lady_schrapnell: (Default)
lady_schrapnell ([personal profile] lady_schrapnell) wrote2004-11-05 08:50 am

knitting and stitching...

except not so much with the knitting. I've done it and like it fine but it's not what I want to do much right now. But the show, as always, made me want to be an embroiderer, a beader, a braid-maker, textile person (whatever you call them - can't apply the word 'artist' to myself, as it just doesn't fit!) a spinner and weaver, and ooh, forgot felt-making, which looks like lots of fun... Came home with some beads, though the shop was disappointing really, a couple of 'inspiration packs' from a group who hadn't been there before (I'd so have gone for a beautiful lavendar sachet kit of theirs, had it not had a British stamp on it - nothing personal, but I don't really have any great desire for the Queen's face on a sachet). These have a piece of hand-dyed raw silk and matching silk embroidery floss and/or ribbon and a silk leaf, and were just gorgeous. And two books (I did hear that the prices were cheaper than Eason's, which made me feel a bit less insane) and a bit of coloured wire and two hanks of thread (one mix of rayons and cottons and one rayon) in the most gorgeous deep peacocky blue-greens from Oliver Twists. What I'm going to do with this stuff is another matter...

But I didn't see the goddess embroideries you mentioned, wyvernfriend - at least I don't think they were there. Some amazing things in the exhibits though.

Oh, and there has to be just one little complaint, right? It is this - if you are coming over from the UK to Ireland to sell things, then why, why can you not think ahead enough to mark your prices in Euro rather than Sterling? One stall was selling lots of little things, had small cardboard hand-written price tags in Sterling (would have taken about two minutes to re-write them all), and the stupidest woman trying to convert the prices as you bought from her. When she'd finally worked out the cost for me in Euro I gave her the small change so she wouldn't have to work out the coins - and then she actually moaned about having to deal with this unfamiliar currency. I said (pleasantly, of course) that we'd had to go through learning a new one and the woman behind me in the (slow) queue leaned over and said 'good for you!' in my ear. Honestly. And - not a complaint this, just a wonder - when people use a public toilet (and the RDS's are not the nicest, though far from the grottiest around), why do they go to the bother of the ritual of running a drib of water over their hands and shaking them off afterwards? Why don't they either wash their hands properly, or just walk straight out without going near the sink? Enquiring minds...

Yay for the books!

[identity profile] generalblossom.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 04:25 am (UTC)(link)
Yay for the books :) I knew I could count on you for it - hope they are fun!

It does sound maddening about the prices in sterling, if you are going to another country to sell stuff, you better be ready to handle its currency. Stupid woman.

About the knitting, did you hear about knitting meetings? There was an article on the paper about it the other day, and I know some Lisbon people do knitting meetups through the meetup.com site , oh look here

http://knitting.meetup.com/about/

pity I can not knit at all, sounds like tremendous fun. And speaking of felting, [livejournal.com profile] pikapolonica was doing some a while ago, it looked so gorgeous!

Re: Yay for the books!

[identity profile] lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 05:49 am (UTC)(link)
Yay for the books :) I knew I could count on you for it - hope they are fun!

Snort. Yes, of course I could be counted on to spend waaaaay more than I ought to on books. Always! One's just lovely (they're both beading books) - full of great pictures and drool-worthy beads, but the other may not have been such a good choice. It was extra discounted, at least. I want to have a proper look at the beading books you have on your wish list, but not a sign of them!

There's a huge knitting 'thing' going on in Cork (city where my dad was born - always got to plug Cork!), which seems to involve 50 people knitting in a public place, every day for a year. It seemed very cool.

[identity profile] wyvernfriend.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 05:19 am (UTC)(link)
I mean some of the older people there moved from pounds shillings and pence to decimal, at least it's the same base for the currency.

And yes that drives me mad every year as well.

[identity profile] lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 05:51 am (UTC)(link)
Hey, careful with the older people business - I moved from £SD to decimal! ;)

[identity profile] wyvernfriend.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 05:55 am (UTC)(link)
See, I was born in 1970 when the change happened that or the next year, so older just means really older than me... no insult intended honest!!

You can't be THAT much older than me...

[identity profile] lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 05:59 am (UTC)(link)
:) I was only messing, not insulted! But you'd have made up for it anyway by the not that much older than me comment - 12 years is quite a bit.

[identity profile] wyvernfriend.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 06:07 am (UTC)(link)
You're not! Wow, you don't come across as that much older than me. What's more you come across as a fair bit less, mentally, as old as my husband whos claiming middle age at 37 8(.

[identity profile] lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com 2004-11-07 11:04 am (UTC)(link)
Thanks! Been having trouble with communication of various sorts, so couldn't say this sooner. But yeah - if you saw me procrastinating writing an essay you'd definitely think my mental age was less than my biological age. ;)

[identity profile] vierran45.livejournal.com 2004-11-05 02:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Hey, I moved from decimal to decimal - And it's still as hard as ever.. At least I've had real lessons in the sixes conversion table (1 € = c. 6 FIM), and I'm still using the conversion table every now and then...


[identity profile] myntti.livejournal.com 2004-11-06 02:46 am (UTC)(link)
At least I've had real lessons in the sixes conversion table (1 € = c. 6 FIM), and I'm still using the conversion table every now and then...

And you're not the only one doing that... :-)

Hunh.

[identity profile] lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com 2004-11-07 11:10 am (UTC)(link)
We moved from decimal to decimal this time - admittedly the change from non-decimal to decimal was a long while ago, but it's still good for complaint! Pity it wasn't the fives tables for you, but ours was worse - something like 1 £(punt) = €1.25, so we'd to get a quarter and add it on to figure that direction (forgotten which now!) - which was nothing compared to the reverse conversion. Good for the mental maths, I guess.

[identity profile] myntti.livejournal.com 2004-11-06 03:03 am (UTC)(link)
It is this - if you are coming over from the UK to Ireland to sell things, then why, why can you not think ahead enough to mark your prices in Euro rather than Sterling?

It is strange that she didn't re-write the price tags. It would've been easier for everybody - even for her. (And in any case selling something in another country using your own country's currency is, well, stupid.)

[identity profile] dorianegray.livejournal.com 2004-11-07 10:49 am (UTC)(link)
Much amusement amongst the Irish contingent at The Gathering this year; one of the traders was over from Germany and hadn't converted Euro prices to UK - I don't think they'd realised beforehand that the UK doesn't use Euros. None of the UK attendees could figure out whether their prices were good value or not... (They were! *And* they took Euros from those of us who had them and GBP from everyone else. And yes, they did spend the first day frantically rewriting price tags.)