Frances Collier: September 2009

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Saturday, September 26, 2009

You know that I love old buildings in New York. This morning I was sitting around and packing, but mostly sitting around, and thought to myself that it would be wonderful if there were some collection of old pictures of New York on the internets.

Behold: images from the series "Old New York" from the blog If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.

Columbus Circle, 1933

Eden Museum, 1900

Flat Iron Building, 1903

Grand Central Terminal, 1914

Herald Square, 1905

Hester Street, 1901

Lower Broadway, 1899

Lower Manhattan, 1942

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1893

Hudson.

Last week or so we went to see some friends who live near the Hudson River. We stopped by the Hudson to say hello.

Hello, big, sparkly, dirty river.*

*Actually an estuary.

Words, words, words.

I've always been fascinated by letters, fonts, ink, and all the factors that affect the way words look on the page. When I was ten or eleven, we had an old computer that didn't automatically use round quotation marks (you know, these: “”). But I hated the normal, straight quotation marks - so I learned a code, consisting of six keys, that could be typed in order to produce the much more acceptable round quotation marks. There were separate codes for the beginning and ending quotation marks and for creating round apostrophes. I memorized them all and used them every single time I wrote (which was a lot).

As I got older, I became fascinated by fonts. I liked Garamond, the font used in the Harry Potter books. I was also partial to any font that produced perfectly straight "y" letters. I didn't like when the tail of the y curved in at all. Nowadays I write exclusively in Times New Roman, which is a little boring, but I find that anything fancier interferes with the meaning of the words. Words to me are still like physical things, and the shape of the letters themselves change what the word is.

When I was bored the other night, I decided to experiment with photographing words from my own writing. I really liked the result. In the pictures you can see the pixels between the letters, which look like they're kept in place by a lattice of rainbow colors. It's very odd how the camera can pick up things that you can't see normally.

In most of the pictures, you can't read the writing well enough to get a sense of what's going on, but I like that. It forces you to see the words by themselves, independent of their contextual meaning. It's also just cool.

This was my favorite chapter when I took these pictures. Now I think another chapter has replaced it.

This was my favorite chapter before thirteen was my favorite chapter.

Tory Deist watchmakers.

Description of a flying machine.

Giant Squids? Why not. Giant Squids.

This part takes place in Maine.

And this part is in Scotland.

How many Beowulf references does your story have?

There are two words in this picture that will confirm what you may have suspected about a certain character.

This part is just weird.

Sea of Souls.

Matters of great importance.

I suck at packing. I don't like the act of packing or the concept itself. I really don't understand why my clothes and everything can't just appear in my room at Oxford when I get there. You'd think that's how it should be, or at least how it should be at Hogwarts. But no, even Hogwarts students have to pack their trunks and haul them on to a train. Don't you think that's a bit weird? I mean, they go to a school where their professors can turn into cats and shit but they can't get a magic closet that makes any item of clothing they want simply materialize? And with all of the magical transportation technology that exists in the wizarding world, the students still have to take the train?

These are things you think about eleven years after you read the first Harry Potter book. You also think about things on Etsy, because why not. These are some things that caught my eye this weekend:

Initial letter M antique typewriter ring, qacreate

[I don't really wear rings that often, but if I did, I would wear this one all the time.]

Oatmeal Soopascarf, Yokoo

[I've been a fan of Yokoo for quite some time. I love her oversized, cozy knitted things, but furthermore I just love her style. I don't know if I could pull off wearing a scarf three times the size of my head, but she definitely can.]

Kitty no. 130, penguinandfish

[Effing adorable. I don't think it would be a good idea for me to own one, though. Sometimes the cute can push me over the edge. I mean, I almost died just looking at this.]

Softspoken crochet bubble beret in rust, softspoken

[This reminds me of the terribly cute Cable and Bobble Hat from Boden, although this one is crocheted. I need to find a pattern so that I can make me one.]

NYC plate, Esther Coombs

[This complements my recently acquired NYC architecture obsession quite nicely.]

Eco Toes in golden yellow, infusion

[These remind me of the dream I had last night about trying to get to somewhere while I was stuck somewhere else on a snowy mountain. If I had been wearing these shoes at the time, they probably wouldn't have helped, but they would have made me feel happier.]

Friday, September 25, 2009

Today in Photobooth.

My mom got new glasses. I like them a lot except for the fact that they make me almost barf when I put them on. My mom's vision is like 20/2 million or something. By the way, my bangs are whack today. I don't know what's up with that.

My baby has a new favorite place to take a bath: on top of a chair in the living room. I managed to get this picture of me and her with her furry belly showing.

I'm going to miss her and her furry belly.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

More little birds.

I took some more pictures of my Little Birds cardigan (design by Ysolda Teague). You can see the first batch of pictures that I took here. I liked that batch, but these pictures show the cardigan better, I think. Both of them make me laugh because they remind me of the elaborate set-up that went into getting the camera in the right place. For the pictures below, for instance, I used a clothes drying rack, across which I piled a stack of books, on top of which I put the camera. It was very precarious.

If you like the Little Birds pattern and are wondering whether it's too difficult for you, JUST DO IT. For serious. I thought that this pattern would eat me alive, and it did, but not in the way I thought it would. What makes the pattern difficult is the sheer amount of knitting involved. It's an issue of endurance, not skill. Although you need skill too. I was familiar with most of the skills in the Little Birds pattern when I started, but not all. These are the techniques that I did for the first time while knitting the cardigan:

-Provisional cast-on
-Tubular cast-on
-Cable cast-on
-One row buttonholes
-Cutting a steek
-Three needle bind-off (which was actually a four needle bind-off)

The pattern explains how to do some of these things, but not all. For the ones that weren't explained, I relied on random knitting blogs and knittinghelp.com.

I realized today that I am nearing the two year anniversary of my beginning to knit. Like many knitters, I learned how to do a simple knit stitch when I was little, but I didn't actually make anything until college. I joined my school's Stitch & Bitch in freshman year. And I blogged about it. I wrote a blog post about my first scarf on October 22, 2007 (you can see it here). On October 15, I announced my intentions to start knitting seriously (here). I suppose I shall consider October 15 to be my official knitaversary.