chronic knitting syndrome

More Stripes, Believe It or Not

2012-01-28T00:44:00.004Z

Thank you very much for all the new year wishes, and I'm sorry it has taken most of January for me to re-emerge.

Knitting
My aunt was very pleased with her pink cowl for Christmas, saying a number of times that she liked its simplicity. 'It's just there,' she said. So that's good. She said that I can be her knitter for the future, which she thought was a joke but is borne out by this.

She has a birthday this year which is worth marking although she won't, so I thought I'd make her a Stripe Study in her favourite colours. They aren't really accurate here; the purple is a real royal dark purple, not the blue that it looks here.

They're both Wollmeise, although I realized rather late that the purple is Twin and the pink is 100% Merino Superwash. I used 100% on Grey Gardens with 5mm needles so I went ahead with 5mm again: I think it might be a little loose on the Twin but I am fairly confident that sufficient blooming will take place.

The purple is a We're Different and isn't very variegated at all, but the pink is Magnolie and is joyous. I think the only magnolias I've seen were creamy white and certainly the ubiquitous paint shade is a warm white, but this is a richly textured mix. The light is so poor today that I can't photograph it at all, but some more talented folks have posted pics here on Flickr, and there are projects on Ravelry.

Speaking of blooming, I finally got round to washing the Crispy Crunch Snow Cowl and it has softened and stretched beautifully. I love it, although I would probably still give it way if a suitable candidate presented themselves.

My cast off was a lot looser than my cast on, by the look of things.

Movies
You may remember, Mary Lou, that you reminded me of the film Big Night last February and I put it on my LoveFilm list. Yes, last February. I put it in the High Priority category but I think they're fake and just there to make the customer feel better, like the call buttons on lifts. It finally showed up this week and I watched it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it again. Although the actors weren't total unknowns, many of them were near the beginning of their careers and most of them are now household faces so it's nice to see them when they were young and had more hair, or fewer lines. Not that there's anything wrong with lines.

Netflix has launched in the UK, with a 30-day free trial. I can stream the films on my iPad and watch them on the television, which is handy. At present LoveFilm can't or won't do that, only permitting streaming through a pc, and my pc is too old to have an HDMI socket. (It has a VGA socket, but the hell with that.) But I suspect that once Netflix is properly launched here, LoveFilm might come to an arrangement with Messrs Apple.

At the moment the selection isn't utterly fabulous, including as it does the usual selection of blockbusters and familiars that you can see anywhere and which, if you wanted to see them you would have seen by now, but I expect that will improve once the subscription service starts. If you are of a cynical or indeed a practical turn of mind, Nathan Ditum has helpfully compiled a list of the thirty films you might wish to watch during your trial.

The Ghost is on Channel 4 on Sunday night at 9.00, so if you want to see where I got the colour scheme for my Watery Stripes, you could catch it then. Or you could watch it for other reasons.

Video
And in case any of you have been on the moon and have missed this, here is the clip of the snoring dormouse, with sound. He seems to me to have a very high respiratory rate for someone who's hibernating, but I suppose that might be because he's so small.

I think that might cure my insomnia.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T03:21:00.000Z

As seen at Feminist Ryan Gosling

Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2012 - not that any of us likely to be prosperous, things being what they are, but still, let's hope.

Actual Christmas Knitting

2011-12-24T05:05:00.000Z

Knitting
I got the Bronte Hat finished. The Rowan Plaid isn't all wool as I thought, but is still soft and warm and very nice to work with. It knits up in no time at all and is as much fun as I hoped. I put tassels on but I must have done that after I took the photograph.

I came across these photographs recently. It's the Hamish jacket from Rowan's Tadpoles and Tiddlers, by Kim Hargreaves.

I made it a long time ago: I was a fairly experienced two-colour knitter by then, but I found this a real chore. I didn't mind, because of who it was for, but I've never knitted tartan again.

I won't tell you who it is, because he's fifteen now and taller than I am, but the jacket is cute, isn't it?

Now that I'm out of danger as far as starting any more Christmas knitting is concerned, I've cast on for a January birthday present. I think you can probably guess what it is.

