Let’s cut her some slack shall we!

I know I’ve been a bad, bad bloggeress. Two weeks since my last post, and they passed by so fast. I’ve been crocheting like a maniac and it shows: my blanket is about one square metre big right now. I’ll post pictures later.

I figured a way to tie the hexagons together, differently from what the pattern proposed. Instead of crocheting them together as I go, I’ve been joining the hexes with slip stitches. They make these shallow ridges between the hexes and I kinda like the look of it, plus they make the blanket feel sturdier. Now I just have to keep up with it and decide how big and how many is enough.

I finally did what I’ve wanted for years now: I took up a painting class! It’s at the workers’ institute and it costs a little something, but I don’t care because my mum pays for it. She thinks it’s a great thing for me and she wants me to develop my painting hobby as much as I can. Nice to have support!

There are both watercolour painters and oil colour people in the group. The teacher started from the basics of oil painting because we’re mostly beginners there. Yesterday we made a little rehearsal of blending a single colour with white, trying to create as many hues as possible. Then we applied what we’d learned from mixing the paints to a painting of some object. The others painted some vases and boring stuff like that, but myself  I just started sketching Amoena‘s portrait. I felt inspired to paint her, even though I thought I would paint La Roux at first.

I’m very happy with what I got, at least everyone else was impressed and said it looked exactly like the photo of Amoena. The perfectionist that I am, I’ll say not quite photorealistic, but I definitely got something right. You’re not ugly and grotesque, Amoena! Not yet anyway. Heehee. That was just a rehearsal, I’ll start on the final painting perhaps the next time.

I’m so happy to be painting again. I’m so happy that my darling Pretty Head rescued me from the sauna bathroom. He’s got such lovely eyes. I also went to a drawing class on Thursday, but I lost my nerve with drawing. Drawing isn’t painting, and that bugs me out so much. I need colour! Lots of it! Being a good drawer definitely pays off when you paint, undoubtedly, but I can’t bring myself to draw. Perhaps when I develop some patience one day in my life.

Well, now that I got this off my chest and over with, I can take another break of two weeks from blogging! Let’s hope not.

Since I visited Amoena a couple weeks ago, I’ve been knitting and mostly crocheting a lot. She taught me how to knit again, since I’d forgotten after so many years. Crocheting was completely new to me, but I learned to do it as well, thanks to Amoena and JR‘s generous virtual help. I also got instructions on paper with me so I should know how to finish my mittens.

Here’s my work desk: my new couch on the left and yarns on the sofa table. I like to crochet/knit while I watch tv shows on my laptop, sitting on the sofa and sipping tea and enjoying good food.

I feel a little bad about neglecting my half-done second mitten, but tomorrow I’ll get to knit again: I’m going to visit a new acquaintance here in Tampere. She also likes knitting and crocheting, so we decided to go to hers and do it together while eating apple pie.

My main project has been a hexagon blanket. The pattern is by Attic24. Amoena had made a similar blanket for her cute puppy Papu, and I truly liked it when I saw it in person. I wanted to make one for myself, except very colourful. Later I decided I would try to finish it in time for Christmas, so I can give it to my mum. She likes colourful things just as much as I do. She’ll definitely appreciate the work I will have done, since we’re both a bit clumsy about handicrafts.

(That’s my new beautiful carpet btw! Mum gave it to me in the summer.)

Here’s how much I’ve done so far. I’m planning to use 2-colour hexagons on the rim around the blanket, always with white as the other colour. Then I’ll have mostly different coloured hexagons with white outer rounds in the middle, and some hexagons with no white at all here and there. The round ones at the bottom are unfinished – I decided I’ll add the white round later all in one go, so I won’t have to change the yarn all the time. I like doing things systematically if I possibly can.

There’s one thing I’m slightly concerned about. The hexagons don’t quite seem to match together when I lay them together on the floor. Some of them look bigger than others, and some of them have corners and straight sides in different proportions than others. I wonder what’s up with that. Well, I can only hope I can force them to go together in the end, even if the blanket becomes a little bumpy.

Today I went grocery shopping, but I ended up buying some more yarn that was on sale. It’s the same yarn I’m using for the blanket, Novita 7 veljestä. I bought two new colours for my blanket, just to be even more extravagant. I like things when they go overboard. In particular I like spending money on something that isn’t quite necessary when I should be saving it for food and other life’s necessities.

(Close enough?)

I’m listening to La Roux as I’m writing this. I like her music so much, as well as her style. She’s androgynic and kooky, it’s so cool. I’ve been missing the feeling you get from falling in love with new music. I know that my medication has partly to do with it, because it tunes down my emotions so much that I don’t get really great highs from anything these days. I’m happy, don’t get me wrong, but a part of me misses the feeling of being completely and utterly over the moon over some newly discovered music, or anything new and great whatsoever. But the middle road isn’t too bad either.

One person I know has told me countless times that I’m a perfectionist. But what does that mean exactly?

You want optimal results in everything you do. Whatever you get, you’re not happy with it. Either because there’s no such thing as perfection, or you don’t recognize it even when it slaps you in the face.

I always feel like I could have done much better, whatever it is I’ve done. Sometimes I’m happy and satisfied, but mostly not.

It must be linked to poor self-esteem. There’s always someone who does the same thing better than you in an objective evaluation (though all such are really subjective ones). On the other hand, there’s probably always someone who does it worse than you.

I feel like I’m backstabbing myself when I’m feeling fine and dandy and happy and so forth, then suddenly I get overwhelmed by a huge attack of envy. Why is it so hard for me to acknowledge that someone does something better than I do? Why not just be happy for them? Why should I be just as good, or better? What would I accomplish with that?

It’s like my whole existence is questioned if I don’t do something as well as I’d like to. Like I don’t have the right to exist if I can’t do anything worthwhile or noteworthy.

I think everyone needs to feel that they’re successful in something, whatever it is. Raising reasonably normal kids, keeping a pretty garden, painting, writing, teaching, keeping people safe, selling stocks.

So it’s only normal that I want to have that feeling. It just seems I’m not satisfied with anything small. Is my problem too much ambition? Is ambition a bad thing? Is it a sin to shut down your ambitions?

Ok I don’t know what I’m trying to say, this is just a filler-gap dependency* function of my blogger’s identity.

*In bloggese, that means no posts in a while -> must. post. something. no. matter. what; in grammar, a filler-gap dependency refers to a process whereby a subpart of a phrase is missing and another, complete phrase outside of it fills the missing part. The other phrase is called the filler, and the existence of the gap in the other phrase is licenced by the existence of the filler phrase.