When the alternative is no alternative

The first bit of news I have is regarding that appalling interview last week. I was still feeling like a prat on Friday and decided I’d better clear my conscience with the fellow who’d recommended me for the position. So I dashed off a brief email, hoping that my below-par performance wouldn’t damage his credibility, as he’d obviously been enthusiastic in his support of me.  I’d also realised that, no doubt adding to the effects of the sleep deprivation, I’d  taken   prescription Imigran for a migraine on that morning, which anyway sends me a bit ga-ga – but who’s to say what state I’d have been in without it.

Anyway, it turns out that there must surely be some bigger goofs than I as the interview panel had already sent my details off to the Minister as their preferred candidate from the list of applicants. I had to chuckle when it was reported back to me that they did notice I was a bit more ’strident’ than had been expected. As my partner later commented, that’s what he has to put up with all the time!

Moving on – my partner had this crazy idea on Saturday afternoon that we should go off to the Seymour Alternative Farming Expo. I wasn’t feeling so enthusiastic about the idea – after all  it was around 35C, maybe more,  and I’m not too good in the heat at the best of times (I have MS and heat tends to exacerbate my symptoms). Plus I have found that this show has gone down the tubes over the years. I was last visited it  a couple of years back and it was well and truly in decline. I used to exhibit there myself for the first few years of its existence. ‘Alternative’ was the new thing back then, and the Expo showcased a lot of farming practises that were out of the ordinary. Australia was no longer riding on the sheep’s back, so wool growers were looking to value-add, or even enter into totally new ventures. There would be displays associated with emu and water buffalo farming and other less mainstream animals that could be grown for use of both meat and hide. There were also a lot of arty-crafty stalls selling their wares, whose products really stood out as being something unique and appealing. And alternative. Back then, I was functioning primarily as a designer/maker, and selling ready-to-wear  and made to order knitwear. For the Alternative Farming Expo I’d work a range of garments in unusual or recycled fibres. The unusual included yak hair (yak & silk more precisely), and the recycled included using yarns made from reclaimed denim jeans, and one that included recycled PET bottles in its composition. I also designed in some of the high end fibres – alpacas were only just being brought into Australia at that time, and proved a very popular line,  and  I also sourced a lot of unusual yarns to work with that weren’t otherwise available in Australia.

But the Seymour Alternative Farming Expo of today really should remove the word ‘alternative’ from its title – it’s now become no different from any other local agricultural show.  There was nothing there that I happened upon that was new and innovative. Gone were the food stalls tempting you with roo steaks and emu burgers, replaced with the regular trailers selling fast food, chips & Coke. The sheep’s milk yoghurts, the goat’s milk cheeses were nowhere to be seen. There were no marquees full of craft stalls any more, just an excess of cheap market stalls selling shoddy clothing, socks and hats. And where were all the stalls promoting alternative farming practises ? Just a few alpaca breeders, a fairly good stall for chook keeping  goods, and not much more.

One thing I was particularly wanting to do was to source some info re suitable water tanks for our garden. There were a few companies there who should have been able to provide me with all I needed to know. But were they interested in selling their product? It seems not. I can appreciate that it was 3pm on a hot afternoon, but some traders had actually left their stands unmanned, others had packed up entirely, and still more were so engrossed with larking about with other staff members that they seemed oblivious to the fact that there customers even present. Which all seems a bit strange to me, being as we’re in the grip of a horrendous drought,  you’d surely expect the public interest to be at a higher level than normal. So, we came away empty handed, as well as unimpressed that we’d had to pay out $30 to get us both through the gate for barely an hours diversion. There must be better ways to waste a Saturday afternoon.

There’s some things that you just can’t frog

I’m feeling somewhat flat. I’ve been waking up at ungodly hours these past few mornings – almost at the exact same time (4.45am)  each morning – and have been unable to get back to sleep. The deficit is now telling, yet yesterday was one day when I could really have done with having my wits about me.

10am I had an appointment with The Bank Manager. It was actually meant to be the Business Banking Manager, but the girl on the desk last week clearly misinterpreted the request. Not to worry; I just wanted someone ‘in authority’ to vent my spleen at about the continuing frustrations I experience at the hands  of ‘Merchant Services’, that is the part of the bank that provides my facilities to accept credit card payments from customers, and they continually move the goalposts, causing the cost of the service to spiral upwards, ever out of control. But that is a story for another day.

