Story: The Day We Didn’t Kiss

(Another small thing I wrote in February; Yarn stories will follow, I have knit a lot, but I don’t have the headspace to write about it at the moment. Please bear with me.)

The Day We Didn’t Kiss

It was raining that day, and yet, we didn’t kiss.

The reason why I am explicitly stating this is that we went swimming while it was raining, and that we were naked, but we didn’t kiss. We didn’t even touch each other in the slightest.

Well – this is not quite true. Our fingertips touched, but briefly.

Maybe I should explain how I got into the water in the first place.

I had over-socialised and felt empty. When I got up, the sound of pouring rain filled the little hut, and I declined an invitation for waffles in the community centre ‘where everyone would be’. I drank my coffee, leaning against the counter and looking out of the window.

A decision formed in my head.

I put my mug away and stepped out. A few steps brought me to the shore of the lake our huts grouped around. Nobody was to be seen.

I stripped naked and, before I could chicken out, plunged into the water.

So cold.

But only for a few moments.

I had never been swimming in the rain, and I had never swum naked, but now I was paddling out onto the lake, raindrops above me, the lake under me.

I turned onto my back, spread my arms wide and closed my eyes.

Then I became one with the rain.

The water surrounded me, caressing my body, kissing my face with a thousand raindrops. My thoughts emptied into the lake.

No one was there.

Only the rain.

Silence.

Suddenly, something touched my fingertips, and I gasped, and swallowed a load of water.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you!”

Coughing, I wiped the water from my eyes and looked into her face – she was genuinely concerned. Worried even.

“You’re alright?”

Her hair was tied up in a bun.

“Yeah. I just didn’t expect anybody.”

I was treading water. So was she. Her hair was as wet as mine.

“I’ve never been swimming in the rain”; she said, her eyes suddenly shining, “and I just needed some peace and quiet.”

I raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Sounds just like me.”

She nodded and seemed to ponder something. “Shall we enjoy it together?”, she asked, “the peace and quiet, I mean?”

I smiled. I had to. We grinned at each other, there in the water, the rain pouring down upon us, and I nodded. She turned onto her back and stretched out her arms, and I saw that she had no clothes on, just as I. She saw me looking at her.

“What?!”

I shook my head and laid back, arms outstretched. I closed my eyes.

Silence.

Except it was different than before. There was another, a separate entity beside me, but funnily enough, it didn’t bother me. My ears filled with water again.

No one was there but us.

Only the rain.

And then we heard the thunder.

I opened my eyes and looked into the sky – the clouds had darkened considerably, and another thunder was rolling towards us.

“I think we should get out.”

I looked at her, and she nodded. Side by side, we swam to the shore, swiftly, but not racing each other. We grabbed our clothes and ran towards my hut, seeking shelter under the roof, shivering. We were cold again. We smiled at each other, and went inside and had tea.

So there.

It was raining that day, and yet, we didn’t kiss.

(© Julia Müller, 02.02.2018)

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Story: Road Trip. A Story, or a Dream

(This is not about yarn, but I wrote a small story today, and I’d like to share it with you. Enjoy! Feedback is always welcome. 😉 Yarny stories will follow.)

Road Trip. A Story, or a Dream.

I want to sit next to you. In the car.
We both in the front, you at the wheel.
Just us.

We’re not talking much. You point at the stereo.
“Can I turn it off?”
“Sure.“

We drive in silence.
Comfortable silence, not the kind where you are trying to make conversation, searching for words, trying to communicate, frantically grabbing random words from the shelves of your brain and stuffing them into your mouth only to watch them tumble out again.
Good silence.

I love to know you beside me.
Breathing.
Alive.
Sharing this same spot on the planet with me.
It’s not like in the stories – I don’t get a whiff of your aftershave, my perfume doesn’t blend in with the smells in the car. Our scents don’t mix. They don’t need to.

The road goes on.
The car is warm.

“Did you ever-”
You don’t look at me, eyes on the road, the sound of your voice fills the car and my ears, and now we are talking movies, talking books, talking music, talking about whatever comes to our minds, and just as the silence before, the flow of words that runs between us now feels good; natural.
We are stringing words, like pearls, weaving, not a web to entangle us, but a tapestry of sounds that binds our cores closer together and that, as we both know, will keep us warm much later.

