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I think that after years of making an effort to do so, I’ve finally taken up knitting seriously. My original and main intent is to try to purchase as little sweatshop made clothing as possible. It’s incredibly frustrating to me that my choices are so limited when it comes to considering the human rights of the person making a product. In the world I want to live in, it shouldn’t even be an issue.

Over the years I’ve also developed a contentious relationship with words and have found it difficult to convey what I want to get across. As someone who used to love what I could do with words and had a lot of confidence in my ability with them, it’s been distressing and I haven’t been able to work through it. I feel like I’m wrestling with them all the time. I can’t imagine a day when I’ll feel confident with them again.

Tonight I crafted a light and quick “About Me” (In Relation to Knitting!) for the knitting community I just joined, Ravelry, and felt it captured the easy way with words I used to have. I admit I’m sort of proud of it, and if I can’t showcase a way with words I want to recapture here, then where can I, right?? (And at the moment I’m not even supposed to be on the computer because carpal tunnel is kicking my ass!)

So here it is:

• I adore color. Love love love it. I think this is in part because I’ve done photography for many years in my spare time and capturing and photographing vivid color is one of my preoccupations.

• I can see this love of color aiding and abetting a development of a stash. In learning about and beginning to appreciate yarn over the past few months there have been many times when the color of something has made me go “I MUST have that now!” Luckily I’ve been able to consistently talk myself down from the edge.

• I am always cold. I daydream about the possibility of knitting up comfortable, incredibly warm garments (instead of the several ill fitting, uncomfortable layers that characterize my winter days now) and maybe a few light hoodies to deal with summer AC.

• I like fingerless gloves and find them useful to go about day to day business while never having to take them off. Every fall I buy a cheap, one size fits all pair of stretchy gloves and cut the fingers halfway. This has mostly worked fine for me besides the inevitable holes they suffer by the end, my always losing them, and the hints from people that I look homeless. I’m looking forward to the possibility of knitting up a number of quality, nice looking and warm pairs of fingerless gloves!!!

• I just got into graduate school and may join the ranks of commuting knitters.

• I guess another of my loves that resembles a knitter’s yarn stash is my book “stash”. I have hundreds of unread books and I’m trying to combine knitting and reading. My first try at reading from the screen while knitting was a dismal failure, but my second had limited success. Maybe one day I can graduate to books… lol. (I have a bias against audiobooks – not sure why.)

• I like to watch documentaries while I knit and call it “radical knits.” (That’s me making fun of myself about taking myself too seriously!)

• I am waiting impatiently for carpal tunnel symptoms to clear up so I can finish my first project for my beginner’s class and rush headlong into one I’ve chosen. Typing certainly isn’t helping.

Now back to regularly scheduled broadcast. (I think Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are up next.)

Though I’ve been somewhat diligent about posting lately, I’ve been taking a long break from reading other blogs. Took a look at some of my feeds today and as usual, Brownfemipower is writing amazing stuff about why “private matters” are not just “private matters.” Also as usual, the comments are top notch.

An excerpt:

even more to the point–while young promising male congressional employees hobnob and network with other men to get to the or high power senator position, young promising women congressional employees are being manipulated and fucked with by dirty old man fuckwads. or they’re marrying dirty young man fuckwads in the hopes of helping their own careers.

and queer women of color are being thrown in prison for giving the police the finger. is it any wonder that cynthia mckinney had her run ins with the law? if a black woman can’t be fucked, what good is she/what the hell is she doing at the doors of Congress?

And my latest favorite picture -

I’ve been working my way through an Aperture lesson book (image organizing/light photo editing program) and didn’t think I could stand looking at and reading the dry text about sending one’s photos to scout “locations” with your “selects” for “a possible a job” one more time. Figured I’d liven up the web gallery lesson by using my own pictures and uploading to the site.

As easy as it was to get something decent looking, there doesn’t seem to be any way to mix vertical and horizontal images without getting ugly gaps on the index page. Unless I’m missing something, that’s an epic fail. And as usual, severe desaturation in Firefox!! Argh technology.

Some of the stuff has been uploaded before, some not. Had great success with some color saturation editing tonight and am pretty excited about it.

gwytherinn.com aperture gallery

This photo missed the mark for me in color.. did some experimental post processing on it last night, and I really like it. The intended goal was to make it black and white but I really liked the washed out colors and upped contrast. Click the picture to see both this and the color one.

Going out in a minute to go get a new lens – Nikon 50mm f/1.8.

