Wool gathering on the web

Multimedia design professional and amateur knitter, Karen Virapen tells Disability Now where she finds creative inspiration – and a pattern for a woollen G-string – online

I work in an Irish university and when I’m not eavesdropping on racy conversations as research for my campus novel, I spend most days enduring death by PowerPoint or reading endless documents written in ten-point Times New Roman.

So when I need a holiday for my eyes, I head over to ffffound (http://ffffound.com), an image bookmarking website where artists pick out amazing photos and illustrations they’ve found on the internet. A quick trawl in their archives is a great way to lose an hour.

Having lived with anxiety and depression for ten years or more, one great outlet for me has been knitting although I’ve been knitting the same scarf now for four years; soon it will be able to circumnavigate the globe. Stitchlinks (http://www.stitchlinks.com) is a group that promotes therapeutic knitting and stitching for people managing long term illness and it sells kits to get budding knitters started.

Ravelry (http://www.ravelry.com) is a buzzing Facebook-style knitting social network where you can meet and chat to fellow knitters and find amazing patterns for anything you might want to create. Click their “naughty” tag under Patterns for some very, er, creative ideas. (Surely a knitted G-string wouldn’t be that comfortable?)

If you want to see guerilla knitters creating covers for telephone boxes (http://
bit.ly/xeBy7) you can, via the power of Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), a photo-sharing website where you can find an eclectic range of images (for “eclectic” read “sometimes bonkers”). All human life is there, plus lots of cute animals. Want some pix of Sakura cats up cherry trees? Somebody obviously does: there’s a whole photoset devoted to them (http://bit.ly/2pAKwe). Want to browse pictures of the Indian colour festival, Holi? Go to http://bit.ly/xS6IW.

Of course, no day of procrastination would be complete without a sprinkley of blogs to read. Ten minutes with a funny blog, a cup of tea and a Curly Wurly and I’m like a pig in muck! Current favourites include Dooce (www.dooce.com/), Jason Kottke (http://kottke.org/), and Little Red Boat (http://littleredboat.co.uk/).

For design beauty, I look to the style blogger, The Sartorialist (http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/), who photographs diverse and quirky people he finds on the street.

Poems are another great source of pleasure to me, so I was delighted to stumble on writer Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout Poems (http://bit.ly/2A3xzn), see left. He takes a marker pen to a newspaper page and makes poetry from random uncovered words.

For more ideas on boost­ing your mood and being creative at the same time, check out the BBC site Healthy Minds, a website I helped to write a few years back (http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/healthyminds/). Nothing like a bit of self-promotion!