This year it seems as though I've only knit for other people. Which is grand in its own way, because they are so excited/astonished/squeeful when they open up their mail! So there was mrvelocipede & il_professore's fib blanket, and lilly_rose's brain tumor post-op kerchiefs, and b_zedan's post-apocalyptic Road Warrior scarf, earlofgrey's tweedy Pip, and now . . .

Birthday hats for Endsend! Which allowed me the luxury of knitting all sorts of interestingly structured and architectural beanies, without the guilt of never wearing the finished product because Chronographia Can Not And Does Not Wear Beanies.



Because, you see, when you have hair as long and baby-fine and slippery as mine, beanies cling to the skull for a grand total of fifteen seconds before they sproing off behind you. (My camera has a ten second shutter delay, thank goodness.) And when you do manage to jam the things down on your head, you look like a dork. These were happily shipped off to the birthday boy, who is now thirty and has a prominent skull that beanies like. I named them all after the sometimes-obnoxious music we used to swap back and forth, because I am a music geek.

He reports back that he is very thrilled with them. And also slightly shocked at them dropping in out of the blue.

Patterns - Einstein on the Beach [rav]: Cairn by Ysolda Teague, Kraftwerk [rav]: Claudia by exartstudent, Orbital [rav]: Windscheif [rav] by Stephen West, and Stereolab [rav]: Botanic also by Stephen West.

Another post for the remaining gift-knit, and then I will stop beleaguering you with tales of yarn for a while, I promise.

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NB: Yes, I do use that shirt for meeting people from the internet, really. Sometimes I worry that they would not recognize me if I didn't have some approximation of my user pic on me.

You know, of course, that most of my silence the past month or so has been due to restocking natural history hats for the upcoming Faerie Con? (Because, man. Those faerie people want pinecone hats.) And so I've been mostly keeping my head down, hatting away, editing pictures when my joints can't take it any more, quoting from bits and pieces of my reading. (Which is why I don't have opinions on timely news stories.)

But most happily I can announce my new line of (not especially twee) hats, The Rivets Collection! Here's a preview:



For all your Industrial Revolution headwear needs! (I would have said This Modern Victorian Era headwear needs, but strictly speaking, capotains went out when toppers came in. Industrial Revolution it is then.)

These won't be available on Etsy until after the con, assuming that I've got any kind of hats left, let alone these pretties. I'm talking to a metalworker soon, to see if I can get more rivet and hex nut buttons custom made for me. Exciting times, my friends, though maybe not as exciting as all that.

Also look for a sneak peek at another new project later in the week! I've been wanting to let the secret slip long before this, but there was always a bit more work to do. Always, always.

In the glow of productivity, noblerot has pointed me in the direction of Ann Wood and I am dying a slow death of hero worship and sewing inadequacy as a result. Just . . . oh! Owls and floating ships and found tiny things and indigo-and-black-glitter! Tutorials, even!

There is a kind of affection and tenderness in the re-use and re-purposing of things that were once personal and perhaps treasured possessions. Much of my inspiration comes from these materials as well as from many of the ideas I have been infatuated with my whole life : smallness, intricacies, miniaturization, collections, repetition; lost or abandoned things discovered and rescued; the idea of haunted and enchanted places, things and creatures; the setting of a tiny stage.

2009, The Year of The Tiny rolls on!

There are a number of you (all right, most of you, most of everybody alive) who did not have the experience of going to Ella's Deli impressed on you as a child. And I weep for you. mrvelocipede, especially.



It is as the name suggests a perfectly serviceable kosher deli. With an ice cream bar. And really good malts. But keep in mind that the food is sort of secondary. Secondary to . . . the stuff! Animatronics and whirlygigs and puppets and kinetoscopes and weird shit that moves. It is pure carnival inside. And not that contrived 'zany, disparate things we pulled out of the attic" jumble that certain franchise restaurants try to pull.



There used to be a great deal more antique animatronics and hand-made sculptures, I remember, but I suspect that they are too fragile to be on display for small children these days. The tables are the same, with set-in games and toys, thank goodness. And the tube and ball maze running around the ceiling! That never gets old.



