Oranges and lemons

It’s been a difficult week, so I decided to celebrate Friday and it still being mild enough to wear shoes instead of boots with my orange tights.

Shawl – Isaura
Cardigan – clothes swap
Dress – People Tree
Tights – Debenhams
Shoes – Jones Bootmaker

I have really been struggling with depression this week; it’s taken everything I have just to sit at my desk at work and not run away in tears, so I haven’t exactly been at my most productive. And sometimes I wonder, when I feel like this, if work isn’t the thing that’s making me ill. When I read this post by Katie (who dyes beautiful fibre as Hilltop Cloud) I did find myself wondering, is that my problem too? Would I be better if I didn’t have to drag myself in to an office and interact with lots of people even when the thing I most want in the world is to pull a blanket over my head and shut everything out? Is the stress of my job (because it can be very stressful and demanding) too much for me?

I don’t actually think this is the case. I enjoy my job, when I’m not too depressed to enjoy anything; I get a lot of satisfaction out of rising to a challenge and sorting out complicated problems. And while I probably could earn a decent living from doing small business accounts, I suspect I wouldn’t get the same enjoyment out of it. And of course, that would have its own stresses. There’s a lot to be said for a regular salary and paid holiday and sick leave, to say nothing of the scope that a normal office job – even a middle-management role – offers for keeping your head down and focusing on the easy stuff as much as possible when things are tough, which I imagine would be a lot harder if every minute spent poking the internet instead of adding things up equated to actual lost income. And sometimes office conversation is just the thing to raise a smile even on the worst of days.

I seem to have spent a lot of today talking this over with friends, on Twitter and elsewhere. I really am so grateful that I do have friends who offer sympathy and support when things are bad and help me work my way through things. And today I’m particularly grateful for the people who’ve known me for years and are able to offer me insights into myself from an outside point of view and who all tell me that actually, in my case it looks far more as though my mental health affects how I feel about work than vice versa. Which I did know, really; depression can be situational, of course, but I’ve been depressed for most of my life and while bad situations can make it worse, mostly the problem is what’s going on inside my head, not what’s outside it. I learnt that after making some really bad decisions while depressed, and now I know that part of the job of living with depression is learning to try and minimise the effect I let the stuff inside my head have on the things outside me.

Under the weather

I am not feeling 100%. I don’t know if it’s just the effect of the arctic weather or if I’m coming down with something, but I spent most of today feeling like the walking dead and still do, really.

My outfit photos are also weather-afflicted, as I couldn’t take an outdoor picture today because the roof of the bird-table, which I normally balance the camera on, was covered with ice (I watched a collared dove attempting not to slide off it yesterday, not entirely successfully) and even though it isn’t a terribly expensive camera, and is several years old now, it didn’t seem like a good idea to balance it on an icy surface, so I took pictures in the conservatory instead.

Shawl – Isaura
Jacket – Debenhams
Dress – Gap
Tights – Debenhams
Boots – Gabor

At least the orange tights and shawl provided a bit of brightness on another freezing, grey day!

Yellow and orange

I finished the latest pair of socks for T last night: Rachel Atkinson‘s Doctor Foster from the February issue of The Knitter magazine.

I don’t normally buy knitting magazines because I never make any of the patterns, but I was bored of Earl Greys and fell in love with these socks when they popped up on my Ravelry friend activity feed, so I thought I’d give them a go. They were fun to knit and made a nice change, and T is very happy with them; there were a few errors in the printed pattern but I messaged Rachel on Ravelry and she came back with answers very quickly.

The yarn is Yarn Yard Bonny in ‘Safran’. I picked this for the rainbow challenge running in the Yarn Yard group on Ravelry, where we’re up to yellow for January and February. It turned out to be quite an orangey sort of a yellow, but I don’t have time to knit anything else so I’m maintaining that it is definitely yellow.

Besides, today’s outfit had proper orange in it. The socks definitely aren’t this orange!

Shawl – Isaura
Shawl pin – Nova Steel
Cardigan – clothes swap
Dress – People Tree
Tights – Debenhams
Boots – Gabor

Love for two oranges

It was snowy this morning so I thought my orange boiled wool jacket would be nice and warm, and so would my woolly tights (though if only I’d worn my orange tights as well, I could have been dressed as Prokofiev’s opera!). And I added my Isaura because I figured that you can’t really have enough bright colours on a grey Monday in January. I did have a colourful necklace too, but sadly it broke halfway through the day (I shouldn’t wear long necklaces, they always end up getting caught between me and the edge of my desk and breaking) and I decided there wasn’t much point trying to gather together 100-odd beads, some very small, and bring them home in the hope that I might one day get round to re-stringing them…

Slightly dull

Today I wanted to wear my orange jacket, which I hadn’t worn since last winter, and I thought this outfit worked really well. The jacket is a lovely cheerful colour, and even though I was just wearing a plain t-shirt it didn’t look too casual because it matched the skirt and was tucked in, and the skirt may be a size too small to wear normally but looks fine worn higher up, on my actual waist.

