Give ’em hell, Gough!
Month: August 2007 (page 1 of 8)
Nicky Epstein Signing
We are officially *on*, folks! Tapestry Craft will be hosting a book signing with renowned knitting author and designer Nicky Epstein in two weeks. The details:
When: Friday, September 14, 2007 at 3:30pm
Where: Tapestry Craft knitting department, 50 York Street, Sydney
We’re going to have as many of her titles available to buy as possible, and they’ll all be sold at the recommended retail price. So if you’ve ever wanted to get them, this is the time! Hope to see you there.
Update: Just heard from Nicky’s PR people, and she wants to do an hour-long demonstration for us! So the demo will be from 3:30-4:30, and then she’ll sign books for people.
Job News: As the girls at SnB know, the Company-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named rang me last night with the all important news. I’d been stressing all week to hear whether I’d been accepted or rejected. The reality, it seems, is neither. Sometime in the past week, they did some “internal restructuring” and decided that they don’t actually need a permanent person to do this job after all. They want a temp for a few months. For a wild second, I considered it. It would be a way to get my foot in the door, I guess. But then reality set in. “I can’t do it,” I said. It would seriously screw up any plans to buy a house, and it’s not really any kind of step forward career-wise. My HR contact admitted that she was expecting as much. HOWEVER, there’s another opening in the company that suits my skills, and I told her that I’m willing to switch tack and go for that one. She’s going to put me forward for it. Hopefully all the interviewing and work I’ve done will be applicable and I won’t have to start over at step 1. So all in all, it’s a strangely empty result, really. I didn’t get rejected; in fact, I got the impression that they definitely wanted me. It’s just that the position I was going for isn’t there anymore. We’ll see.
Shane Warne, you are dead to me. DEAD TO ME!
I’m over at MetaFilter defending High School Musical to the haters.
Koala Tea Cosy
This little fella didn’t quite make it in time for the Fifties Fair last weekend, which is all the better really because now I get to keep him! He’s awfully cute, isn’t he? (Until you remember that he has a teapot up his bum, at which point it becomes disturbing.) The pattern is free online and purports to be from 1937. That might explain why I had so much difficulty following it. It reads like it’s supposed to have a picture, but since it doesn’t (except for a random illustration) you’re knitting blind most of the time. You also have to do weird things like knit the two body pieces sideways. Anyway, I had to change a few things: 1) The nose. The shape they give is just perplexing and it didn’t look at all like a real koala. So I went with more of an egg shape. 2) The neck. The opening at the top of the cosy is waaaay bigger than the head, so I had to cinch it up a lot. That’s why I knitted him a patriotic scarf to hide the ugly join. 3) There’s an error when you get to the second row of openings on the front. It should be on rows 67-68, not 66-67. Lastly, this makes for a pretty big tea cosy. I had to pad ours with a dishtowel just to get it to fill out his shape. Using 4ply and smaller needles would give you a smaller koala.
And that is IT for tea cosies for about the NEXT TEN YEARS!
I hate waiting. I feel like Calvin waiting for his propeller beanie. *sigh*
Nicky Epstein!
Chrystalla burst into the office waving frantically.
Her: That knitting author… You know, the Epstein lady?!
Me: Who, Nicky Epstein? What about her?
Her: SHE’S HERE!
And that’s how I met Nicky Epstein, famous author of books such as Knitting on the Edge and many more. She and her husband just got into Sydney yesterday, and Tapestry Craft was one of their first stops. They’re so nice! Nicky’s writing a new book on knitting in Australia and they’re doing research for it. Then she’s heading to Melbourne for the start of the 2007 Vogue Knitting tour of Australia and New Zealand, which she’s hosting. They’ll be back in Sydney in a couple weeks, so I suggested that we should host an event for them! Nicky gave me the PR contact details so hopefully we can set something up. I’ll let you know as soon as things are decided…
Email Bankruptcy
Yesterday I realized that I had over 3000 messages in my Gmail Inbox, and that the items that needed action (replies, etc) were being buried in the pile. It was time to declare email bankruptcy. So I clicked on “Select: All”, and then clicked the option to select everything in my Inbox. Then I clicked the “Archive” button. Voila! It’s all gone. Then I created a new label called “@Pending” (the @ symbol is to make it get listed first alphabetically). I went through the archive and found the stuff that needed action, adding it to the “@Pending” list. I’ve now got a sparklingly empty Inbox and a pending list of 14 things that need my attention. When new messages come in, I’m forcing myself to decide immediately whether it requires action, and if it doesn’t, whether I’m going to archive or delete. I can already feel the psychic benefits of being so organised; it’s like a big source of guilt has been removed just by hiding all those old messages. I recommend it!