Before you leave to look sullenly at the real! working! carousel! ohgod! outside that isn't functional probably, due to it being not-summer in Madison and therefore covered in large sheets of ice and/or other inclement weather, this miniature confection of a carnival cheers you as you go out the door:



Today, today by some miracle, there is no ice or snow! A dazzling, twirling carousel to ride, omg!



And this concludes my attempts to convey the excitement of a seven year old hyped up on ice cream and kinetic sculpture. We hope you have enjoyed this presentation and feel somewhat cheated for not having grown up with this. There are oodles more pictures on flickr, particularly of the miniature carnival.

I can haz camera! Brenna and Chase were very right in their recommendation of the Canon G10—it's just enough of a step up from my last camera but not so intimidating a piece of gear as a DSLR or anything. If I had any sense, I'd read the manual before I go put it through its paces, but what are the odds of that? Squee needs no instructions!

Before I go run off erranding, I feel the need to remind you that in this sesquicentennial year, the zeitgeist arrow is never too far away from Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species. Woo!

Adventure!

Excitement!

Science!

. . . FINGER PUPPETS!!



Tangentially, a helpful list of latin-derived anniversary terms like sesquicentennial. Because sometimes they can be confusing.

There was going to be a big, looong post here about yet more grey yarn and trilobite hats and serendipity and post and how the universe is being really rather nice to me right now and I need to send out thank you cards and

and

and

and then our wonderful iceskatin' lads won Lord Stanley's Cup

in the best way possible



and I am nearly dead of GLEE

at us having bragging rights to the large, shiny, impractical silver punchbowl

again



and so I can't write anything that I had planned.

Sorry.


. . . I may have to illustrate trading cards in celebration. Eee!

For the most part I've been internalizing my squee this season so you've had to put up with fewer sports-related nonsequiteurs this year than I led you to believe. So there's that.

Every once in a while, the various typographic newsletters that litter my inbox will send me something useful (slightly more often than Border's newsletters do, but usually during June for whatever reason). Today FontShop felt the need to share their recent blog entries, including a sweet little piece on the Lemony Snicket end titles, using Emigre's Vendetta.



Understand, around here, those end titles are a Big Deal.

Apart from being pretty much in all ways perfect,* they made me want to draw again after I thought my illustration teacher had killed that impulse dead. They saw me muddle through a period of intense depression, and gave me the courage to start messing around with pen and ink. They urged me on to start the Hogwarts Tinies and helped to tie the whole aesthetic together. In short, they gave me a standard to try to live up to, and it's a dazzling one at that. I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching those end titles. How many times do you say that about movie credits?

I've never known who to thank until now—James Caliri's production company is credited nowhere in their own credits. O, irony.

While we're on the subject, Thomas Newman's score for A Series of Unfortunate Events is also brilliant and evocative. It's another one of those things that goes on endless repeats and I never tire of it. And, as you'd expect, squeeing about Lemony Snicket is what we've been doing here at Wound Tighter Than A Pocket Watch nearly since we began.

---

* I do not know what possessed them to use Apple Chancery for 'The End' but they deserve a swift kick. It doesn't even come off as The-Littlest-Elf- or The-Pony-Party-kind of cheesy horribleness. Argh. It was put there to give the typegeeks fits, wasn't it?

Thing that is singlemost making me happy right now:

2D Goggle's presentation of:

LOVELACE & BABBAGE: TOGETHER THEY FIGHT CRIME



'Happy' is probably a bit of an understatement. 'Deliciously and exuberantly dorky enough to break my face from the nonstop grinning' might be more accurate. Because, dear heavens, there is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And Wellington. And Coleridge. And and and and and.

I recommend that you begin from the beginning though.

In related news, I've been drawing more but not nearly enough. (This is part of formal artists' training, I suspect, to counteract any innate laziness and make us all manic and paranoid instill good work ethic.) But part of the trouble is that a good chunk of reference photos I want to use are digital and I've never been at ease drawing from a screen. I don't know—the vertical-to-horizontal view is screwing with my perceptions?—there's more squinting involved?—I'm still living in my little bubble of Ye Olden Worlde? Weird. Any advice on overcoming that, people who draw from screens on a regular basis? Other than more practice?