We turn the music on.

Lunch is at a small diner, somewhere. We both eat sandwiches, salad, and share a plate of fries.
Again, we’re not talking much. You buy yourself a beer.

When we get back to the car, we switch seats.
You look out of the window, lost in thought – and then you look at me, ask me a question, I answer.
We’re working on the tapestry again.

Night falls.
You are asleep, in the passenger seat, head tilted back, arms crossed in front of your chest. I smile, and turn down the volume of the radio.

We will stop at a motel, later, and we will talk and we’ll eat, and we’ll drink, and we might watch some stupid TV show, and I will write and fall asleep, curled up on my bed, and when I wake up, in the middle of the night, you will be there, in the bed beside me, sleeping. Or you might still be up, watching TV, sports.

The next day, it’s your turn to drive.

 

© Julia Müller, 28.01.2018

Last haul for 2017

HO HO HO!

Is everybody getting into the Christmas spirit at last? I hope you are … I have a bit of a problem, but maybe it will hit me full force tomorrow.

The last few days were busy for us, and I am really glad that I finished my Christmas knitting on time this year … I wouldn’t have had much time to finish it this week. On Thursday, we baked the last two batches of cookies (we decided to give homemade cookies as presents to some people, as it’s nothing that will collect dust and cookies are always appreciated) – in between that, I made two trips to the post office to get a package. Yesterday, I worked on the PhD dissertation for almost three hours, answered emails for my second job, wrote an important email for the first job (I will have to meet my boss before the year ends, because there was some mistake with my extra hours, please keep your fingers crossed for me, if you can), and made a last trip to the post office and the drugstore, while Philipp cleaned the flat and did some last minute grocery shopping. Then we put the tree up and wrapped the presents; everything that was left to do today was cleaning the shower (me), dealing with one more load of laundry (us) and decorating the tree (also us). Now, Philipp is at the local Christmas market, meeting some friends, while I am taking the evening off, having wrapped his presents. I did the rest of the laundry and ironed the last tea towels and blouses, and now it’s writing this blog post and tea and knitting for me, while listening to some cyberpunk ambient sound.

While I was working away on my chores, I was always hoping for the doorbell to ring – because I expected YARN. (or YARRRRRN).

It came at last.

Now, if I did one thing in 2017, it was buy yarn, but this is the last haul for a while – that is set. I have so much of it now that it spills into the living room, and I will flash my stash after Christmas so we can have a better look at it. For now I want to show you what I got from this wonderful, awesome shop I found online (a lot of the yarn I bought was purchased there. Ahem.).

All of this yarn came Angelina, a very talented indie dyer who lives in London and operates the etsy shop gamercrafting. She has sock yarn, lace yarn, superbulky yarn, stitch markers, and lots of cool stuff, shipping is superfast, and while this package took almost two weeks to arrive, I was 100% sure that it is worth waiting for. Let’s have a look what I got …

This lace yarn was going out of stock, and I am happy to say that I got the last skein! It belonged to the Halloween themed series, and has the wonderful name “Pumpkin spice”. I’m not a Starbuck’s fan, and I don’t drink coffee usually, but I do love brown and can wear it well, and I am seriously looking forward to knitting this up into something nice (it will be nice. More than nice. This is 100% Merino we’re talking about).

The next skein is also lace yarn, but the theme is very, very different …

Meet Angelina’s Alien themed hand dyed lace yarn in the colourway “Weyland-Yutani”, the company that employs some of the biggest arseholes Ellen Ripley probably ever encountered! (we did watch Aliens on Sunday, and I hated Burke. Passionately. Sorry for the outburst).

I already have two other skeins of this series, Faded Stompers and LV 426 (the planet where the Nostromo-crew finds the aliens), and I have made myself a shawl from the latter yarn that I forgot to show you. Lace yarn from gamercrafting always comes in singles, but it’s sturdy and knits up like a dream (because it’s 100% Merino. Just sayin’).

