A Little Fun

I pass no comment, I simply state that this happened over the summer.

 

Soapbox

In January, many popular areas of the internet took part in a blackout to protest against internet-related bills. Yes, these were American bills but this is the internet, there's not really any such thing as 'American' here. 

Broadly speaking, anyone who understood the internet was against these measures. With an extremely loud voice, the internet stood up and said "Um, actually... no" and the bills were shelved.

As in normal life, the internet has a very large silent majority and an activist core. The January blackouts raised awareness far beyond that core, reaching out to a lot of people who'd never really thought about what the internet meant to them.

A little like the Occupy protests, the blackout consisted of a lot of people saying, "No, that's not what we want for the world." The obvious next question is: "Well, what do you want?"

Far less like Occupy, the internet has an answer. Okay, so it has a few million answers. That's what freedom of expression gives you. But it has a rallying call:

 Please sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom

We stand for a free and open Internet.
We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:
Expression: Don't censor the Internet.
Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don't block new technologies, and don't punish innovators for their users’ actions.
Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone's ability to control how their data and devices are used.

The internet isn't the newspaper of our generation. It's not the radio station or the town hall. It's the soap box and the park bench and the kitchen table of our generation. It's where we speak our minds, meet our friends and share our creativity. 

Oh, and if I've not swayed you with my argument, try this one from a fellow signatory

Patrick from Webster, TX
Our collective creative expression and potential for innovation has never been more transparent. The idea of actively cutting ourselves off from this pool of wealth and knowledge is beyond ridiculous. The Internet is not something you can control, only maintain. To attempt control would be to invite chaos. Please don't take away my porn.

The internet: Land of eloquence, creativity and pornography. Keep it free.

We Are Amused

Extremely amused. Nicely done, fabulous knitters of Knitiffi, the people of Bristol approve.

 

Quilt Envy

The Stitch and Craft show was host to two quilting exhibitions I think.

Spread around most of the top floor were hundreds of quilted pennants from Quilts 4 London (although I'm currently listening to Ed Reardon's Week I'm going to resist the urge to comment on that 4). Apparently the aim is to give one to everyone competing in the olympics and paralymics. The pennants were a real mix of styles and clearly came from quilters with a wide range of skill. The volume was impressive and I can't even imagine how much work must have gone into organising a project of that scale.

Almost half the floor was devoted to the A Gift of Quilts exhibition, which was more impressive in size, scale and skill. Also for the olympics, this project will give one quilt to every team competing the games. 

I'll admit that I'm a late recruit to quilting and I should probably confess that I'm enjoying the process of making the thing more than I'm going to enjoy the final product. More often than not, all I can see in a quilt is a bunch of different fabrics that don't quite go together in a pattern that I can't quite make out. Or a set of boring fabrics in a pattern that is so regimented that it may as well just be printed.

Wandering round the exhibition, the point of several of the quilts still passed me by. I can appreciate the amount of work that goes into them (hand sewing hundreds of little squares of fabric will give you real appreciation of the amount of work a quilt takes) but the over-all effect of some were lost on me.

Only some, though. The rest were a lesson in how it should be done and the vast gulf that lies between my beginner's efforts and the beautiful quilts that approach works of art. Some of the best had too many people admiring them to get a photo. 

Here are some pictures of quilts made by people with excellent fabric-based imaginations:

This is how blue should be done

Unlike me, the person behind this quilt knows how to make rectangles not-boring

Just in case I'd been doubting my lesson in how contrasting colours work in quilts

This is the only quilt that made me laugh out loud

And this quilt is a physical manifestation of the gulf between my skill and true quilting

 

Yarn Budgets are for Losers

I have to start by saying that there are some unfeasibly attractive people in London. I kept wondering whether the tube had been suddenly overwhelmed by escapees from a high-end fashion shoot.

Anyway. This weekend I have mostly been travelling on the Bakerloo Line (or the Brown One, as I know I'm not supposed to think of it). I'd allowed about an hour to get to Olympia on Saturday morning and the plan went well until I got to Earl's Court, panicked that there might not be a train  in time and bought a massive A to Z so I could find Olympia myself. So my best-laid plans for travelling very light were a little dented.

The queue at the Stitch & Craft show was on a surprisingly epic scale and quite chaotic, though I did find myself behind a woman with a lovely entrelac coat that I would very much like to find the pattern for. 