I have ideas for Commerce & Alabaster Productions and they need to get out of my head. Real soon now.

Hurrah, hurrah, 2ce's generous mailing of Magic for Beginners has arrived. Bringing cool and damp Portland weather in its wake.

MAGIC.



As fast as I was consumed with glee, I was consumed with guilt for wanting to ignore my library books that much more. Poor library books; poor Alphabet Juice—which I hear in my head as actually being narrated by Mister Roy Blount Jr. (Abecedariums, linguistics and word-fooling are just not doing well with me at the moment for some strange reason.)

Mendacity, thought Mosca. Mellifluous. She did not know what they meant, but the words had shapes in her mind. She memorized them, and stroked them in her thoughts like the curved backs of cats. Words, words, wonderful words. But lies too.

- Frances Hardinge, Fly By Night

pbprincess was right when she felt very strongly that I needed to read this book. Lovely turns of phrase, characterization and an abecedarian chapter naming structure. And the colophon! Oh the colophon.

Library of Congress summary: "Mosca Mye and her homicidal goose, Saracen, travel to the city of Mandelion on the heels of smooth-talking con-man, Eponymous Clent."

Is that not the very best LoC summary ever?

So worth the two shiny nickels I gave to the library. pbprincess is hereby absolved of any obligation regarding Fly by Night, except of course the obligation to be smug about the high quality of her book recs.

Then all at once, she decides to write to the internet at large again, . . . she writes to the internet.

PS122 Gallery! It has an awesome exhibition running through this weekend which you should totally see if you are in NYC - Yarn Theory: Knitting, Crochet, Math and Science. I believe my initial reaction to reading the blurb was to ball up my fist and bite my knuckles to keep from waking the neighbors with my squee. (Except of course that I can't be there, so it was squee mixed with a wail of crushing disappointment.)

Highlighting the work of some of today’s most interesting practitioners, Yarn Theory juxtaposes installations and art objects made with a scientific or mathematical basis as a starting point, and with mathematical models and items made explicitly to explain or clarify abstract concepts, which end up being compelling aesthetic forms unto themselves. Because of their incremental structure, the crafted shapes often mimic growth systems found in nature. Today’s needle workers, many of who are also scientists and mathematicians professionally, are exploring such correlations.

Emphasis my own. Because how many times does this need to be repeated before people start believing me?

People are also finally starting to publish on the subject too. Which is great, but not as great as seeing a gallery filled with mathematically structured string.

Oh oh oh. I was going to hold off on blockquoting bits of Miss Pettigrew until later this evening, because it is that sort of rich and sumptuous fare which will make you sick if you consume it too quickly. I've been wanting to savor each chapter as it's broken down by the hour.

But then I got to the swearing and I could not contain myself.

'To hell with what you thought. Will You Go?' exploded Nick.
'No,' said Miss Pettigrew.
'! ! ! . . . ? ? ? . . . ! ! ! . . . ? ? ? . . . ! ! !'
'Oh!' gasped Miss Pettigrew.
Miss LaFosse started forward. She threw a wild look at Miss Pettigrew's shocked countenance, and a distracted look at Nick's raging one.

'What?'
'What what?'
'Are you staying here?'
'You know I'm staying here. I said so. Until to-morrow the invitation was and until to-morrow I stay, and what's it got to do with you, pray?'
'? ? ? . . . ! ! ! . . . ? ? ? . . . ! ! !' exploded Nick again.

In future all of my printed swears will be a combination of ellipses and interrobangs, yes indeed.

Before I can post all of the marvellous pictures from this year's Costume Con (An entire eighteenth century contingent holding court at the bar and generally being fabulous at all times!!) (Inventive steampunk awesomeness that made me all squeeful about the genre again!?) (DID I MENTION THAT THERE WAS AN ACTUAL CEPHALOPOD STOLE!??), I feel obligated to clear out a few photoshoots that were back-burnered in preparation for the con. Like this:



It's the sparkliest, jauntiest, least twee hat I've made to date (which is kind of exciting all on its own)! In part I think this is because the capotain is an amazingly resillient hat shape - it became fashionable in the late Elizabethan and lasted well into the Regency era, until the top hat finally took over.

