More Stripes

Knitting
Goodness, that was a long time. The truth is that I've been working on another Stripe Study and again, it's really unputdownable and I can't stop to blog. It's in my beloved Felted Tweed. The first colour, starting from the bottom, is Watery. I had an old skein of this in the wardrobe and bought some new - at first I thought the colour had changed a lot, but when they're next to each other the difference is less. The modern shade is just a tad greener. The old one was from the Christmas that I knitted four Harry Potter sweaters, in dark blue, brownish red, dark green and then the littlest one in Watery. The dark green one subsequently had to be re-knitted after an incident with a washing machine.

The dark green is Highland, long discontinued and a real, deep, fir green. The bright splash was also in the wardrobe: I can't remember what I bought it for but it's a very juicy light green, the colour of leaf buds. It's called Avocado and it's the inside of an avocado, not the outside.

This one isn't for me. It's a present for someone but I haven't yet decided what sort of present it is, as her birthday is a long way away.

I want to do a blue one next, for myself. The very first item I ever blogged about was a stripy Brandon Mably jacket in Rowan Summer Tweed, another of my favourite yarns. I just love that crunchy little squeak that it has. I went to vast amounts of trouble to select my own choice of shades and arranging how they would appear. You really have to click to appreciate my efforts.

I knitted most of it.

And then I realized that I had made it too big. I couldn't bear to do all the i-cord around the edge because I knew I would never wear it, and I couldn't bear to frog it because, well, because. But last week when I was in a frenzy about another Stripe Study, ripping it became imaginable after all.

As you can see, I was in an organizing mood when I finished the ripping. The piles are sorted by weight, balls of 1-2 grams, 3-4 grams, and so on. I have a total of 665 grams, although I suppose the 62 grams of the smallest bits don't really count - but I did remember that my mental queue includes Kaffe Fassett's Unwind Wrap so I'm hanging on to that bag meanwhile.

I was fairly sure that I had some whole skeins left over but I couldn't find them - until the next day when I was looking for something else and up they popped. So if I find that it's all getting a bit bitty, I can zoom on with those. Veera has obligingly come up with another stripy geometric shawl called Different Lines so I scooped that up. If you've already bought Stripe Study, you get Different Lines for half-price. There's just no excuse really.

I also started these.

It's the cute little Blu jeans that Mette knitted recently, in Debbie Bliss Cotton Denim Aran. I managed to do one leg before I got sidetracked irretrievably by the green stripes. I hope Baby doesn't grow too much before I finish the second. I would like to knit a Stripe Study in  this yarn, but I expect it would weigh a ton...

Telly
There is a new detective series on ITV on Sunday nights, called Vera. It's based on  novels by Ann Cleeves which I haven't read and it stars Brenda Blethyn. I will watch anything that she's in and I found the first three quite watchable - the solutions were daft but it's photographed well and most of the characters have Northumberland accents, so I was quite happy to stick with it. This week's however (which isn't based on one of the books, just on the characters) was utterly daft. The victim 's possessions included hypodermic needles so the detective immediately assumed she was an addict. She had trackmarks too. The pathologist went along with this. Then there was an astonishing revelation when it transpired that she wasn't an addict; she was diabetic, specifically Type 1. So why didn't the pathologist spot that? I don't know what he would have spotted but I'm sure he should have. And anyway, diabetics don't use hypodermics nowadays and don't have trackmarks. This character was also meant to have lived out of sight, keeping herself off the databases and acquiring two false passports with no difficulty. 'She just scanned the details into her birth certificate,' said one of the actors with a straight face. That doesn't even mean anything. She also managed to keep her son out of school, which I suspect isn't that easy.

By this time I was shouting at the screen, 'Where is she getting her insulin prescription?' and, 'She must have a doctor!' 'You can't just buy insulin, you know!' I'm baffled how writers get away with such stuff, espcially now when most viewers could pass GCSE Forensics without too much trouble.

I think next week, Brenda Blethyn or not, I shall watch something more edifying.