The last yarn is the exact opposite of lace …

It’s superbulky yarn from the Harry Potter themed series in the colourway Patronus. Knitting with superbulky yarn is very unusual for me, but since E. got me two balls of it the year before last for Christmas, I have somewhat made my peace with it and I appreciate how quickly it knits up. (does anybody want to guess what kind of fiber this is? Yeah? You in the back? That’s right, me luv, it’s 100% Merino!)

These three skeins added another 315g to my stash (skeins are always genereously weighed, another feature I appreciate), and, provided I don’t get any yarn for Christmas, this will be it for a while.

And so, this is it for today, I think …

I hope that you have a very jolly and peaceful Christmas, my friends, I hope your family gathering will be great, that there will be no fights and no arguments, that everybody loves the gifts you got them, handmade or not (or at least are polite enough to say thank you!), and that, while it can be a bit much, you have a great, wonderful time.

Merry Christmas!

Julia.

P.S.: In case anybody is wondering: No, this is not a sponsored post. I pay for my yarn like anybody else, but I’m all for supporting the artists. 🙂

Shortly before Christmas

Hello there!

Before I disappear again for too long again, I thought I’d give you a quick update – I uploaded a lot of pictures today, and prepared some posts so hopefully, blogging will be a bit easier. For now, I just wanted to give you an update on what’s new, and I hope everybody is okay with that. 🙂 Let’s go …

Do you remember this picture from the last blog post? These socks

are done!

I love them so much. They are very simple, just a k2,p2 pair of socks with one half-round of purl stitches before I started the toe decreases. For a bit of contrast, I did an eye of patridge heel:

And I am incredibly happy about them.

Philipp got socks:

And I am very proud of them, because I somewhat designed them on my own. They have ribbing at the back and small patches of ribbing at the front.

(I might put the ribbing all the way down to the top half of the afterthought heel next time though)

He loves them. And so do I.

Right now, there are two WIPs on my needles: For one, I  picked up the Perfidy à l’orange shawl again (the pattern is only called Perfidy, but my sense of humor is a bit strange sometimes). After ripping out what I had (because I got confused and didn’t know where I was in the pattern), I started anew, but got worried that the fabric was too loose or too tight. I bound off at six pattern repeats and treated the tiny shawl like a swatch:

Then I decided I liked the fabric and accidentally undid the cast on instead of the bind off.

Then I stuffed the shawl into timeout.

A week or so later, I picked it up again, and so far, things have been going great:

Knitting is easy, the Russian joints haven’t made any problems so far, and adding wedges to the main section is happening intinuitively.

Not to brag, but I think, we’re friends now.

The other WIP is something I am really excited about. It’s a pair of socks for Philipp (again), but this time – in Matrix-coloured yarn.

It may sound weird, but I had my eye on this yarn for two years, but never really dared to buy it, because Philipp wasn’t into too-bright or too colourful socks two years ago. Since this has changed significantly, I just grabbed the yarn when I was at the LYS in September and had 300g of sock yarn in the basket already anyway, and was determined to make a pair of Sci-Fi socks for him. When I brought it home, he got very excited, commenting on how cool the yarn looked and that um, YES, he’d TOTALLY like a pair of socks out of that, but if I wanted to make something for ME that was fine as well … 😉

I cast on last Sunday, when we sat down to watch Aliens, and it was the best combination ever.

Instead of knitting vanilla socks, I decided to purl all the green stitches, and I absolutely love the effect. The socks were set aside until today, when I knit on them in between two trips to the post office and baking two batches of cookies with Philipp:

I just love the combo of Science Fiction and knitting on these socks, with some Cyberpunk ambient sound playing in the background.

Christmas knitting is done, by the way, and I’ll be showing my knits after the holidays. 😉

Take care and please don’t let yourself get too stressed out, my friends!

All the love,
Julia 😀

The long silence

Dear friends,

I haven’t written since summer. There are a couple of reasons for that, but I don’t want to talk about why I didn’t write really (it was mostly stress-related), but rather share what I am working on right now.