It's two shades of Wollmeise, a purple and Magnolie Medium. The purple is completely wrong in the photo; it's a real royal purple. I'm looking forward to getting lots of it done over Christmas and I just hope it isn't going to transform before my eyes into a horrible mistake.

Weather
I've bought a spiked ferrule for my walking stick. I've wanted one for years because a rubber ferrule on ice is one of the most useless things imaginable, but I thought they were probably illegal. However, it appears that are available and I've bought one, a Swedish one called Ingrid. Now that I am thus armed, the weather has warmed up and Edinburgh is likely to be one of the warmest places in Britain on Christmas Day. You couldn't make it up. I saw the most extraordinary cloud this afternoon, just before sunset, and tried to photograph it with no success: a couple of minutes later, Ian Rankin the crime novelist posted a picture of it to his Twitter feed. I don't seem to be able to copy it to this page, but here's the link Edinburgh 5 mins ago on Twitpic It looked like the sort of cloud which could easily conceal an alien spaceship, which might explain a few things, but it was distinctly pink which bodes well.

Penguins
The naughty penguins have been very popular on YouTube and some other people have posted the clip, so this should be visible outside the UK. The title isn't mine.

One of the many good things about this series is the music, which was specially written.

Christmas
Lastly, here is a real Christmas clip. You might want to adjust your speakers.

It was posted to YouTube by the embarrassed big sister in the front row with the gold halo. I hope her sister's forgiven her. The Baby Jesus sleeps all the way through.

I hope everyone has a happy festive season and doesn't embarrass themselves, or at least not when the camera's rolling.

Some FOs which Aren't Striped

2011-12-17T02:23:00.008Z

Knitting
A kind and generous friend gave me a ball of the new stripy Kidsilk Haze from Rowan, in the Twilight colourway. I'm watching the projects on Ravelry and it seems to me that it looks best used in pieces which allow it to be seen in long stretches so that the bands of colours are narrow, i.e. lengthways scarves , long cowls or garments knitted in the round. I've been swatching for a lengthways scarf but then a couple of people did long cowls, and someone else did a Citron. Hmmm. Now Rowan have brought out a pattern book, called Kidsilk Haze Stripe Collection, which shows them to great effect. At first I could only take the more sombre shades to heart but now I'm not so sure.

I like Freya, although I can't imagine when I might ever wear it.

And the poncho, Megan, although the same applies.

(Ponchos have come back after hardly being away, have you noticed? I wonder if I might make one this time. Or would people think I was still wearing it from last time?)

While I'm copying and pasting little pics from websites, I spotted this while I was Xmas shopping.

It's from Marks and Spencer. Sorry it's such a tiny image. They're calling it a Slash Neck Knitted Top and it's 50% polyester so I don't suppose Sarah Lund would be seen dead in it, but it's only £35 so that's some consolation.

Speaking of Sarah Lund, if you're a fan of Scandinavian detectives, you might like this. Lovely sweater. If you click on the YouTube logo you can see it properly: it's widescreen so I can't squidge it in here.

I finished the pink cowl and gave it a soak and didn't exactly block it, but persuded the garter stich edges to lie flat.

I think it might have been better with just a rolled edge, but all I can see in my knitting at the moment is what is wrong with it, so I'm not going to dwell on it.

It feels delicious. I finished the Crispy Crunchy Snow Cowl as well.

I feel bit happier with this but that's maybe because I haven't thought about it for long enough.

It's 40 inches by nine inches so it's a bit of an effort to get it round my neck twice, but it works perfectly well as a single loop and it'll probably soften up and grow a bit when it''s washed.

In spite of everyone's lack of interest, and a deafening silence when I asked if anyone wanted a hat, I've decided to do some Xmas knitting. I have wanted to knit Capucine ever since I first saw the pattern and burst out laughing. It is such a splendidly Victorian piece, suitable for tramping about moors looking miserable, but done with wit and style. One of my nearest and dearest is reading English at Stirling just now, and we recently discovered a mutual dislike of Dickens, so I think that could be celebrated with this hat. Stirling is a chilly campus, so I wanted an all wool yarn and in purple. I've ordered a ball of Rowan's discontinued Plaid in Bramble. I hope it arrives soon. I might even add a little Kidsilk Haze, which as Mary Lou says, is the bacon of yarn - makes everything better. Everyone says it's a very quick knit. I hope I have enough yarn for all the tassels - I think the ones with pigtails at the side are cool, aren't they?