I didn’t realize my laptop wasn’t plugged in and just lost half a post to a shut down. ANYWAY.

I promise I’ll get to slightly less boring things in the near future, as soon as I finish chronicling web site failures and hosting issues (and who knows what else at this rate!), dear loyal readers, 1 or 2 that you are. But since sleep and I don’t seem to be friends lately, I figured I’d regale you with the run in I had with luck today. (Of the bad variety.)

Among some of the things I’ve run into in the past few weeks, I had a ton of sensor gook, and it’s shown up in about 600 pictures now which makes me feel like an idiot. I kept thinking I had gotten it in the lenses only to see that I hadn’t. And then realized one of my lens’s polarizing filters is gone. Filters don’t just fall off. The viewfinder rubber piece has fallen off as well. So while these things were irritations, today was just bad.

After five years of owning my lovely Nikon D100 SLR camera I dropped it for the first time today. Usually I’m pretty paranoid and careful about my camera, but today carelessness and stupidity prevailed. I did not close my camera bag after taking a few shots with it, at which point camera hit pavement when I dragged my bag out of the car.

Ugh.

I think the sound must have stopped my heart for a moment.

Read more

Found her work by chance, and I love this group of pictures.

Joni Sternbach: Surfers

(And I love that there’s actually some sort of gender parity!! And all the women look strong!)

I lost my photo gallery in the move to a new host. I suppose “lost” is the wrong word to use, as I intentionally did not restore it. I actually forgot about it completely until a friend mentioned it to me one day…. in realizing it was still there, I decided that it would be one more thing to renovate on the site. It was a relic, and an oversized, bloated one at that.

I’ve been alternating between researching new options to display pictures and looking through the first batch of pictures I’ve taken in years (yes, years) while on a hiking trip the other day.

I go through a lot of mental wrangling when it comes to taking pictures. (But then, don’t I with everything?) I switched to a digital SLR a few years back and I feel as though I lost something important in the transition. I don’t think I’ve ever been strong on the technical aspects of photography, but this has really allowed me to slack off. So while the camera has more than made up for itself in the volume of pictures it allows me to take, it allowed me to completely let go of the understanding of the way things work. There was a finite amount of tries to get the shot right with a manual SLR. I had to calculate to get the shot the way I wanted it. I’d like to get that back with my digital.

Another thing is, I adore color. I’ve always found that the pictures taken on my digital SLR have been lackluster in comparison to what is in front of me. I’m being pretty harsh on myself as I look through these shots and recall how deep the colors were when viewing them in person and the comparison to what I captured. I’ve always been frustrated with the idea that one needs to “retouch” the shots in a photo program to get them to look their best. I’m trying to move away from that… Reading through a photo retouching thread last night on Flickr, I came across someone commenting on “purists.” It’s not that you’re doing anything different from the way it used to be with the darkroom process – there was certainly retouching going on there – it’s just that the tools are now different. And you know what, he’s right.

So, I think one of the things I’d like to tackle in the near future is relearning the technical aspects of photography and sharpening my understanding of them – learning to work with my DSLR rather than letting it dull my abilities.

The 27 that made the cut.

I’ve also opened a Flickr account.

I dusted the moth balls off the photo gallery….. Damn it’s been awhile… I guess another project to tidy up. Now in the Linkroll.

• flickr

  

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  • Evil Slutopia: Is Your Fetus More Important Than You Are? 2010/02/21
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  • Violence against women is justified, says pupil study 2010/02/15
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  • The Feminist Who Made me Blush - Katha Pollitt's Learning to Drive 2010/02/03
    Where her bold confessional purportedly leaves her looking foolish, few people got bunched up over the excruciating memoir "American Sucker" by New Yorker film critic David Denby, about losing tons of money and all perspective in the wake of his wife's leaving their 18-year marriage. A couple of critics griped that he revealed too much personal stuff, but mostly, his self-exposure was welcomed. Publisher's Weekly printed a review of the book that asserted, "the work is more appealing when Denby focuses on himself ... Denby brutally details his decline, from a night of impotence to an affair with a married woman, then a six-month obsession with Internet porn -- harrowing stuff for a New Yorker staff writer ... More of Denby, and less of the Nasdaq, would have made this good book even better."
    
  • The Haiti Haters 2010/01/31
    The reason some people call the Haitian quake biblical is that they believe, whether consciously or not, that it is a sort of divine retribution for the temerity of the Haitian Revolution, and for the idea that black people could take charge of their own lives.