My stash has grown excessively this year – I’ve surpassed the 13kg of yarn (which is … well, kind of counter productive if you wanted to stashbust), but to be honest, I have given up on trying to refrain from buying for this year, and I’ll shift stashbusting to the next year. (please remind me of that. 😉 )

Philipp and me have been on vacation in Scotland – and while we were there, I did not only buy another kilogram’s worth of yarn,

but I also asked for his hand in marriage, and he said yes! So now, after almost 13 years together, we are happily engaged, and while this is a BIG THING for me, I am really, really happy (he is, too. The first thing he said after we were done hugging, kissing and crying was “You beat me to it”, and I don’t think there is a better reaction to a marriage proposal. 😉 ).

So, just a quick update on what I am working on right now!

Of course, it’s socks. I’m always knitting socks. Earlier this year, I treated myself to three gorgeous Opal skeins of the “Schafpate”-collection, and although the blue ball was originally intended to become socks for Philipp (I frogged his hideous birthday pair in the end), they ended up too small.

The first one is done, and I am FINALLY at the gusset decreases for the second sock!

The other WIP (which got shoved aside a bit) is a Mousseux-shawl in natural white:

And I am just showing you this photo because it’s the first time that I did not fuck up the garter tab. It looks really nice when done right, actually! 😉

Since this modest beginning, the shawl grew significantly:

and I worked on it on train rides in Scotland and in the hotel rooms in the evenings. I’m making it a bit bigger than the original, and so far, the garter stitch is working its magic again, I love this knit!

Christmas knitting has also started already, and I actually have a pair of mittens that I can show you at the end of next week. 😉

So, to keep this sweet and short – would you like to see some pictures of Scotland? Is anybody still reading this blog? It feels awkward to write here again after being silent for so many months, but I’d like to get into the habit again, and I’d be thrilled if you wanna come with me!

All the love, my friends! Take care!
Julia 🙂

You know you’ve got the right guy …

… when he enters the room, sees you digging through the HUGE STASH BOX and, instead of complaining about the yarn on the couch, and the yarn in the living room, and the yarn in the plastic bags in the living room and the yarn in the footstool with storage, mildly remarks:

“Oh. The chamber of yarn has been opened.”

Going red, no, green

If there is one thing I am really passionate about, it’s … the environment and recycling. I kid you not.

Growing up, recycling and preventing unneccessary waste was a big thing in my family (it still is), and that includes not using tons of chemicals for cleaning, but simple stuff, like, for example, vinegar to get off chalk stains, and using baking powder and vinegar to clean pipes. Taking cloth bags instead of plastic ones. Choose the loose fruit, not the one in plastic packages.

Recently, I’d like to take this a little step further. Over the last few years, I have knit a couple of dishcloths, and Philipp and I have agreed that I will make more, and, in the long run, use self-made ones instead of storebought ones.

But there is more. Simple cleaning is something that seems to sit in the corner of my brain and climbs on top of my thoughts from time to time, and a few days ago, I googled for recipes to make your own cleaners and found a great website that tells you how to make your own (they also have tips for saving money, and recipes, and upcycling stuff – it’s a German website, but you might want to have a look).

I got the ingredients to mix our own washing powder, and I’m really excited to try it! We also debated mixing our own dishsoap, but Philipp is a bit hesitant (he is willing to give it a try though, despite being sceptical).

I know that this probably sounds really hippie for a lot of folks, but it’s important to me. We have lavender and sage on the balcony for the bees and bumble bees, we take care to buy eco friendly and local, we recycle, we donate stuff we don’t need anymore, and the next thing is to safe a bit of money and consume maybe a bit less in the cleaning department.

I am also planning on making a small string bag like this one when we buy fruit so we can put an end to these small plastic bags we do not have use for anymore (at least not that often) and which tend to pile up in the kitchen, but shh. Don’t tell Philipp. I think it might be a bit much right now. 😉

Pattern: Boxy Dishcloth (freebie on ravelry!)

Yarn: Wolle Roedel Universal cotton, 66,3m / 72.5y

 

Have a wonderful weekend, my friends! I’ll be on the sofa, nursing my sore throat and drinking lots of tea. 😉
Julia 🙂