Pix
This is one for you, Mette. I have been meaning to post this for ages. It's an illusion, a piece of trompe l'oeil, but even although I've been looking at it for weeks, I still can only see it as if it's real. Do click on it to see it full size. It makes lovely desktop wallpaper.

Here it is in action, at Springdance 2011 in the Netherlands.

And thank you, Joan, for a new word - kawaii. I now wonder how I ever lived without it.

Movies
I saw The Ides of March recently and while it's o-k-a-y (watching George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti could never be a waste of time), I felt it was made at least five years too late and there was also bit of a plot hole (why didn't Ryan just tell George what he was doing right away?) Rachel Evan Wood was in too, the only female role really and she's good too, even in such experienced company. Marisa Tomei is in it, but not given much to do. So I wouldn't say you should rush out to see it, but if it 's ever on television you could watch it then.

Great news about another series of Southland being made after all, f11holdsteady. Between a new series of Southland and one of Justified, 2012 is looking up. Southland does that thing that you got in The Sopranos, where things are revealed to the audience but not to the characters, which is so much more interesting than the usual cathartic style of drama where everything is revealed and resolved. I always remember that moment when Tony came home from doing a piece of work with Christopher ('Bring two pairs of rubber gloves and a bottle of bleach,') and told Carmela that Janice's boyfriend Richie had done a runner - Carmela, in her best new Jersey accent, said 'Oh, Janice will be devastated,' but we knew better.

And Another One

2011-12-12T01:58:00.003Z

Knitting
This is all getting a bit samey. I'm sorry, but until I shake off the addiction, there's not much I can do about it. It's misfired this time, though.

I bought one skein of each colour of madelinetosh Merino Light to make a Different Lines, but after I had done my first Different Lines I was itching to do another Stripe Study instead so I just started, and sent off for another skein of Kelp meanwhile. The brown shade is William Morris. I knitted an extra stripe of Kelp, so it's a very good size.

This being the winter, I mostly knitted it in artificial light, and it was only when I saw a photograph that I really saw the difference in the colours.The first skein is a deep, rich, intense, organic shade of malachite and the second is well, green. I'm torn. I might rip it back and make it a short Study, or I might rip it all and make a Different Lines after all. Or I could decide it's all right really.

I've washed it and hung it to dry, to lengthen it, but I haven't woven in the ends yet because I haven't decided. It's a Christmas present for somebody, but I don't know whom. It feels gorgeous, has that heavenly swing that garter-stitch Merino Light has after washing.

My aunt asked for a pink cowl.

She's very elegant, and has a magnet on her fridge which reads, 'My tastes are simple: I only like the best,' so I looked at cashmere at first but then I decided Malabrigo Lace in Damask Rose would be soft and warm, and could be combined with a strand of Kidsilk Haze Spray. Either of these is an absolute pig to knit on its own on these needles, but together they're a joy.

The pattern is the Superior Cowl but I didn't knit the full length. I just knitted until the KSH ran out (not a full ball, just 15 grams) which gave a length of ten inches, which I think is fine. We don't have long necks in our family.

It's certainly simple: let's hope it's the best too. It still needs to be blocked. I'm thinking of knitting her a Stripe Study for her birthday in January, in Wollmeise, shades of purp and pinkle. And yes, I have enough yarn.

Lastly, we have a piece of sheer impulse knitting. I keep seeing thick squishy cowls in my Ravelry Friends' Faves, and I have some Jaeger Matchmaker Merino Chunky which has been burning a hole in my knitting bag. I love Jaeger Matchmaker and scoop it up on eBay from time to time, in interesting shades of grey and sometimes Charcoal. This is shade 302, a very creamy Cream. I don't have a pattern, just cast on 100plus stitches and set off. It's sort of like the lovely Gap-Tastic Cowl, but instead of moss stitch, it's seed stitch (or is the other way round? It depends where you're standing.) because I wanted it to be extra crunchy. It's like knitting crisp snow. I had thought of striping it with charcoal, but I think I'll keep it cream. This is two balls. I don't know who this is for either.

