A Close Secret

I love the windy closes that extend away from Edinburgh's Royal Mile like veins on a leaf. Their unassuming, dark entrances provide no clue as to what treasures lie beyond. I chanced upon this one on a wander while on the phone.

Dunbar's Close garden, off the Royal Mile

I had to draw on powerful reserves of altruism in order to blog about this peaceful plot of orderly vegetation; perhaps a secret garden should by definition be a private pleasure, lest it become, simply, a known garden. Not to be confused with a gnome garden.

Anyway, I highly recommend Dunbar's Close for those weary of foot or spirit - or those who entertain fantasies of being a seventeenth-century lady, taking turns about the garden before finding a sunny patch to do some stitching. 

Salisbury Crags

A little while down the Mile, the landscape in front of the Parliament ('here for tae represent aw Scotlan's folk') is provides a more dramatic background to my knitting. As for what I'm working on - that is a close secret too, for the moment.

A Day at the Museum

The entrance hall - note the sad lack of fish! The coin-dodging carp that used to take up much of this space were the main attraction of the museum for me as a child.

The National Museum of Scotland reopened this summer after a three year refurbishment project. As far as I can recall, the last time I visited it was on an ill-fated semi-date: the guy was a smoker, which I disapproved of, so I playfully hid his cigarettes in the Ivy Wu Gallery, which he disapproved of. Luckily there was no awkward games of hunt-the-tobacco when I went yesterday with my friend Alice - just lots of marvellous creatures and wondrous objects.

A massive prehistoric deer

A glowering T-Rex

An astronomically interesting room...

... replete with astrolabes and other other-worldly paraphernalia for measuring other worlds

A giant trilobite scuttling up a wall

Ptiny pterosaurs flapping overhead

There were details I'd forgotten I remembered from the museum's previous incarnation, like these beautiful Victorian radiators wrapped around columns. 

It was a super day; I will have to go back when I am less cold-y and more able to take everything in. Have you had any exciting days out recently? Leave a comment and let me know! In the meantime, I plan to curl up, drink cinnamon tea and knit my snuffles away - I hope you're all having lovely Sundays.

Plenty of fun to be had in the gift shop.

Brooching the Subject

 I thought of a pun; I took some photos of some brooches. That is all.

Posting

Gosh, it's hard to get back into the swing of blogging after a break! I feel like I should have something really momentous to say to justify the silence, but I don't, so here is a picture I took today of a postbox, as a reminder to myself to keep posting.

Shooting From The Hip: Genoa 01/11/2010

Another rainy day, viewed through a steamy bus window. Still, I got lots of knitting done, much of it to  a sparkling Cary Grant film, His Girl Friday.

I fly back tomorrow, and am thinking of keeping this series of posts up, alongside regular knitting content. What do you think? Are you sick of retro photo trickery?

Shooting From The Hip: Genoa 31/10/2010

A somewhat sad and sodden Sunday. Almost everything was shut it town, so I came back to the hostel and finished both of my knitting projects - thank goodness I took an emergency ball of wool! It seems that tomorrow is a public holiday here, so I won't be able to use any libraries or archives... now I'm a bit worried of running out of emergency knitting! And, for that matter, food. But the knitting is my main preoccupation. I hope you have all been having happier Hallowe'ens. 

Shooting From The Hip: Genoa 30/10/2010

Rather a less successful lonesome lunch today. The waitresses studiously ignored me (reminding me of that brilliant George S. Kaufman epitaph for a waiter: 'God finally caught his eye'), and, realising I was not a native speaker half-way through ordering pudding, started speaking very loudly and clearly at me ('This cake has PINE-NUTS - do you know what a PINE-NUT is?'). Then, as the figurative faded cherry on my slightly substandard fruit salad, what should come blaring over their speakers but Celine Dion's 'All By Myself'. I couldn't wait to leave.

Still, I suppose it could be worse. At least I didn't have to participate in the sinister sex-game 'Bunga Bunga' with Silvio Berlusconi, unlike 'Ruby', the latest barely-legal beauty to be connected to the president. Shudder.

Shooting From The Hip: Genoa 29/10/2010

The buses were on strike for almost all of today, so during the brief windows when a few were running they were overflowing with people, packed together in an intricate (and sometimes uncomfortably intimate) human tessellation that left little room for breathing let alone knitting. Elsewhere, I'd just walk, but Genoa is a murderously mountainous place, and the youth hostel sits right at the summit of one of its peaks. 

How about you, readers? Do you commute? Are you lucky enough to take a form of transport that allows you to knit/sew/sit down? I do hope you've all had lovely Fridays.

Shooting From The Hip: Genoa 28/10/2010

How could I do a series of photos from Italy without any food? It is everywhere, from artistically arranged confectionary in the windows of the pasticcerie, to the scent of cooking seeping out through cracks in shutters. Shops (and archives) routinely shut at 12.30 or 1 and open again at 3; no speedy sandwiches wolfed down at desks here. 

The thing is, I'm not always very good at taking advantage of all this bounty when I'm here all by myself. I tend to find a quiet place to perch and eat a little slice of pizza or focaccia, perhaps supplemented with some fruit if I feel I'm in danger of catching scurvy. I don't mind spending time on my own - in fact solitary exploring is one of my favourite things to do - but this has not so far extended to eating out. I have always been foolishly fearful of asking for a table for one.

This lunch, however, was different. Inspired in part by the sweet video below, which seems to be all over the craft blogs at the moment, and in part by the fact that it was just too darn cold to sit outside, I faced my fear, and went into a bustling restaurant. I didn't feel like a loser, no one gave me pitying looks, and I had an unbelievably delicious meal, pictured above. Definitely an experience I would repeat.

Shooting From The Hip: Genoa 27/10/2010

The fountain in Piazza De Ferrari is a constant source of inspiration. I took these two pictures next to it within seconds of each other on my lunch break today. The girl at the top was rather ostentatiously taking photos with her vintage camera; I very surreptitiously took one of her with my faux vintage camera. The couple at the bottom are just about to embrace and leave in opposite directions.

Shooting From The Hip: Genoa 26/10/2010

The cool, gilded elegance of the Durazzo-Giustiniani archive in Genoa, where I have been reading the household account books of a sixteenth-century noblewoman.

Postcards from Italy

I'm on an extremely shaky internet connection in a youth hostel, but I couldn't resist the Beirut-inspired title of this post, and sharing a few snaps (sorry, I know I said I'd lay off the Hipstamatic, but I can't help myself!).

A little more Hipstamatizing...

Sleeve from Tealeaves Cardigan - more on that later!

Top Secret Gift Project!

I'm having such fun Hipstamatizing everything in sight that I've revived my dusty Flickr account, so if anyone's at all interested in these you can check out my stream here. I hope you're all having lovely Fridays.

Hipstamatic (G)love

I have finally succumbed to the lure of the iPhone, and have been playing around with the Hipstamatic app to photograph my Farinelli gloves.

It's been making me think about photographing knitwear. There is the urge to produce a faithful, true-to-life document, and visually to convey technical details about the pattern and the yarn (one of the most common notes on Ravelry project pages is 'the colour is most accurate in x photo'). I wonder, though, if being too anal about these aspects sometimes makes for boring photos...

The colours in the above photo are wildly inaccurate, but maybe that's ok - to my mind, it captures more of the evanescent 'spirit' of the glove. What do you think? Are they annoyingly misleading?