Jacket – East
Necklace – Oxfam fairtrade
T-shirt – Evans
Skirt – Boden
Tights – M&S
Boots – Duo

Unfortunately, I spent two hours of the afternoon in a very stuffy meeting room, and even after that I was warm enough that I didn’t really want to put the jacket back on, and without it the outfit really wasn’t very interesting at all. And also, a slightly-tight skirt is fine when I’m sitting in my office chair with a nice straight back, but not really ideal when I’m trying to find a comfortable position to sit in a meeting-room chair for two hours!

Accidental orange

Today’s outfit was something of an accident; I’d been vaguely thinking about wearing the orange top and red jacket with brown trousers, but I appear to have mislaid the only pair of trousers I own that aren’t a size too small. (I suspect I may have given them to the charity shop on the grounds that I never wore them, which is not unreasonable, although I don’t know why I still have three pairs that I not only never wear but actually can’t wear because they’re a size too small. Life is full of mysteries.) In the absence of trousers I considered repeating this outfit, but it didn’t feel quite right today, and then in a fit of desperation I slung a wrap dress over the top even though it’s not really the sort of top that I’d normally put a dress over, chucked the jacket on top and decided it would have to do.

Jacket – M&S
Brooch – handmade
Necklace – Oxfam fairtrade
Top – M&S
Dress – charity shop
Tights – Debenhams
Boots – Duo

At least it brightened up a day that was cold and grey and, while not actually bad, so intensely meh that it left me feeling worn-out and demoralised. And then I got home to find that my copy of Kate Davies’ Colours of Shetland had arrived, so I intend to spend the rest of this evening drinking in the gorgeous photos of knitwear and sunny landscapes and puffins and pretending I’m not really in suburban Oxfordshire in dark December at all.

Tangerine dream

I don’t think there are any colours I actually dislike. My favourites will always be purple, the purplier reds and teal, but in recent years I’ve branched out into greens and blues and oranges and even a bit of yellow. What I do tend to go for, though, are deep saturated shades, rather than pastel colours, and although I’m rather fond of orange these days I really wasn’t at all sure about this skein of Yarn Yarn Spinel (80% wool, 20% silk laceweight).

(I might add that that is the only one of an awful lot of club and surprise yarns in all kinds of colours I’ve had from the Yarn Yard that I haven’t loved on sight!)

It just seemed a little too sugary, a little flat. But the November and December colour for the Rainbow Challenge in the Yarn Yard group on Ravelry is orange, and somehow this yarn just wouldn’t stop calling to me. After my failure to start an Ishbel it told me in no uncertain terms that what it really wanted to be was Åsa Tricosa‘s Isaura.

So I cast on, and was knitting away without much enthusiasm until I got on to the second wedge, when I suddenly realised how pretty the pattern really is.

And then I took my knitting from the living room, where the light isn’t particularly good, into the kitchen where it’s much brighter, and realised that the orange isn’t dull and flat at all; it’s bright and vibrant and brings some much-needed sunshine into the gloomy winter days.

November brights

Today’s outfit was an attempt to banish the November blues with red and orange. Sadly, the November blues are not that easy to banish (I’m starting to think the month should be outlawed under the Geneva Convention), but it was a good outfit anyway.

Jacket and top – M&S
Necklace – charity shop
Skirt – Boden
Tights – Red Herring
Boots – Duo

Bright tights

Apparently orange tights are a good way to get admiring comments from random people in the corridor at work.

Jacket – Debenhams
Brooch – handknitted
Necklace – Oxfam fairtrade
Dress – Gap
Tights – Debenhams
Boots – Gabor

Also, someone mistook my orange knitted rose brooch for a posh poppy, which I was a bit surprised by.

Jaffa cake

Having bought orange tights yesterday I couldn’t resist wearing them today. Even if I did end up feeling a bit like a Jaffa Cake!

Cardigan – clothes swap
Necklace – Oxfam fairtrade
Top – M&S
Skirt – Boden
Tights – Debenhams
Shoes – Shuropody