standing right now. I know that doing something creative is important to me, and that I should take the time to do it, but it is so frustrating when you cannot give something your full attention and energy that most times you simply just don't do it. I want to stop not doing things. Not because this is a New Year's resolution or because I think it will make me more interesting or "a better person" or whatever, but just because I miss it, and I think I need it.
So hopefully you'll be seeing some paintings, postcards, pictures, or writings appear on this blog very soon! And if you don't, it may even be because I am busy producing those very same things!