Also, I can block it on a flower pot. And it doesn't make me look like an idiot when I try it on. You can't beat that.

For reasons too numerous and complicated to go into, I spent the better half of the evening excavating the things residing under my bed. Wherein it is revealed that I've still got a blank silkscreen! Two, if you count the failed design that I could bleach off of the other one. Oh man.

Most of the time between then and now has been nonstop mental tailchasing of omg-I-can-silkscreen-stuff-what-should-I do-what-should-I-do-what-should-I-do.

I put it to you, o internets, since I'm very likely to be peddling the end results in the Etsy store, sooner or later. WHAT DO YOU WANT?



(Of course this being me and the universe being what it is, I only discover these screens after going to Artist's Supply Center today and making sad faces of longing at their printmaking supplies that I had no immediate use for*.)

---

*Not having any immediate use for iridescent watercolor glazing medium did not stop me from buying that, so clearly there are inconsistencies at work here. Shiny, shiny inconsistencies.

Hello world,

My last name is still not Morton.I don't know how else to communicate to you that I really, really mean it when I say 'address all post to Chronographia von Strangehours, no seriously, I mean that, it will save on confusion.'

You see, I can't guarantee that I will be the one emptying the letterbox, and one of these days you're going to get your post back again with a big old return to sender, not at this address because other people are not aware that you have me in your address book wrongly, and there is nothing I can do.

With regret,
C. von Strangehours



P.S. Me marrying someone with a surname Morton is right out.

---

In postal-related squee, the World's Smallest Postal Service makes me so ridiculously happy, I had to go breathe through a paper bag for a bit to calm down. Leafcutter Design's other stuff is great, but. Tiny. Post. I don't think I've been so thrilled with the internet since my encounter with the Tinysaur.

I am returned from squeeing at The Revenger's Tragedy like a mad squeeful thing specializing in squee. So brilliant, especially their cross-gender casting . . . the incredible degree of poise necessary to pull off a black comedy . . . the blinged out New Romantic/Clockwork Orange aesthetic for the villains (which would be, er, nearly everyone) and . . . this unique atmosphere that broke down the boundary between audience and spectacle and made everyone feel as if they were in on some great joke, by virtue of just being in the room. Intimacy and familiarity and the most wicked shared sense of humor.

To get ahead of myself slightly:

GUIL: Wasn't that the end?

PLAYER: Do you call that an ending? -with practically everyone on his feet? My goodness no--over your dead body!

GUIL: How am I supposed to take that?

PLAYER: Lying down. (He laughs briefly and in a second has never laughed in his life.) There's a design at work in all art--surely you know that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.

GUIL: And what's that, in this case?

PLAYER: It never varies--we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies.

GUIL: Marked?

PLAYER: Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they can reasonably get. (He switches on a smile.)

- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

In a bid to make us feel even more special about being revenge tragedy fangirls, they left us a note on our seats for the second performance of the day: detailing the history and significance of bringing Shakespeare's contemporaries to the stage, how they parallel what we tend to think of as modern, edgy entertainment (why yes, The Sopranos was name-dropped along with Dexter and a few others), more of that wicked shared sense of humor, and a little hand-written note that hoped we liked both the plays. They are good, innovative people, the people who run the American Shakespeare Center at Blackfriars.

Good people. Who all end up dead at the final curtain, heh.



Soon: I will obsess over architecture for your entertainment, instead of Jacobean drama. It will be a refreshing change, I'm sure.

Rather than let this, my 2000th post, fall on a Twitter syndication, I thought it would be more appropriate to post something that makes me squee on so many levels it's ridiculous.

My dears, I present to you Anita Bruce's knitted wire plankton. It's tiny. It's delicate. It's modular. It's organic. It's grey. It's dubiously useful.

It makes me DAMNED HAPPY.

