Zen's day out

So there are pros and cons to living in London.

Con: one is always having to deal with boilers and fridges and washing machines that leak. (This is not inherent in living in London, but they never made me deal with this kind of nonsense in Cambridge! Hence it is with London that I associate tardy plumbers.)

Pro: everyone has interesting shoes!

Con: -- and I think this is something peculiar to city life -- one suddenly understands road rage in a way one never did before, because when you're pushing and shoving in a crowd of about 1 million people all pushing and shoving to get on a bus, and it is cold and wet and smells of exhaust (not to mention exhaustion), and suddenly some City dude with an irritating tie steps on your foot -- then you know the true meaning of abrupt fury!

Pro: but you can have such great days out!

The subject of this post is going to be days out, because City workers with irritating ties and boilers are not very interesting things to blog about. Also they are not as photogenic!

Yesterday my nice young man came down from Cambridge and we went to the Royal Academy for the Byzantium exhibition -- highly recommended, particularly if you're interested in Christian art. But there won't be any pictures of that, because probably they wouldn't have allowed it, and anyway I left my camera in the cloakroom.

But what is more relevant to our purposes: I'd been impressed by the too-quirky-to-be-formal chic of this classy lady's outfit on Wardrobe Remix, and was eager to attempt to replicate the look with my H&M lace dress.


(It is such a great dress.) Unfortunately, while it has much in the way of charm and retro quality, there is one thing it lacks significantly, and that is length. And yesterday I checked the temperature and it was 1ºC in London.

How we suffer for beauty! Alas, not only was I freezing whenever necessity drew us outdoors, I did not manage to get any pictures in which both I and the outfit looked nice, so posting to Wardrobe Remix in ecstatic homage will have to wait for another day.

Outside a shop window, yearning to be let in :(
Jacket - Dorothy Perkins; shawl worn as scarf - random London shop; glittens - Accessorize; lace dress - H&M; 2 pairs of tights - Uniqlo and Debenhams; ballet flats - Franco Sarto

This, for example, is rather a nice photo, but it is useless as regards showing you what I was wearing. Nevertheless I have included in tiny font a list of what I was wearing, because I do so love knowing what people are wearing and where each item comes from.

What I was gazing at were these:

Which inhabited a shop fronted by this:

There's a knock-down argument for you!

After admiring Byzantine art and macaroon towers, we went to Patisserie Valerie to have PASTRIES.

but seriously it is ridiculous how photogenic pastries are!

I had a strawberry-and-kiwi tart.


The cream goes right down into the heart of the tart, and it is encircled by a layer of strawberry jam between the strawberries and the pastry. It basically tastes of happiness.

After that we wandered around Piccadilly and down Regent Street, where I poked my nose into shops, withdrawing it in some disappointment when it turned out that there were no sales. But there's a happy ending to this story: discovering to his shock that I had never heard of or been down Carnaby Street, P led me down that street of wonders, where we found Kingly Court, home of Cha Cha Moon and something even better -- vintage shops.

Which is all basically just a roundabout way of saying: I scored a dress in the bargain bin! Woo!

NB. I look slightly less like a hobbit in real life

I'd prefer short sleeves, but long sleeves are so authentic! We shall see. I plan to wear this with a houndstooth scarf, tights for the winter and boots; it will be interesting to see what works.

- Zen

Crochet and feathers

I've always had an obsessive personality, and I have just acquired a new thing to be obsessed about: crochet.

Crochet! It's done wonders for my Internet addiction, except when I go on crazy crochet website surfing sprees and turn up millions of things I wish to make when I have honed my skills sufficiently.

Like this sushi roll scarf:

Found here.

And a crazy vintage hat:

Only one of many crazy hats from the year 1944, here.

And handwarmers!

Pattern here.

With the little crochet flower on the side, oh how adorable.

Apart from these mad orgies of wish fulfillment, however, my addiction to the Internet has sat down and shut up. Upon coming home, no longer do I rush to Gmail with a hopeful expression. Instead, I curl up in my armchair with a 4.5 mm hook and wrestle with loops of cotton yarn, looking hazily through the stitches at the future.

The future is glorious, and it looks like a scarf.

I started crocheting all of a week ago, when I went into a shop to buy yarns for a knitter friend and got distracted by all the pretty colours. The textures! The variety! The glorious things you were able to make with them, they said, ranging from sheep-shaped tea pot cozies to fancy-ass dresses! I bought a hook and a ball of yarn and a book --


It is a crappy book, by the way; don't buy it --

And came home and started to crochet. Since the explanations and diagrams in my book were not terribly helpful, I had to consult the Internet at a couple of points, but once I had cleared up the nature of the slip stitch everything was smooth sailing from there.

Well, not quite. With heedless enthusiasm I started on a double crochet (single crochet in American) scarf in strawberry and mint colours, but rapidly came a cropper for various reasons: I was using the wrong sort of yarn; I failed to do extra stitches to make up for it; not only was I using the wrong sort of yarn, I was using different wrong sorts of yarn ...

The long and short of it is, that scarf was not a success.


I look quite happy here (well actually I look like a blank-eyed alien, but never mind about that), but that is only because I was bravely biting down on my anguish. The reasons why the scarf did not work out are many and varied, but I won't bore you with the technical details. I moaned about them in detail to my sister, who said, "It doesn't have to be a scarf! Why don't you use it as an accessory? Like, you know, instead of wearing a necklace and earrings, you could wear your ... thing."

Zen: Right, that'll go down well. 'Hey, Zen, what's that you're wearing?' 'Oh, it's my, you know, it's my ... accessory.'
Sister: Yeah! It could be your trinklet.

So we have taken to calling it my trinklet. I have hung it up on my bedroom door: pretty, resembling coral in its charming curliness, but ultimately useless.

The projects I next wanted to go on to doing were a) a beret and b) handwarmers and c) something cute in the way of amigurumi ... but since I have only yet managed to produce a trinklet and not a scarf, I decided to start over again and do a Proper Scarf, a scarf one could actually wear and not look that odd in.

It is going reasonably well so far! Again I will restrain myself from expounding upon it in technical detail, but there will be pictures if it does eventually turn into a scarf. Wish me luck!

Just in case crochet chat is not your bag of Jelly Babies, I include an obligatory non-crochet related link.

Link.

This is a wealthy heiress circa 1911 (probably). Isn't she marvellous? She's just exactly what you'd expect an heiress to look like somehow.

We don't have heiresses anymore, do we? Not simply as a descriptor but as a job description, a definition of a particular identity. I guess if you dream of the Marxist utopia, as surely we must all do, you can't regret the loss, but what a shame people don't wear hats like that anymore.

Anyway, what I was meaning to say was: the Shorpy Photo Archive is a repository of supremely cool old photos, worth a look if you're interested in people and the past. I haven't found that much in the way of glamour so far except in the photo above, but check out the beauty pageant photos; they are absolutely hilarious.

- Zen