Images of autumn

I don't have much presentable knitting to show you. It's not that I haven't been knitting, it's just that it's all in different stages of unfinishedness and as such extremely resistant to photographing. Instead, I first give you some photos completely unrelated to knitting and then some fresh photos of old projects :) But please stay tuned, some new knitting is sure to follow, I only have half a sleeve to finish a cardigan :)


I really love autumn. Even with all the rain, and the cold, and this terrible wind that we have here, and the dreariness and everything. It has a certain charm, a certain poetic aura about it that gets me every year. And the colours, ah, the colours...


This year the beginning of October was so warm that you could  sit in the park in short sleeves.

But soon enough the windbreaks were up at the beach 

and the playgrounds were deserted.

And then finally it was cold enough to put on the February Lady Sweater I finished back in July (wool+alpaca at 40 degrees!), pack my camera and a willing photographer and head off for the river bank.

I paired it with two more projects that never had proper photos of them taken either: Travelling Woman shawl and Drops' 98-55 Bag with cable pattern in Eskimo. 

Aren't I lucky that autumn colours are in vogue at the moment? I had put on a pair of  Jaywalkers in matching colours too but we forgot to photograph them :(

Images of summer

Goodbye, summer! I'm glad you're over so that I can finally welcome the long-awaited autumn, knitters' favourite season :)

Some very, very happy feet :)

Some very, very happy girls :)

Some very, very happy grass :)

Why do I like reading?

Since that post on books I've been thinking why I like reading. What is it that has always drawn me so strongly and irresistably towards books?

The first thing must be the magic of the story, the yarn spun from page to page, drawing you ever deeper into the plot, the characters and events. It was impossible to resist the temptation presented by the mystery of the unknown and the thrill of the suspense was, oh so addictive.

Then there's the imagination, whole new worlds and universes, which provided backdrops against which I could stage my childhood fantasies and play with them, turning them this way and that, playing a hero or a victim, a savior or a villain, a sheriff or a vigilante, a cowboy or an Indian, depending on the mood. I must have been an avid daydreamer back then. It is from these stagings, I guess, that my power of visualization developed, a blessing and a curse that's been with me from a very early age.

And finally, I think that the seclusion that reading offered is what I enjoyed. Even as a child I liked being alone and was never bored. Reading offered an opportunity to be alone when I was not, an opportunity to set myself apart from the rest of the world. And it worked.

Then came university (and later work) and a different kind of reading that I needed to learn. Reading for study, dissecting, analyzing. I didn't enjoy that as much. I had a feeling that it stripped books of their magic. And that is, at least partly, why I did not go on to study literature but opted for a different line of work. And I'm not sorry because the magic is back :)

Klika Klika

Kažite dragička! Otvorena je nova onlajn prodavnica vune, i to Dropsove, i to najbliža nam do sada! Zove se Klika Klika i možete je naći na ovoj adresi, ali i na FB. Jedva čekam da tamo potrošim malo para :)))

Books et al.

I've always been a voracious reader. Don't you just love that collocation, 'voracious reader'? It literally means that you eat books. And that is exactly what I did. I ate them, devoured them. From a very early age, I read and read and read. Voraciously, insatiably, unremittingly. Now, I would also add, indiscriminately. As a child, I read everything I could lay my hands on. (Which, as you can imagine, meant that I read quite a few books I couldn't understand or fully appreciate.)

When I now think about my childhood reading, I see myself in the countryside, at my grandparents' place in the summer. I'd take a book and head off into their huge garden, find myself a spot under a tree (it was too hot in the attic) and spend hours there, lounging in the hot, motionless silence of summer afternoons. I'd get up and pick a pear or go and gorge myself on raspberries. Idyllic is the word that comes to mind and, although my grandparents' house did not have manicured lawns, rose gardens or breathtaking views, this picture always reminds me of English countryside. Must be all the 19th-century novels I read there :)

I've also kept a reading journal. Since 1985. No profound thoughts or enlightened observations there, just a list of books I've read. Ordered chronologically, all 20-odd years of my reading. The first entry is Alexander Belyayev's KEZ Star (Zvezda Kec in Serbian translation), a forgotten classic of Soviet children's science fiction. It seems unbelievable that it was a prescribed school text only 25 years ago!

And I've filled several notebooks into which I copied sentences and passages I liked, sometimes whole pages. I still do that. It may seem pointless nowadays, with all the online collections of all possible quotations from all imaginable books, but I find it difficult to connect to these. These are just heaps of texts, other people's texts, bland, expressionless, meaningless to me. Not my quotations.

These days I read much less. Partly because of all the work-related reading, partly because I have far less time to waste away under a pear tree than when I was 13. But the addiction is still with me. I don't go anywhere without a book, I can't go to sleep if I don't read at least half a page. I'm usually too tired to read more than that anyway, but that's a story for a different kind of post. This year I've set myself a challenge, over at Goodreads, to read 20 books. Not many, but I'm not counting work-related literature. And I'm 2 books ahead already, which I consider to be quite an achievement, as one of them is Murakami's 600+ page The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and another A. S. Byatt's 500+ page Possession. Not that sheer volume matters, but neither of them is exactly a breeze to read.

Now, if you've borne with me this far reading this pictureless post, tell me something about your reading habits. I won't ask you what kind of books you like or who your favourite author is (I've always hated these two questions!). Instead, tell me when and where you like to read and how your reading habits have changed over time.