The GirlAlive Blog

A while ago I bought myself a drop spindle.  It's a clever technology that been used for a few thousand years to make thread and yarn.  I also bought myself a big bag of random wool bits from Etsy.  After a large amount of spinning and pulling and plying, I now have a huge weird callous on my right index finger, and this bunch of yarn:

It's all squishy and pretty and crazy.  I'm not sure what I'm going to knit with it.  

Also, I went to a party last week and on the way home I saw a hedgehog on the sidewalk, just waddling along.  It was so cute!  I'd consider getting a hedgehog for a pet, but I don't like pets that eat meat.  They tend to have stinky poop.  I like my little vegetarian hamsters and vegan guinea pigs. 

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 09:16 AM | Permalink

I've been complaining to my husband a lot lately about how there are no mid-range restaurants here.  So we found some. 

Generally in the UK, there are two categories of restaurants.  There's the fancy Gordon Ramsay-type three course meal that costs a fortune kind of places.  Then there's the take-out places.  And not much in between.  Now, let me be clear that this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  In the US, it's easy to find a place to have an affordable dinner for four, but that place will inevitably be a franchise like Applebees or Perkins.  It's all very homogenized and frankly mediocre.  When restaurants cost a lot, you tend to cook your own food more and that is healthier.  But sometimes I want someone else to cook a meal for me and bring it to a table where I can sit and eat at my leisure.

So we've found some cafes.  They don't serve dinner.  You have to make it lunch or breakfast.  But it is food that someone else cooked.  And it's cheap and good.  

The first place we tried was called Joyce's Cafe, and it is in the Penicuik town center just between Farmfoods and the newsagent.  It's the perfect place to get a full fried breakfast, with an egg, sausage and toast and beans and black pudding (which I shift to my husband's plate).  And all of that for about 3 pounds.  And that includes tea.  We've been there twice, and it's been great both times.  It's brightly-lit and the people who work there are friendly and nice.  But nothing there is healthy, so it's just kind of a treat every once in a while.

The other place we tried was the Gallery Cafe, which is just off the high street, next to the inexplicable Belgian consulate in the Penicuik town center.  It's run by the Penicuik Community Arts Association and there is a vegetarian cafe downstairs with a craft shop upstairs.  It's lovely.  I had a toasted cheese sandwich and my husband had the soup of the day (a very good split pea and pepper soup, according to him).  The shop upstairs had knitted stuff, jewellery and pottery by local artists.  And lunch for both of us cost less than 5 pounds.  Much healthier than the fried breakfast place too.

So we've found two nice little cafes less than ten minutes away.  I'd highly recommend either of them, depending on whether you are in a carnivorous mood or not.

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My name is Alana, and I have an alpaca addiction.

I was surfing through the "nearly expired" listings on Etsy a while ago and I bought a few small balls of hand dyed alpaca wool from Larkspur Funny Farm.  Now I've entirely fallen in love with alpaca yarn.  It's all soft and squishy and made from alpacas, which are some of my favorite animals.  Alpacas are like little tiny llamas.  They're cute and fluffy.  The problem is that their wool is also quite expensive for someone who usually only buys cheap acrylic yarn from the 99p store. 

For my family and friends, if you're ever stuck for a gift to get for my birthday or Christmas or anniversary, or anything, you probably can't go wrong with a big pile of alpaca yarn.  If you really want to impress me, buy me an alpaca farm and a spinning wheel.  

Back to trying to stretch my tiny ball of alpaca wool into a viable knitted scarf...

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've added a new category to my blog called "craftiness", for all of my hobbies that involve making stuff.  I crochet pretty well and I knit, but only poorly crafted rectangles.  I haven't been drawing much lately, but I used to do it a lot.  I'm pretty good with painting and stuff too.  And I know how to sew and quilt and stuff.  As mentioned in my last post I've been playing around with weaving.

I've been thinking about crafting a lot lately.  Not just what to make next, but why I think crafts are important. 

For the last couple generations, people have not been making stuff much.  It has been a society of providing services rather than making things.  We buy everything we own and most of us don't even know how it's made.  More and more, I think that petty crime is tied to not making anything. 

I hate vandalism.  I hate people who randomly destroy other people's stuff.  I think I'm more sensitive to it because I make stuff.  I have a quilt that I made by hand when I didn't have a sewing machine.  That quilt represents months of cutting and sewing without even a table to work on when I was living in Seattle.  When I first lived here, I had the quilt on the couch, and I eventually had to move it into the bedroom, on my side of the bed because my husband had no respect for the quilt.  He threatened to spill things on it, and got guinea pig fur on it and squished it into the crack of the couch.  He has never sewn a quilt by hand, so he does not know why I'm protective of my quilt.  He's no longer allowed to touch it.  And none of what he did was on purpose. 

All over the place here I see trash in the streets and bus shelters that have been broken or defaced, just for fun.  I think that people who do things like that are people who have never made anything.  If they had ever had to build anything from scratch, they would not be so eager to destroy something someone else has made.  They were the kids who smashed other people's sand castles and Lego skyscrapers, and the people who contribute to the world are the ones who built the sandcastles and Lego skyscrapers. 

If you have kids, do them a huge favor.  Teach them to make things.  Teach them jewelry making and pottery and painting and cross stitch and quilting.  Buy them play-doh and weaving kits and knitting looms.  Risk stepping on some Legos for the sake of making your kids better people.  

Shop on Etsy.  Buy things that are handmade, to show your kids the value of the hands that made them.  Don't let your kids break things without understanding how much more work it takes to make things.  Make sure they grow up to be builders, not destroyers.  The world has enough destroyers.

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been weaving.  I got myself a Size 2 Spears Weaving Loom a while ago and I've been weaving up a storm, mostly making scarves.  It can only do things up to 5 feet long and about 6 inches wide.  But it is fun. 

I was having so much fun I decided to upgrade to a Size 3 loom.  It's a little wider and has a better system for handling the warp threads (the long ones that you weave onto).  Here's the problem: it took me about 4 hours and a huge pile of wasted yarn to get the warp threads onto the loom.  Then I started weaving and it just plain didn't work.  The heddle thingy is corroded and sticking to the threads, so it isn't moving them how it's supposed to.  Basically, the upgrade has been a bad thing, and I have just ended up wanting another new loom.  After a whole day working with my new loom, I have about 6 loose crooked rows of weaving done.

The first two looms cost me about 15 Pounds (don't have the little symbol on this keyboard) each.  The loom I really want costs about 80 Pounds.  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about this.  I like weaving, but I hate my new loom.  But I can't really afford to get a new one right now.  Back to the old loom I guess?

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)