Men’s clothes are one of the things I appreciate about the approach of autumn

[learnsslowly]

No, this isn’t because my father will stop wearing sandals with his socks and return to shoes. It isn’t because my husband will stop wearing the orange shirt with the little pictures that Smaller Niece thinks is Really Nice. (In fact, against all reason, my husband looks rather good in the shirt, but then he does in most things.) I don’t have a

Comments

[elen_nare]

Linking colours and sounds seems a bit like synaesthesia, maybe?

[learnsslowly]

I always thought that synaesthesia would be a stronger link - I experience colours as colours and sounds as sounds - although if something is colour coded and linked to the "wrong" colour, I can make mistakes. I once had a filing system where I put each topic in the lever arch file with the colour that seemed to suite the topic best. I then arranged the files in spectrum order (the magenta was where ultra violet would be placed and the black one was where infra red would be.) I eventually had to branch out into pastel and saturated versions of most colours, placed next each other. This worked well, rather to my surprise for about seven years. I didn't pick up the wrong file by accident, through misreading a label in haste - powder blue cannot be mistaken for royal blue however pressed for time I was or upside down the file was. To my even greater astonishment, many of my students became adept at using the system. (Although they were really "teacher's notes" I was more than happy for students to come and use them in the lab whenever

[heliopausa]

Oh, the colours!! Yes! let alone wonderful natural lambswool. And all together, colour on colour, is so mindblowing - like embroidery silks, or really good knitting yarns. (You could have a winter project of making your own something,in the colours you like? A wonderfully floppy cabled beret, maybe?)

[learnsslowly]

Ah, well if you'd seen my only two attempts at knitting an actual garment.....

Unfortunately my sensitivity to wool - any kind of wool- next to the skin has got worse as I have got older and it has begun to cause problems through a thin layer of cotton too. I love the colours that wool can achieve when dyed that other fabrics just don't manage.

I used to do needlepoint and florentine work, but that's a lot more difficult since shattering my right index finger - I've got quite a lot of function back, but it will never be as it was. Luckily for me, I can enjoy something just as much without ownership (except for food obviously!)

May I take it that you are a rather talented knitter, since you can refer to such difficult maneuvers as cable stitch with such aplomb and no apparent trace of fear?

[heliopausa]

That's a pity, about your finger - and sounds pretty traumatic. :( Is it okay to ask how it happened?
(And cable's much less tricky than it looks!)

[learnsslowly]

Fell over going up stairs while carrying a work laptop, a few months after some fairly fierce shoulder surgery. Knowing it was really important not to do any further damage to my shoulder, I just let go of the laptop and put out both hands to save myself. I had just had time to think "phew, got away with that", when the laptop, which had been tumbling through the air, landed corner first on the proximal phalanx of my right index finger, shattering the bone into 3 pieces. After a night of sulking the laptop was as right as rain