Knitting

Knitting is a craft that I have loved. I can't knit now for more than a few minutes at a time. But there is still something magical about the feel of the yarn and the whole process of turning it from a string into a fabric, and eventually from a flat fabric into a garment or other useful item - or even into a work of art, and it still calls to me and tempts me to buy pretty yarns from time to time.
Knitting (and I would include crochet in this, being a similar craft involving knotting a single fibre to build up a fabric) is one of our most ancient crafts. You can do it with fingers or with sticks, as well as with the knitting needles we use now.
And there are wonderful yarns out there now. My choice used to be horribly limited - I like soft and fluffy yarns, shiny or bobbly yarns... and smooth, crunchy cottons. Most of the fluffies used to be mohair based or wool, both of which are inimical to me, but these days I have my pick of the "man-made" yarns.

Way back in the day, my parents, struggling for money with four teenage daughters, started a small mail-order wool-supply business. It did moderately well, and a by-product was that there were an awful lot of small quantities of different dye-lots - a few ounces at a time, quantities too small to be sold, in many different shades. And as it happened, most of that leftover yarn was Bri-Nylon (trademark I think)... an early nylon yarn with quite a soft feel, at least on the ball. So my father bought a knitting machine and spent many Sunday afternoons making what seemed to be hundreds of stripy sweaters for us.
In Bri-Nylon. Now the thing about Bri-Nylon is that it washes and dries quickly, lasts forever, and that with repeated washing it changes its feel, becomes hard and ropey, and very gradually shrinks. We wore these stripy sweaters for a VERY long time. And grew to hate them... as they became tighter and harder to get on and off, we used to try and snag them on bushes just to wear them out faster.

So with all this spare yarn, and very little pocket money, for Christmas time we were encouraged to knit presents for one another and other people and I developed a serious addiction to knitting patterns. I started to make many knitted items; some I even completed, though the delight was more in the starting than in the completion. There were knitted and crochet hats, bags, scarves, toys, jewellery, for instance, this being the Sixties. So began my interest in making 3D items in yarn. And over many years I collected many hundredweight, eventually, of knitting magazines and patterns. I found knitting books too, sometimes in the jumble sales we visited from time to time, and later in the "charity shops" that developed (IMHO) as a by-product of Thatcher's economy in Britain. The hobby of knitting for me became the hobby of studying knitting magazines, sorting them into "I might make that for..." or "I have enough yarn of the right colour to make that" and I still did occasionally make something. I had a wonderful deep turquoise crochet cotton tunic I made during many long hours travelling by train, started before I was married, that I actually wore right through my first pregnancy until it was completely stretched out of shape and useless for a non-pregnant shape. I had a pretty apricot-coloured crochet lace dress that I wore to death, again it took literally years to finish but was much admired. (I did long to make a crochet wedding dress but decided I wanted to get married sooner than that!)

I still remember Daddy knitting. My mother refused to touch the machine, and with reason. It was an old machine, with small, evil, hooked needles that held each stitch. If you were unlucky, when you ran your arm with the carriage across the needlebed to knit each row, the carriage made a roaring sound and had to be pulled across with quite a lot of force. The needles could be slow in returning back to their "bed" where they were held safely captive, and remain sticking out so that they caught the skin of your forearm as it pushed the carriage across... You couldn't wear any kind of protective garment, or the needles would shred that too. So he sat there in his trousers and vest, post-Sunday-afternoon bath, in a good mood and fought this knitting machine, often with The Mikado playing on his tape recorder, the next enthusiasm. It really must have been a labour of love - I'm sure any blood was instantly washed out of the jumpers he made for us, but I do know my mother disposed of the machine into the garage (the store for all his finished enthusiasms) as soon as she could, where it slowly and gracefully rusted into oblivion. Unlike our sweaters, which my youngest sister eventually inherited.

Bah! Facebook

I've finally deleted my Facebook accounts. I had not used it much; an application that seems to be able to access some of my local information, that claims to give me freedom to communicate and express myself but in fact gives me NO chance to customise my "homepage" - that is difficult to use to actually communicate with people, which is its primary stated goal - large PHAIL in blinking lights.
I did get a large increase in spam from it, worse than I ever got from joining Yahoo Groups, which was admittedly pretty bad, but is worth it for the content.
Possibly because I didn't do it often, I found it difficult to actually SEND messages to people - I could write on their "wall" and it would be seen by anyone. Sending a message which would be seen only by them seemd next to impossible. So I made sure people I cared about had my real email, phone etc - old tech rules! and didn't use it.
I also contracted a very unpleasant trojan this spring which appeared to come from one of those many emails (and yes, I know - I NEVER open attachments to emails whoever they claim to be from). I had to reformat my whole machine because of that thing.
It was odd, too, WHO exactly wanted to add me to their friends list... I think four genuine friends (yes I know that's sad) and maybe five distant but genuine family members. And then literally SCORES of people who wanted to add me, that I had never heard of. WHY?
The Facebook apps worried me. Seemed to be a way to compromise my system, install stuff without any of the usual protection.
Writing - anything you write and publish on there becomes Facebook's property. As a writer, I want to keep MY material to MYSELF!
So I've used it very little over the years...
Interesting point: I DID have an alternate account, in a second name, which I kept completely separate. This was a fictional name, a name I used to use in a roleplaying game. Oddly, I had surprisingly many "people" asking this fictional character to befriend them, claiming to be a long-lost friend or frequently a member of my non-existent family. Including, of all people, one Barak Obama....
That capped it for me. At that point I deactivated my account.
Now with the latest round of scare stories about Facebook, I have had enough. I have deleted my account/s. If you want to do so too, read this http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account then log in to Facebook and then follow this link.