I was thinking of knitting some Christmas present hats, especially after I saw the fiendishly clever Howlcat, but I've asked around and haven't got any takers. This is possibly a good thing.

Moving Pictures
I have quite a lot of pix and clips that I want to show you, but I'll put them up in a day or two. Meanwhile, here are some kittens (and Mum) watching an ice skater on the telly.

There is a sound you can hear on the soundtrack which is either the noise of skates cutting through ice, or the sound of sharp little claws running down a television screen. I hope it's the former. There's a moment where there's an extra bit of light and you can see that they are little golden Bengals.

Not Completely in Love

2011-11-03T03:10:00.002Z

Knitting
It turns out that Comet isn't so moreish after all. It's one of those patterns that the first half takes no time at all, and the second half takes the rest of your life. However, by working on it ceaselessly I managed to get to the stage where I could reasonably cast off and seam.

It doesn't say to block it but in everyone's photos it's plainly been thoroughly blocked, so I did that.

I was looking forward to seeing the pattern when it emerged, but it hasn't really. I suppose I didn't block it enough but it fought back quite hard.

I wish I had listened to my inner knitter and made it in the round. I kept wondering why it had a seam and I still do. But it's just a small attack of Post Knitting Disappoinment Disorder, not a major tantrum.

My loved one had good test results last week but will still be convalescing for a while and will need something cosy. I forgot to take a pic of the bottle of matching nail polish which I parcelled up with some dvds and will post with it tomorrow. I hope she likes it.

While we're on the subject of family members, it appears that airing opinions about movies on the internet is a genetic trait - check out Internet Voices for some recent releases.

Movies
I caught Stupid, Crazy, Love recently. I have to confess that the presence of Ryan Gosling was one reason. Someone else clearly feels the same.

Oh, and this.

I know, I'm old enough to know better. More here, at FeministRyanGosling.

Anyway, back to the film. There's usually a character in a romcom who has to do something completely unmotivated and unconvincing in order to get the plot going, and in this case Julianne Moore is stuck with the role. Steve Carell is luckier, as is Emma Stone. At first I thought she was the girl with the saucer eyes from Glee, Jayma Mays, but she isn't. I laughed a lot at the funny bits. It has to be said the characters with the best chemistry are Steve and Ryan - chemistry doesn't always have to be sexual and they have the best lines and pace their scenes brilliantly. I would watch it again, and not just for Ry.

I forgot to say I saw Bridesmaids. I think I laughed once, at one of Melissa McCarthy's lines. She's a lovely girl, who's to be admired all the more for succeeding in Hollywood while not being anorexic, so why would a film which is supposed to be feminist put her in such hideous clothes? Why would they make her a figure of fun? Why is the 'heroine' always in very short skirts which reify her out of existence? And so on. So much of it seemed to me to have been done before: perhaps these things have to be discovered by each generation. And could we please, just once, have a film or book about women which doesn't have any bl**dy cupcakes in it?

I thought I had written about Drive, but it appears that I didn't. It stars Ryan again, and Carey Mulligan and some other very good people including the wonderful Bryan Cranston, but you know what, hiring a lot of good actors doesn't stop it being full of pointless violence. I couldn't quite see why Ryan and Carey had taken it on except that they had next to no lines, just lots - and I mean lots - of meaningful glances. Albert Brooks is in it too and I always find him unbelievably wooden: other people claim he's very good so that must be a failing on my part. He really spoils Broadcast News for me.

And I should benmore tolerant, Knitlass. I'll watch Burke and Hare when it comes on the telly.

Television
The third series of Southland is showing now on More 4 on Thursdays at 9.00. You can catch up on earlier episodes from this series on 4OD, and it's worth getting the first two series on DVD. Simply, it's a cop show set in Los Angeles, but it's outstanding. It has a documentary style, with a James Ellroy twist: the sun is always in your eyes and terrible things happen, and yet we keep going. It's produced by John Wells who wrote ER and made Third Watch and The West Wing, so you can imagine how well it does gut-wrenching emotional involvement and ensemble acting. It got cancelled after the third series, which brings home how tough Hollywood is: if John Wells can get cancelled, nobody's safe.

