Bookworm and Knit The City

 Gosh! Comics was the exciting venue for a book signing by my friends at Knit The City on 16th September.  I knitted a tiny friend to take with me:

Questia, a Blinkin' Book Worm (the pattern can be downloaded for free here from Whodunnknit).  She was rather taken with Plarchie the recycled plastic squid - something about liking his colour - but felt it wise to gaze at him from a relatively safe distance, although he usually only eats humans.  She did not notice the tip of tentacle creeping from behind the books!  I left Questia at Gosh! - she seemed so at home there among all the fabulous books.

Hand healing is progressing painfully slowly

The healing of my broken finger and damaged tendons is progressing - as confirmed by the physiotherapist yesterday, which is excellent news. However, the process is painfully s-l-o-w. Unfortunately for me, the precise way I hold my hands to draw and paint is extremely painful.  When I forced myself to complete a new detailed illustration for a competition in August,  my fingers swelled up again, and I felt like a character in Harry Potter being forced to draw by Dolores Umbrage! Apparently, tendons are like elastic bands, and in the healing process they have been tightened by scar tissue, so I need to loosen the scar tissue and very gradually stretch the tendons again to full range of movement.
Naturally, I am very disappointed about this: I am keen to get back to normal work with pen and paintbrush.  Patience is required though, and acceptance that I can only do very short bursts of drawing at the moment.  These tiny sketches are from the fantastic Womad at Charlton Park in July, and are of a scale and type that thankfully I can currently do.

Etsy shop

I'm very excited to have updated the link from here to Dragonfly Sky,my etsy shop: the etsy mini app creates a far more attractive button on my blog, and it shows an item from current stock!

Orange hat

This orange bobble hat I knitted over the weekend is now on its way to the excellent St Mungo's, whose work with the homeless impressed me in the days when I did development work for housing associations. It was very easy to say "yes" to knitting a hat for them when Stitch London asked for volunteers to contribute to the knitting of a batch of thirty hats, and I'm looking forward to seeing how St Mungo's use them!

At the edge of the photo you can just see a  glimpse of children's character story I am developing, too: I will post some drawing soon.

Head injury and the importance of getting checked

Life has thrown me another of it's curve balls, just when I thought I'd be able to get back on track with my plans!

This photo is of me and my friend Nick on a wonderful day out in Whitstable on 5th August. On August 12th he sustained a nasty bang to the head on the tube, which resulted in a small cut, but no signs of bruising. However, Nick did begin to suffer continuous headaches which pain killers did not disperse, and also began to vomit heavily and frequently. Neither of us made any connection with the bang to his head.  To summarise what happened, I found Nick collapsed in his flat on September 2nd, and thanks to the wonderful ambulance crew and The Homerton Accident and Emergency department, Nick discovered that he was in urgent need of an operation to relieve bleeding and fluid on his brain which were the internal consequences of that bang to his head. Following successful surgery at the excellent  The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Nick is thankfully recovering well.

In the meantime,  along with Nick's other friends, I am helping him with practical matters, hence my lack of posts and drawing.

I decided to post here about what happened because I now know how very important it is to get bangs to the head checked out - especially when sypmtoms like head ache, vomitting, confusion, co-ordination problems, etc become apparent: Headway has some excellent information on head injuries.