Ravelry rocks! (As if we didn't know...)

I got a surprising message on Ravelry the other day from someone I don't know, now living in Germany. She had come across my profile while looking for a friend of hers and saw that I was doing research on the Gaeltacht Quarter in Belfast, so she messaged me to say that she'd visited the area I work on and was interested as she speaks Scottish gaelic. It was really cool to see the Scottish version written down - the extreme similarity is much more obvious to me when the two types of gaelic are written, rather than spoken. I love it when the whole internet seems like such a small world! I wasn't expecting to have a tiny bit of fieldwork pop up in my knitting universe. The knitted thesis rides again!

I was equally stunned with Ravelry's eerie tendency to coalesce all my favourite things when I realised that the Crossword Junkies group I belong to has a thread about murder mysteries, full of people who love knitting, and cryptic crosswords, and mystery stories, even more, potentially, than I do. That's a niche. I was trying to explain the existence of this thread within a group within a knitting-centric social networking site to my mother and ended up exclaiming 'I'm a subset of a subset of a niche', to which she replied with maternal weariness 'I know.'

Still fooling about with the LOL roving, having great fun making it do different stuff. I don't know what I'll end up making from it, something with lots of textures anyway. The colours change in ways I can't currently predict according to how it's spun and plied. I really need to get Deb Menz's book on Colour in Spinning to find out why. I'm terrible for book buying at the moment. It always feels more virtuous than other crafty expenditure.