On a slightly less angst-ridden level, there's a new natural history series on BBC1, Frozen Planet, about the North and South Poles. The first episode did feature a very badly beaten up polar bear so it isn't all creeping glaciers. Before it started I thought it might all be a bit familiar but within ten minutes I was gobsmacked.

I hope this clip can be viewed outside the UK.

I keep thinking this must have been set up, but it couldn't be, could it?

PS I'm sorry to hear that this clip of a Very Naughty Penguin can't be viewed from Canada, grannypurple. It shows some male penguins lining their nests with stones - someone on Twitter said that the female penguins were off buying hats, but surely that can't be true? One male penguin is working quite hard while his neighbour pops in every time his back is turned and steals a hard-won stone. This seems to be quite widespread behaviour as the thief has to fend off another male penguin who is stealing stones from his nest. It's tempting to see this as typical of some human behaviour too, bu that would just be sheer anthropomorphism, wouldn't it?

Even if you can't watch the programme, it's entertaining to follow the comments on it on, Twitter using the hashtag #frozenplanet

Something that Isn't a Stripe Study

2011-10-24T02:40:00.001+01:00

Knitting
Did you hear that noise? Sort of rhythmic, and impatient? It was me, drumming my fingers as I waited for the second skein of Kelp to turn up. The colours work brilliantly.

I'm happy with this, although still not absolutely sure that I'll give it to the person I have in mind.

To fill in the time, I started a Comet cowl in Kidsilk Aura. One of my loved ones is having surgery, to be followed by a fairly long convalescence, so I thought something soft and light might help keep her warm while she works her way through a stockpile of dvds.

The lace is a very simple pattern but I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner as the Rowan Kidsilk Aura isn't the easiest to work and needs the right needles. I use Addi Turbos a lot, but if I'd used them for this I think I would have flung it at the wall by now. Fortunately, the needle I happened to pick up was a rosewood circ with very sharp pointy points, and they can handle the loops and snaggles and insane fluff with ease. I really like the yarn, so I'm very glad to have found a way to work with it.

Every row starts with casting a stitch on and then casting one off, which gives a nice runcible edge. It's knitted flat and then joined beginning-to-end.

I could imagine these being quite moreish, if I weren't already addicted to the Stripe Study.

Here's a joke you've probably heard before.

Movies
The Guardian recently covered Edinburgh in their City Guide series. This includes a list of Ten of the Best Films Set in Edinburgh. When I first read the list I thought it was the ten best and I got somewhat cross, but 'ten of the best' is vague enough that I calmed down. You can read the descriptions and see clips here, but the titles are

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Trainspotting
Chariots of Fire
Regeneration
Hallam Foe
Shallow Grave
The Illusionist
Festival
Burke and Hare
One Day

I haven't seen Regeneration yet, or One Day. I don't plan to see Burke and Hare. I think Festival is absolutely dreadful. Jean Brodie, Trainspotting, Chariots and The Illusionist I like a lot, and Shallow Grave is one of my favourite movies ever. I used to watch it after a bad day at work and it always cheered me up: I'm not sure what this says about me or my job, but there you are.

My favourite of the films missing from the list is The Battle of the Sexes, an early Peter Sellers film adapted from a James Thurber short story, The Catbird Seat. Made in 1959, it's in black and white and directed by Charles Crichton, who made so many of the Ealing Comedies and at the age of 78, A Fish Called Wanda. It was photographed by the great Freddie Francis. I was going to add a clip here, but this is the whole film! You'd better get a cup of coffee.

It's a bit dark, but in the circumstances we can't really complain. Sellers makes his first appearance about 2: 45 in, in the Royal Mile. You can see Edinburgh as it looks in The Illusionist, which I raved about here.

