Things that The Person doesn't have in his kitchen

- A peeler

- A grater

- A ladle

- An oven dish

- Kitchen roll (he uses toilet roll instead)

Pretty much every other day The Person gets an e-mail from me going "Am I mad or do you not have?....." followed by him going "Nope" and then a reason as to why he doesn't have said item whilst I sit with my head in my hands at home wondering how the hell I'm going to make a meal this evening.

It's been interesting times in the kitchen...

Edited to add: Add a masher to the list. I just discovered there is no masher.

Observations of the unemployed #003

It's actually really difficult to fill in job applications and try and sell yourself when the very fact that you were made redundant means that you feel kind of worthless.

People will tell you over and over again that you shouldn't take being made redundant personally but it's incredibly hard not to as it is, after all, a form of rejection. I think it especially feels like that for me because I was the only person doing my job - it's not as if they were making a team smaller and someone got the spot instead of me, I was seen as just completely irrelevant and got rid of.

I find job applications difficult enough at the best of times because I'm not a crower and a bragger but they're even more difficult when you've been kicked in the teeth. There's a part of you that wants to go "Well if I worked for these people for 5 years and they couldn't see the point of me then how on earth can I make someone else see that I'm worth hiring?"

And that sucks.

Observations of the unemployed #002

In your quest to find new things to do and distract yourself from the depression which threatens to overwhelm you, you will decide to try a new form of social networking and join Twitter.

And then realise you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.

(But the highlight of your day will be when Graze replies to one of your Tweets.)

Come find me: @Shippers1983

 -------------------------

PS I think that I've been away so long everyone might have forgotten my sense of humour. Just to refresh: I am super sarcastic and the things that I say tend to be a little tongue in cheek. I haven't really taken out any payday loans and given all my money to sick children.

Observations of the Unemployed #001

Things that could happen to you when you've been unemployed for some time and have watched a lot of daytime TV:

You could give away all your money as a result of endless adverts urging you to donate money to various charitable causes - neglected children, starving children, just generally sick children.

But it's ok, you can get one of those loans which are a mere 2,567% APR.

Gone for not forgotten

I've had a nagging feeling for ages and I haven't been able to work out what it was. And so I filed it with the other 12 billion things that are nagging at me at the moment and left it alone. But still it persisted and I couldn't shake it no matter what I did.

Eventually I realised what it was. It was this little guy. This poor abandoned blog of mine which has been left in a state of limbo for most of the month.

That is not good and for that I apologise. Not that I believe anyone has been wringing their hands and looking up to the sky and screaming "Why?! WHY?! Why is she not posting?!" but I just don't like leaving things up in the air with no explanation.

The fact is that I've fallen a bit out of love with the blogging game for the past month. I've been crazily hectic at work (since being told I was being made redundant, I was moved to a different area of the company and have been working for a catering supplier - yeah. Don't ask. That is not what I'm qualified to do. Let's not go into it.) and with everything going on I've just felt the need to be silent. I didn't want to fill the blog up with post after post after post of moaning and whinging and I didn't really know what else to write about so I decided not to write at all. And now, after not having written for a month I don't know whether I really want to come back at all.

But I also know that I'm going through a tough time at the moment and that's probably not putting me in the best frame of mind at the moment.

And so I am officially putting the blog on hold for a while. I realise this post is about a month too late but hopefully it will put to bed one nagging feeling which will be progress for my poor frazzled brain.

I'll be back...

The only thing that makes me sit still.

I have issues with sitting still and not doing anything.

Don't get me wrong. I can sit and watch TV for 5 hours straight like the best of them, but that won't be the only thing I'm doing. I'll be tidying up or doing cross-stitch or writing an e-mail or doing all kinds of jiggery pokery. I won't just be sitting there.

I can be a bit of nightmare in cinemas because I can't just sit and watch the damn film. I know it's a good film if I've managed to sit still for about an hour. But I'll be shifting in my seat and fighting the urge to go and do something else with my time.

But there is one thing that has the ability to make me stop. Completely. And allow myself to be lost in a moment. No wriggling about, no wanting to check what time it is, no desiring the need to find some cross stitch or crochet to keep me from getting bored.

 

The ballet.

 

Yes I know. Hello my name is middle class.

 

I don't know what it is about it. Sometimes I haven't got a clue what the hell is going on but somehow it still makes sense. And even if it doesn't make sense, for some reason it doesn't seem to matter. I am transfixed and taken away from myself and my neverending brain, demanding that I always be "doing".

 

I've seen some of the big traditional ballets and when I saw that the Northen Ballet was doing a production of Beauty and the Beast I was really intrigued. With Mother's Day coming up I decided that rather than buy Mum a bunch of flowers (to join the 2 other bunches of flowers that my unimaginative siblings send) I would spend the money and get her a ticket to go to the ballet later in the month.

 

I wasn't sure what to expect from this production. Not least because I have a major confession to make....I don't really know the story of Beauty and the Beast. I know, I hang my head in shame. I'm pretty rubbish when it comes to fairy stories and when you couple that with my general dislike of Disney films you'll find a paucity of information about swashbuckling princes and dynamic leading ladies.

 

However, this ballet might be by far and away the best ballet I've ever seen. It wasn't traditional at all, and I do wonder if that might have ruffled some feathers, there were certainly some grumblings from the old couple sat behind us. It was definitely more modern, it wasn't just ballerinas up on pointe all the time, there was much more modern dancing going on. I am not in the know of what you call all the different dance genres and I'm desperately trying to conjure up some of the names of the dances that I've seen on the few episodes of So You Think You Can Dance that I've seen. I'm going to go with Contemporary I think. More of that than just straight up ballet.