No, the real story is about an interview. One for which I received just 5 hours notice - and one which I dearly wish I could, like a piece of unsatisfactory knitting, just frog back and start again.

Someone, who thought I had the suitable background and experience, had asked me to apply for a position on a hospital Board of Management. Last Monday I had a tour of the facilities with the CEO; this Monday the applications had to be in.

Well, that in itself was no easy task. There were 7 separate sets of documentation to be completed, including the application, CV  and a lot of government beaurocracy to prove my impartiality, fitness to run a business and a police record search. There were also eighteen different Selection Criteria to address, some of which included up to 6 different elements, and the information package asked you to address them all. Oh come on ! Let’s get real. And who on earth is going to have ‘expertise’ in all these areas ?  Law, finance, strategic IT, human resources, capital management, business management in the health industry…….anyway, some of the more general items I had plenty of supporting evidence for, others like ‘expertise in clinical governance’ I could really only respond with ”I currently have no experience in clinical governance”. But, at the end of the day (in actuality it took me several days to gather all the evidence from the dark bowels of my shed), I was quite happy with my application package, and thought it made me sound as if I could be a valuable member of the board. Ironic it may sound, but I used to work for a company that killed people, and now I was applying to jointly manage one that helped save people.

But, oh…an interview at just 5 hours notice, with a 2 hour stoush with the bank manager in between, meant I had no time to prepare myself for whatever it was I would be faced with. And remember too I was stuffed from lack of sleep. So, I quickly read up all I could about corporate governance, as that was where my knowledge needed boosting, crossed my fingers and fronted the interview board of 4 men.

What a disaster! At the end I felt like I was emerging from a train wreck. Now, usually I can engage in intelligent coversation, demonstrate an aura of confidence, and provide a case for just about any angle of any topic that might be flung at me. But not on this day. I think I must have misinterpreted the intent behind at least half the questions they posed (though my partner, when I reported my disasterous encounter, suggested it was more likely that the questions were poorly constructed. I think he was just trying to make me feel better).  I kept having to ask for an example of whatever it was they were attempting to get at, and sometimes I just know I was barking up the wrong tree. And then there’s that horrible recognition, after it’s all over – you’ve walked out the door and it immediately comes to mind just what you should have said! Too late ! In fact, I couldn’t even restore my credibility at the end of the interview – I was so caught up with how awfully I’d handled the interview that, when shaking the hand of one of the panel as I was leaving the room, I actually started to say hello, instead of goodbye!

 Now, my partner has a terribly different attitude to life than I – he just said “So what ? What does it matter whether you win it or lose it ? It’s a voluntary job…move on” But me, I’m the sort  who aims for perfection and am a disappointment to myself if I don’t achieve it. It’s just like the way I apply myself to my knitting. 

But unlike a piece of knitting, you can’t just unravel the mistakes made in an interview and go back and start all over again.

Dyeing to find a better solution

I’ve been doing a fair bit of dyeing this past week – a  run of orders for the Tussah Silk Tape that I supply. Last week also, we became one of the relatively small number of towns across Australia that have been placed on Stage 4 Water Restrictions. To put that in perspective, there isn’t anywhere else beyond 4 to go. It’s the max. We can only use water within the confines of the house itself, with none to be used outside. Water use is limited to washing, cooking & essential cleaning inside the home.

Well, I’ve decided that dyeing – at least in the manner that’s been required for the Tussah Tape – should temporarily be removed from my services; it seems to me to be just not compatible with trying to reduce & recycle our water usage.

Before I introduced the Tussah Tape range, most of my dyeing was in the form of handpainted hanks, a few colours per hank, fixed in a microwave (not the kitchen microwave, I hasten to add, but one in the shed that’s dedicated to dyeing). That process, using Gaywool dyes,  is pretty water efficient and, providing you do your calculations correctly, the dye-liquor is well and truly discharged requiring little water usage to rinse and finish it off. Additionally, with good quality and well prepared yarns, there’s very few preliminaries required, bar a good lengthy soak with a dash of detergent.