I saw Midnight in Paris, the new Woody Allen film, last week. I don't quite understand why everyone's raving about it as much as they are, but I enjoyed it and will happily watch it again. I wish Woody Allen would visit Edinburgh; it's hard to see how he could resist setting a film here if he did.

To end with a dance, for those of us who like musicals and film noir, here's a nice mashup showing George Raft dancing in a film called Side Streets. Yes, really it does. Just stay with it.

Raft was known for tough guy roles, and was refused entry to the UK in 1967 because of his gangster associations, but was quite the dancer in his early days and was a chorus boy in New York. This is the scene in the original movie, complete with some wonderfully wooden acting.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T01:43:00.000+01:00

1955 - 2011

At Last

2011-10-03T03:35:00.000+01:00

I'm sorry. You are all quite right to nag, and thank you for being so gentle. The thing is, there hasn't been much knitting, or rather much knitting that has survived. Where there has been knitting, there has also been ripping. I did finish the Different Lines. Here's a blurry photo from before it was washed.

I went to get it just now to photograph it properly, and there is an enormous spider on top of it, so you'll have to wait again. It's been a busy summer for livestock here. The mice came back. My upstairs neighbour unplugged the deterrent in her flat while she was doing some DIY, so we both got them - they swing between our kitchens, - and I was blaming her under my breath, and then I discovered that my deterrent had stopped working so it was my fault too. I have apologized. The are called Pestbye, cost about £20 each and lasted almost two years, which I consider a bargain. I recommend them wholeheartedly. You can get them from Amazon and eBay too, and in the U.S. They make an ultrasonic sound, but more importantly, they also set up an electric disturbance around the wiring circuit which the mice can't bear. If the mice have babies they won't leave at once but will wait until the babies can come along, which is when they are four weeks old (don't say Aaaw; they have dirty feet and they wee everywhere).

After spending a noisy Saturday night having a party behind the skirting board in my bedroom, they went, but one got left behind or couldn't find his way out. I was sitting knitting at two o'clock one morning, watching the news live from Libya so the room was full of the sounds of gunfire, screaming and explosions, when a little tiny black thing shot out from under the sofa and ran under some wool. I went to bed.

After a couple more days, and after cleaning under the sofa, I was sitting knitting again when I saw something else moving and this time it was a huge spider. I mean really huge. Like Woody Allen said, it was the size of a Buick. I'm not scared of spiders, but I don't like really huge ones indoors. I took its photograph - I won't post it here in case some of you never come back - and sent it to a friend, who said it looked like a garden spider. This is a fairly vague label, but it does support my idea that it was something that shouldn't have been indoors. The one I just found amongst my scarves wasn't quite so huge but still has very long legs. I expect it's this deeply unsettling weather that's causing it. At midnight on Friday in Edinburgh it was 18 C in Edinburgh, hotter than London or Paris. It was balmy in Waverley Station - any of you who have ever been in Waverley Station will know that it has its own micro-climate and is inhospitably cold all year round. It has metal benches which chill you to the bone if you sit on them for 5 minutes, but on Friday evening, it was balmy. I don't know if we should be looking out for polar bears or for leopards, but I'm not surprised we have a few extra spiders.

So, knitting. I started another Stripe Study, with some madelinetosh in William Morris, a rich, rich brown, and some Wollmeise in Barist'O. I thought this was going to be a stunning combination as the Barist'O is green and blue with a bit of brown and black.

The colours you see here aren't entirely true as the blue and green have a tendency to swap places with one another while I'm pressing the button, but you get the general idea.

I thought that the Brown in the two yarns would complement each other, and the green and the lighter blue would contrast nicely, but instead something ghastly happened. I don't think it shows properly here.

The stripes vanished because of the other brown and the green became a hard emerald shade instead of the soft sea that it looked before. I persevered for a while, but I had to admit that it just didn't work, and I ripped it. I tried some Fyberspates sock with the brown but I ripped that out even sooner.

Then I started a Scalene scarf, in three beautiful pale shades of Rowan Pure Silk. They don't show correctly here, but they're pale spring green, a sweet blue and a pearly grey.

Something horrible happened and the colours merged into each other, like when you mix all the colours in your paint box and they turn into sludge. So I ripped that.