I hope any and all of the above qualifiers make you happy too, because that is what we here at Wound Tighter Than A Pocket Watch specialize in, and will continue to do for the foreseeable future. (So, what I'm saying is, you're stuck with my knitted natural history fascination.)

Happy Arbitrary Date Marker, my darlings!

The discoveries of this new year so far include:

• Torchwood's Toshiko Sato [Naoko Mori] has really not seen character development since her days on Ab Fab. Anyone therefore wishing to take a stab at crossoverfic, please be my guest. It seems like it should exist. In the most cracktastic way.

• Happily, the rather wonderful Samurai Jack is available on Toonami Jetstream, prompting a marathon of Genndy Tartakovsky animation (which I've got to admit has been lacking in my life). Those background paintings! The restrained dialogue and awesome music! The gleeful use of skewed tropes!

What have you discovered?

Ahhhhh. It is so satisfying to read a piece of fiction straight through, being impelled to go on and neglect everything else until I run out of words. I'd almost forgotten what the experience feels like. Hurrah for another of Patricia McKillip's ornately detailed puzzlebox stories, which is easy to envision as a Jane Austen knock-off film (amusingly or frighteningly, I can't tell). The authorial meta is a grand little touch.

Judd found Toland Blair and Mr. Trent there, with the twins, one disgusted, one grinning. The two men, immersed in the final pages of Gwyneth's story, nodded absently to him.

"I can't believe she killed poor Eloise," Pandora muttered, sitting on the sofa with her arms crossed.

"I think it's brilliant," said Crispin cheerfully.

"I think it's diabolical," Mr. Blair murmered. "Have you read this, Judd?"

"Yes sir."

"And you still want to marry her?" He glanced up, smiled at the expression on Judd's face. "If my daughter is pleased with you, so am I. Maybe you could persuade her to change her ending, show us all some mercy."

[...]

"He was most reluctant to give up his beloved daughter," Judd told her, "but could not deny what she seemed, so peculiarly, to want."

"Don't be silly," she said, taking his arm. "He's relieved that anybody at all would want a woman with such a deranged imagination and abnormal sensibilities."

- Patricia McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head

I'm not sure that I've completely forgiven the fiction section of the library, but it's a good start towards reconcilliation before the year ends.

Have I mentioned lately that I am deliciously in love with the nonfiction section at the library? I have? I have. It's tough to contain my squee when I keep coming across serendipitous finds like Holly Morris' Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine. Ostensibly put in . . . the television section.

(Which is sort of accurate, as it is about making the Adventure Divas series for PBS. It is also about climbing the Matterhorn, smuggling cameras into a beauty salon in Tehran, and the general awesomeness of women.)

"A housewife—a star; a scientist—a star; an athelete—a star. But the concept of 'star' is about the light she radiates, the space she fills. How can I tell you . . . the environment she illuminates," she emphasizes with a smile as a thick band of sunlight washes across her face in uncanny timing.

[Lizette Villa, Federation of Cuban Women]
- p. 18, Paradox Found

I can feel a new transitoriness growing within my own wandering soul, but my pilgrimage isn't exile. It's a choice. And therein lies the significant difference: A pilgrim travels by choice, with a specific quest for meaning, and an exile is pushed into motion by chance, disaster, crime, political upheaval, or the like. The voluntary voyage is about self-discovery and getting the prescription right on one's glasses. But as Erik Leed says in Mind of the Traveler, "The forced departure initiates a journey that is suffering or penance rather than a campaign or voyage. Often one-way or endless journeys, they muddle rather than define the persona of the traveller."

In short, travelers can go home; exiles can't.

- p. 38, Paradox Found

"I've consistently refused to sell the film rights for The Bone Pople. I don't mind it with short stories; several of my short stories have been written to films. It's slightly different when you're dealing with a novel. No, you can't transplant written word into visual and auditory form without generally suffering greatly. We have a novel that is layered, that is fairly tricky in various forms of metaphor and image. You can't easily transform that, and again you're getting into that process which I think is the reader's province. Some stories will read much better inside a head than out of it. [...]"

[Keri Hulme, author The Bone People]
- p. 200-201, Stroppy Sheilas and Mana Wahines