However, for the Tussah I decided to develop a colour range of solids, hoping to achieve just the tiniest hint of variation in the depth of shade to keep a little life and interest in the colour. They also needed to be repeatable colours, do-able in batches of at least 600g of silk in the pot at one time, so I spent a fair amount of time in my dyehouse (read ’shed’) experimenting with formulas and theories. I purposefully avoided the multi-colour handpainted effect for these yarns, as the market is just about flooded with such products, ranging from the divinely beautiful to the downright frightful.  

However, this immersion-dyeing is just so water-hungry, that I feel it’s pretty indecent to continue to use it under our present limitations.  What pricks my conscience more than ever is that we have always been very small users of water in our household; there’s only two of us, and we’ve always had water-saving showers, get away with just 1 or 2 full loads of laundry a week in the front loader, and have never been rabid gardeners. Our 3 monthly bills have shown our actual water consumption charged at between $12 and $25 – yes, that works out as from just $4 per month.

Anyway, back to immersion dyeing. The first problem is that I scour this particular yarn, and that produces a slimy mix of soap solution and sodium carbonate to dispose of. Plus it takes dedicated rinsing to get that same solution out of the yarn, and the yarn uniformly prepared. An additional problem is that, because the waste water at most stages of the process contains substances that are not completely identifiable (are they ’safe’ or are they not?), I can’t sling them over my parched little veggie patch with gay abandon, so all that liquid has to be disposed of for the present, rather than recycled for use in the garden. (BTW, I also have recently been reading news reports that I shouldn’t be watering my salad veggies with grey water – but I have been, and we haven’t yet suffered any mediaeval-type affliction as a result. )

I’ve not yet looked at my options, but will be forced to do so now that I’m up to date with orders. I suspect it may mean starting from scratch with a different dyestuff and a different process, and a different range of colourways.  I’ve already bought in a selection of fibre-reactive dyes (Drimarene-K), as it looks like my solution may well lie there. It’s frustrating because I had a new range of acid-dye colours all mixed tried & tested, ready to go live – bringing my initial range to 8, but they’ll have to be set aside for the present, and I’ll start all over again. It may even mean abandoning  my own range of hand-dyed yarns until we have a more sustainable form of water supply. But, that’s likely to be quite a while yet, as our Victorian Premier Steve Bracks appears to be averse to the idea recycling sewage water. That sounds to me like a decision based on the ‘yuk factor’ and his perceived potential to put his voters offside at the next election. Perhaps he should be looking at a picture a bit bigger than that.

Cells under the microscope

Interesting. I suspect my post doesn’t have the clarity that it most likely needs. I’m actually a bit of an internal debater so, whilst I’ve been privy to all sides of my own arguments (!) what actually gets voiced at the end of it, isn’t always going to be crystal clear to the reader.

I’m not asserting that the designer of this garment was necessarily aware of Debbie New and her CA patterns and, even if she was, I’m not even suggesting it should necessarily have been credited to Debbie.

If we had to credit every source for every technique we included in our designs, the list of credits would soon get out of control:

Cast on technique first described by ‘a’

Ribbing stitch pattern taken from ‘b’s’ stitch dictionary, Vol. 1.

Invisible increase as from page 261 of the knitting techniques book by ‘c’

Buttonhole technique courtesy of ‘d’…….and so on, probably right through to ‘z’!

The question of ‘due credit’ gets raised quite frequently, but it seems the answers are never quite straightforward. Most designers I know of will seek to gain prior approval if they are knowingly using someone else’s technique or stitch pattern in their design. In return, many inventors of a technique are only too happy to see their work being an influence on newer designers, and have no desire or expectation to be acknowledged as the source of that inspiration. Whilst neither of those circumstances are exclusively correct I think, on the whole, knitters and knitwear designers are a generous lot. It’s surely in the interests of the craft to share what you have learned so that others can benefit? How often does the work of one designer become the inspiration for another to build on? As that idea evolves, it can become almost unrecognisable from its first incarnation, so a further technique is born. And another. And another.

I’m fairly confident that most ethical designers will list their primary sources in their submissions to publications. I usually write quite a blurb about how I arrived at an idea for a design, and how I developed a particular stitch pattern, or was inspired by a garment shape from the past.

How those publications or yarn companies will choose to edit those submissions is another matter – I can only comment on my own specific experiences.

So I apologise if I’m causing confusion with my comments – though it does seem that my muddled thoughts have actually got some people thinking and asking questions of themselves – which, in itself, is no bad thing at all.