I did quite a bit of fretting about whether I'd get inside before the workshop began but only because I'd convinced myself that it was starting at 10. Once I was inside and realised it was actually 10:30, I had enough time for a very quick exploration of the venue. Good job too, because it was packed before long. I'd hoped to get a photo of the sheer scale of the event but I never found a good vantage point.

The ground floor was mostly fabric and miscellaneous. The basement was workshops and card making. By 10:25 I'd only found two yarn stalls and I was beginning to worry that I might have planned a whole weekend in London in order to get only acrylic and generic brand yarn.

Fortunately I was proved wrong when I followed some slightly lost-looking people to the second floor and the extensive "Knitting Zone". With only a couple of minutes before I had to dash back down to the basement, I did a super-quick loop of the stalls frantically stroking exotic yarn and trying to work out how not to blow all my money in one place.

When I got to the Colour Wheel Workshop I'll admit that I was a little disappointed to discover that it mostly involved sticking bits of fabric to card. But, once we'd done our cutting and sticking, we moved on to colours that work together.

I've never really understood colour and I'd hoped that this might help. To a certain extent, it did but there was also a fair bit of: "...and if you take these three and add in the colour opposite on the wheel, see how it really works?" And I didn't. But maybe I'll never really get it. 

Apparently this combination really works well. I'm not convinced.

Following the workshop, I pushed my way through the packed crowd of crafters and headed back upstairs. I was particularly keen to find Nimu Yarns and any other smaller-scale producers/dyers. In the end I gave up searching and forked out an utterly ridiculous £4 for the show catalogue only to find Nimu right next to a stand I'd been to three times already.

A knitted village. Obviously.
I suspect crazy challenges like this might be why non-knitters think we're a bit strange.

I refuse to add up exactly how much I ended up spending but I do know that I set a new record for how much I'm willing to pay for a skein when I succumbed to some stunning yarn called Pixie Dust from Yarn Collage.

I'm going to have to wait for some good daylight to get some proper pictures because only natural light will do justice to most of my purchases. In the end I came home with:

• Colinette Roving (because I'd like to try some felting)
• Nimu Blea Lace (beautiful coloured laceweight silk)
• Nimu Sizergh (because I'm just not happy with my plans for the current skein I've got)
• Yarn Collage Pixie Dust
• A beautiful button made from the bowl of a silver spoon (Stealth bunny!)
• Fabric for a new knitting bag

In addition to all the yarn on the second floor, there was also an exhibition of quilts but that'll have to wait for another post.

All in all, Saturday was a great day and it ended with suitably large quantities of sushi. I only wish I hadn't spent several hours extremely preoccupied by the fact that I'd entirely forgotten the word "demographic".

Cultural Overload

I've often wondered how the people of London get anything done. I think I could happily spend every weekend of the year just exploring the museums (if I could manage to ignore the rest of the extremely fun stuff on offer). I did a little searching for things on in London while I'll be on my training course in April and I quickly found myself booking tickets to see Andy Zaltzman at the Udderbelly. I can't really believe it's a giant purple cow but I look forward to being proved wrong.

Anyway, remember the project to knit a 7ft map of the world? Well, it ended up 186% funded and she's two thirds of the way through knitting the map. With the extra money there will apparently also be a moon and both will be on display at her university art show.

And, in an almost implausible coincidence of timing, the show will be on in London while I am on my training course.

So, without any real effort, I have already made plans for three of my five evenings away. Those other two evenings are suddenly beginning to look like a concerted challenge to my ability to find accidental fun.

Now I just have to hope this doesn't turn out to be the sort of training course that has homework...

Accidental Fun

This is about radio, trust me. For a while it's going to look like I'm writing a post about my life. But it's not that, promise.

In April, I have to go to London for a training course. It's going to be quite hard and involve a lot of learning about complicated things that I don't much understand but it's also going to involve spending a week in London and that is No Bad Thing. I've been pretty excited about the prospect of this trip because, let's face it, I don't go away much for fun so if work wants me to go away somewhere for not-fun then at least that's a step in the right direction. After all, fun may well be had by accident.

Because the training is in London and I am on entirely the other side of the country, I will be going up the night before (because the alternative is me dragging myself out of bed at 3am and probably sleeping through the first day of the course, or at least the part where they explain all the important words). Anyway, this means I will be in London for five nights with nothing to do but to seek sushi/a restaurant where I can eat alone and not feel like a social pariah.

Obviously the first thing I did - before even booking my hotel - was to research what radio programmes might be recording while I'm there. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Counterpoint is something I'd particularly enjoy. Oh well, I thought, no doubt I'll find something to do.

And I have!

