Left...Left...Left, Right, Left.

For the last few years I've been searching for a decent pair of ANZAC Day gloves.  For those of you who aren't from the Antipodes and can't be bothered following the link, ANZAC Day (standing for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) is like our version of Veterans' Day.

ANZAC Day gloves are not a weird Australian tradition, it's just that the band I play with performs at the ANZAC Day parade in Melbourne each year.  That's me up the back:

 

Although we don't do the dawn service, it's an early start.  April mornings in Melbourne can be quite crisp and my joints don't like to get cold.  I'm a percussionist in the band and for me, ANZAC day is all about the bass drum.  I spend around three hours keeping the beat, loudly.  In order to keep on keeping the beat I have to tape up my wrists to stop the nerves from pinching.  I think you'll agree it's a good look:

The problem is that the taping is anchored on my palm.  Just ten minutes of drumming usually has the ends of the tape curling up and tangling in my bulky bass drum mallets.  So I have a number of requirements for my ANZAC Day gloves:  They need to keep me warm, they need to leave my fingers free enough to play and they need to cover my palms well enough to keep the scraggy ends of my tape covered and out of the way.

Now as a keen knitter, I already had a few pairs of fingerless to choose from:

Now the purple pair, made by me out of a beautifully soft possum merino mix my mum bought me from New Zealand, could be discounted immediately.  They clash horribly with my black, white and blue band uniform.  They are also a bit long around the fingers for drumming.  You can see from the photo that my little finger can barely peek out, no good for grip.

The second pair, knitted for me by my friend Elisabeth, made me more hopeful.  They matched my uniform so I wore them the first ANZAC Day we played at.   They were pretty good but the covered thumb reduced my grip and the mitten flaps, so useful in my cold and mountainous home town, were just too, well, flappy for drumming.  They did hold my strapping tape down well though.

This year I seem to have stumbled across the best ANZAC Day gloves ever.  They were a birthday present, again knitted for me by Elisabeth:

To begin with, they have an obvious and glorious musical motif, and in black and white they'll match pretty much any band uniform ever.  It gets better though, they are so low cut that all my fingers are completely free, but high enough to cover the strapping, leaving me wonderfully tangle-less.  This ANZAC Day, although I came away tired and sore from hours of bass drumming, my wrists were warm and protected and my fingers unemcumbered.

Here they are in action, what do you think?

Welcome

Well, this is my first entry for the Reclining Knitter, a blog about my knitting adventures.  During the day I'm busy working on my PhD in musicology, or writing articles for various disability related publications.    Given that I spend all day writing for a living, you might wonder why I choose to use my spare time writing a blog.  The simple answer is that I want an excuse to bang on about knitting.  It's become an obsession.  I spend my days thinking about yarn, planning projects and surreptitiously fondling passing fibres.  I'm hoping that writing this blog will help me get my obsession out of my system.

As you may have guessed from the title of this blog, I do most of my knitting lying down.  Okay, not exactly lying down, I am usually propped up on a heap of cushions.  I knit lying down because I have a disability called CFS/ME.  Actually, I do lots of things lying down.  Of course I sleep lying down, but I also watch TV lying down, eat and drink lying down, read and study lying down, I'm even writing this blog lying down.

Most of this lying down (apart from the sleeping bit) happens in our lounge room on the couch I call my nest.  My big, blue, squishy couch has had some pillows removed and lots more added to prop me up while giving me room to sprawl.  The area around my nest looks pretty cluttered.  Getting up and down isn't exactly my forte, so I like to have everything I need within arm's reach.  From here I can reach two knitting projects, a needlework project, a drink and a snack, various medications, knitting books, cook books, research books, all the remote controls, the cat's brush, rubbish bin and my laptop, all without having to sit up.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not bedridden or housebound, not at the moment anyway.  Like I mentioned earlier, I'm a postgraduate musicology student and I write regular articles for Ramp Up, Link, and DiVine.  I help out in my university's archive.  I also play percussion in two bands (don't picture me as a cool rocker though. I definitely make musicianship look daggy, but I am great with a tambourine).  I have a large extended family and a love life which is, shall we say, eccentric.  I'm quite capable of doing all the things you can do, as long as I do them in short bursts.  In between times I'm crashed out on my couch, armed only with my knitting and my laptop. 

It's this view from my nest, in the house we've nicknamed the fortress of solitude, that I'll be discussing here.  Enjoy!