 

And the costumes. Oh the costumes! Absolutely one hundred per cent the best costumes I've ever seen. And the same goes for the set design. Some might think those things are the unneccesary extras but believe me they made the show.

 

I sat there and although I did look up the story on Wikipedia at the end of the night (I'm way too cheap to buy the programme I'm afraid) it was mostly to confirm what I thought was  going on, rather than figure out what the hell everyone was on about.

 

The production is still touring and I urge you to go and see it if it's near you. Especially if you haven't really done the ballet before, this would be a great choice.

For more info go here.

The Craft List

What do you say we stop talking about jobs and redundancies and leaving Hull and all that kind of depressing stuff and focus on something totally frivolous? I can sense your wildly nodding heads from here.

There was an awful lot of crafting that's been going on these here parts. Well at least there was until the R-word came up and during all the uncertainty I seemed to develop a complete crafting paralysis. I would have thought that crafting would have been great as a way of channelling my efforts away from thinking up various job scenarios but instead my coping mechanism seemed to consist of a regimen of sitting and staring at the TV and a lot of sleeping.

But before that there was a lot going on and I feel it would be remiss not to document it in some way.

Crocheting
Now. Who else saw Heather's baby blanket and went into paroxysms of delight? Me too! I developed an overwhelming urge to just crochet these filled in granny squares, using any spare wool I could get my hands on. I was a woman possessed for some time and I swear at one point I became convinced that I was in the crochet version of The Red Shoes and I was literally going to not be able to put my crochet hook down until I died from exhaustion.

They are now sat in a stack where they shall remain because I really have no idea what I'm doing. I feel this might be something I have a flurry of activity on before it lies dormant. Perhaps I should call it the Mount Etna blanket.

Embroidery
I feel I've been bitten by some kind of embroidery bug lately and there is so much I want to do that's embroidery based. My head is bursting full of ideas about various things I could do. So much so that I might have to buy shares in the stock of embroidery hoop manufacturers if I ever actually carry out all of the things in my head.

Mostly in my head however is that I really want to learn how to do some new stitches. Especially inspired by the fact that one of my Not Really Resolutions this year is to learn how to do French Knots.

Whilst all these vague notions were spinning round my head, the Feeling Stitchy blog launched their January Stitch-along which was all about couching. I had bookmarked it to come back to later and when it was suddenly a few days away from Valentine's Day and I realised I hadn't made a card for The Person I whipped out some aida, yarn and thread and made something up on the spot. It was far from perfect and most definitely resembled something a child would do but it wasn't bad for a first attempt I thought. Especially a first attempt which probably took a grand total of 30 minutes, if that.

But then this sparked off something in my head and out of nowhere it came to me. I could quite easily do one piece of work and demonstrate lots of different stitches....

Now granted the picture below doesn't look like anything. That's because it was started in a flurry and I haven't picked it up since, but the idea is to fill the fabric inside this hoop with many many hearts of different sizes and shapes and in different embroidery stitches. There will be a stem stitch heart and a chain stitch heart and a running stitch heart and a backstitch heart...get where I'm going?

I got so incredibly excited about my idea that I had to start on it immediately and I thought that it would be cool to have, as a centre point, a fabric heart, which would be stitched in place. Now I realise why people are always bleating on about bondaweb. I decided to just cut out the heart and stitch it straight on. Not a good idea, you can see it's kind of wrinkled and baggy. I should have not been cheap and got hold of some bondweb, adhered it properly to the fabric and then stitched round it. I'm kind of undecided whether to start again with this one. But the idea is still bloody awesome and I'm getting it down now in case someone else thinks of it (which I'm sure they have by the way, it's highly unlikely I would have an original idea).

Cross Stitch
The biggest piece of cross stitch I've ever worked on is coming along very nicely. As you can see from the picture below I am officially finished cross stitching the main design and I am over the moon crazy in love with it.

I was actually dreading the back stitch part of it because it's really detailed in places and let's face it, backstitch is a pain in the proverbial at the best of times, let alone when you're doing it all over a piece like this. Plus I decided I would be a good girl and would backstitch over each individual square, instead of taking it over a few like I might be tempted to do for a card.

However, once I began the backstitch I could see the design really come to life. The windows immediately looked darker and stood out more. The brick work, which kind of made me want to die when I was doing it, makes the tower on the right look amazing.

This picture was taken at the end of February and I've done a lot more since then, but I think I'll wait until I'm done for a big reveal.

I also immediately began cross stitching the needle felt case which came with the January issue of CrossStitcher magazine. It's got soluble aida in it - brilliant! I went all kinds of wrong though in the beginning. Like I can't even explain to you how wrong I went. But thanks to my experience as a cross stitcher I didn't lose all faith and have a fit about it, I just made efforts to work around it and now I'm just pretending it never happened.

One bad thing though, that kit had absolutely nowhere near enough thread to complete the project. I'm a pretty frugal stitcher when it comes to thread and the red that was part of the kit barely did half the design. Luckily I had the matching colour already in my thread box but it seems to defeat the object of having a free gift if you don't provide people with the materials to actually stitch it.

I'm looking forward to finishing this because then I can finally stop finding needles stuck in random pieces of aida all over the place.

Oh and in between all of this I've also been working on another couple of mobiles that someone at work has asked me to do. Busy busy busy.

Now all I need to do is actually pick some of this stuff back up, instead of just sitting and staring at it and feeling overwhelmed. I'm almost feeling the need for another Gantt Chart here.

So. What have you been doing lately you crafty little lot?