I'm an occasional reader of John Finnemore's blog, on the grounds that he is a complete and total (brilliant!) genius. Cabin Pressure is hilarious. He's always both funny and clever on the Now Show. And John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme last year was fantastic. The man can do no wrong in my books. So, when I sat down to waste ten minutes before I had to go out, I was happy to see he'd posted something about the next series of his Souvenir Programme. Actually, not just something but something about preview sketch nights, in London, on fortnightly Sundays.

London. Everything fun happens in London, I sighed. And on a Sunday too. That's a really inconvenient day for getting back home from London. Well, wouldn't it have been great if I could have gone?

In my defence, this entire train of thought took place shortly after I'd got back from work and it had not begun with me contemplating what I might do with myself while on a training course for a week. So, as I clicked through the booking link out of sheer curiosity, the fact that I am going to be in London on a Sunday hit me like a goose hitting a number two engine over St Petersburg. 

So now I won't just be aimlessly wandering London looking for sushi. There are four other nights for me to do that. No, instead I shall be going to see John Finnemore try out material for his new comedy series that will end up on Radio 4. And all I have to do is find Kilburn on a tube map.

Best. Training. Course. Ever.

The Power of the Internet

For a geek I'm shockingly technophobic. I don't have a smart phone, I've never bought anything from e-bay and I just don't understand what the big deal about twitter is. The internet has a lot of benefits but championing brevity through messages of 140 characters? Is that really the best of use those sizeable resources of bandwidth, boredom and creativity?

Of course not.

I'm used to being behind the times on technological developments and crowd sourcing is no exception. The difference is that even those of us that took years to get a facebook account and still think that RT stands for Radio Times can understand the benefits of crowd sourcing.

Crowd sourcing plays to the internet's biggest strength: the internet brings together people with a common purpose. Anyone who has taken part in an internet forum will know the sheer weight of pressure that can be brought to bear once a group of users have been roused by a righteous cause or grievous injustice. It's staggering.

If anything, the only surprise is that it's taken this long for people to realise what a phenomenal resource this is. Okay, from a software point of view it's not so new (remember the SETI program that would find aliens using tiny amounts of your processing power?). But it's not crowd sourcing of software that has really inspired me over the last few months, it's crowd funding.

There are a lot of statistics bandied about but everyone has seen a variation on those spammy chain e-mails that put our first-world wealth into proportion. I'm not claiming that everyone on the internet has cash to throw around but, if you have access to the internet then there's a good chance that you have a computer. Internet users are a group that, on the whole, is not living on the bread line.

So you have a group of people. They like communicating. They might have a little cash to spend on things they care about. And they're GOOD at caring about things. Really, really good at it. Thanks to the internet, those people can now be connected to the things that they care about and really put that mob mentality (in the nicest possible sense) to some use.

A few weeks ago I mentioned Unbound and the Warhorses of Letters book and I'll admit that there's something magical about helping books come into existence. But it wasn't the first public funding site I joined, that is a micro-financing site called Kiva.

The idea is simple: If you can spare $25 (around £15) then you can help people around the world. The site lists hundreds of small business owners who need loans to improve their business. And we're not talking about big loans, some are as small as just $125. Together with dozens or hundreds of other people - each with their £15 - you fund that loan. It's not a charity donation, they pay you back a little every month and, although there are some defaults, there is a 98.8% repayment rate.

It's really quite addictive. So far I've helped:

• Essi, a 32 year-old woman from Togo to improve her charcoal-selling business
• Marlene from Peru to buy new stock for her clothes shop
• Babak from Azerbaijan to diversify the stock in his food & drink shop

Is there a better use of £15? I don't think so.

Less altruistic but more creative is Kickstarter. Fancy supporting an independent film maker? Kickstarter has dozens! Want to help bring an album into being? Kickstarter can sort it for you. Art installations, performance pieces, games, comics, design, fashion, theatre... the list is extensive and Kickstarter has it all.

Much like Unbound, you donate money and you get a reward. Rewards are better the more you donate. It might be a copy of the book/film/clock that you're funding, or a walk-on part, or an executive directors credit or....

You get the point.

Although I came to kickstarter through a much geekier route, I am now helping to fund a graphic design student who wants to knit a 7ft-wide map of the world. Without leaving my sofa I have supported an art project and, in return, I will get: a knitting pattern; a high-quality photo of the map; and the warm feeling that comes with knowing that I helped someone achieve something pretty crazy and epic.

But crazy and epic doesn't happen without yarn. A lot of yarn.

Help her get yarn.