As usual, the spoken bit's HERE This time last year, at the beginning of the first lockdown, I made a list of all the things I wanted to achieve. Amongst a wide variety of stuff was learning to crochet. Now there are many thousands of good people out there in You Tube Land showing off their crochet skills, some of them are even quite good teachers. I was fairly ruthless in my elimination - some folk have annoying mannerisms of speech, some I simply could not understand properly (there are some American accents I find almost impenetrable I'm afraid - I am British, after all!). But in the end I had a nice selection of channels who gave out good information and explained things to my satisfaction. Among several, there were Bonny Bay, Hooked by Robin, Olga Poltrova, Fiber Spider and Mikey from The Crochet Crowd. In the process of all this learning, I found myself downloading patterns where I could and learning to read them (thank y...
Should you wish to listen to this blog post, please press HERE So now you have the basics of sewing a little book under your belt... it is time to talk about paper. Hopefully you followed my suggestion of cutting different sorts of paper - and perhaps you noticed that sometimes a piece of paper cuts, or folds, more easily in one direction than the other. This is because paper has a 'grain' (rather like wood). I don't want to disappear down the very large rabbit hole that is paper-making, but it is useful to know that whatever base material is used for making paper - wood-pulp, plant fibres, mulberry bark, cotton or indeed old paper - it is broken down to its basic fibres and mixed with a lot of water to make a slurry, which then finds its way onto some sort of fine mesh. The way the fibres are aligned in the paper-making process produces the grain. One direction will always be easier to fold on a piece of paper than another. That is called folding along,...
You can find the spoken version here Wow, it's ages since I ran a blog! I've done them before over the years, but they inevitably run out of steam (my baking blog) or just end naturally (my 2007 holiday blog). Anyway, too much time on my hands in these plague-ridden times calls for radical action... The blog will be odd jottings and musings about 'this and that' - things I find interesting, amusing, even irritating,mostly related to my interests...
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