By this time, as you can imagine, I was getting very nervous. So I did what any rational person would do in the circumstances and bought some more Wollmeise, this time a purple Versuchkaninchen.

I must have spent a week pairing up colours and looking at them. I nearly made a decision a couple of times and then backed off. Perhaps I would never finish anything again, and would pass my life in a never-ending paroxysm of indecision. But there was one combination that I kept putting aside because I only had one skein of the second colour, one that I had already seen knitted up on Ravelry and had fallen in love with. I meant to do a Different Lines with it, but when I wore the first one I realized that I didn't to make another of those. It's lovely, but it's not the Stripe Study and that's all there is to it.

Eventually it dawned on me that I could buy a second skein of the Kelp, and so I started again.

It seems to be working out nicely.

The Kelp is greener than it looks here. The tosh Merino Light is so soft to work with, a beautiful yarn. I find their inability to get the colours right a bit of an affectation - my William Morris brown should have some turquoise in it but it barely has a few scraps of pale blue. I can understand dyelots not matching but the colours should be present. . . but I can still understand why people fall so much in love with it. I think this one might be a go-er.

Comments

There were some suggestions that I could offer some songs of my own, but I'm afraid I never sing in public. I have such a bad voice that at school I mimed during singing lessons, as the children standing next to me said I put them off the tune. I mime at weddings and funerals for the same reason. I once sang a nursery rhyme to one of my nieces when she was small and she looked at me very seriously and said, 'I know that song, but to a different tune.' She didn't, of course.

Yes, Donice, I like the Catkin Shawl and almost used the William Morris and Kelp for it for a Christmas present for a friend. They are such Arts and Crafts colours, I think they would suit it very well. If I don't give her this Stripe Study, I may still do a Catkin.

More soon. There are movies to catch up with.

No Knitting, So Singing Instead

2011-08-03T23:43:00.004+01:00

I finished the Machair Stripes and washed it and it g-r-e-w wonderfully, but it's far too hot to photograph it so you'll just have to take my word for it meanwhile.

And since then I've been stuck. I do a little bit, usually four rows, of the Palatina from time to time but that's all so I think that's maybe not a keeper. It's probably the two strands of laceweight that's slowing me down. I suspect that if I were to wind one of my skeins of Wollmeise or madelinetosh merino light that I would be off again madly gartering, but that would require me first of all to make a decision about which colours to use and that seems to be out of the question at the moment.

So instead, here's another girl singer, Ronnie Spector at the Lincoln Center, NYC, last Saturday, singing Be My Baby with quite the line-up of backing singers.

And LaLa Brooks singing Da Doo Ron Ron, with the girls again.

And The Angels singing My Boyfriend's Back.

Now try and tell me you didn't join in with any of those.

Thanks to @oliverburkeman who alerted me to these on Twitter.

Knitting First, then News

2011-07-25T00:14:00.002+01:00

Knitting First
I finished my third Stripe Study, the watery one in madelinetosh merino light. I soaked it and then left it to dry in such a way that it would stretch under its own weight. I didn't want to block it in case it looked stretched, but I wanted it to get a bit swingy. Which it did.

It's beautiful and I wish the weather was colder so that I could wear it. It hasn't been warm, but it hasn't been cool enough to wear a wool shawl.

And I got an extra stripe of green in the Machair Stripes. The last stripe used nearly a fifth of the ball, and I was left with four grams of green left over. I'm still on the last band.

This bit is somewhat interminable because up until now there's always been something going on, counting, or wrapping, or heading back, or making a narrow stripe, whereas this is just knitting. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This is the best pic I've got of the colours in the dark blue Jabberwocky. I had 66 grams left for the last stripe.

I couldn't resist starting a little something something, a Palatina shawl. The pattern is only available with the yarn, as a kit, but I've hazarded a guess at how it works and I've set off. This is the Colourmart lace set which I was planning to do something else with - actually there's probably enough yarn for both, but the earlier idea has palled.

It's two rows of plain and two rows of purl, executed indefinitely with a stitch added at one end on every second row.

News
The Murdoch business continues to hypnotise. It doesn't look as if they got the numbers of 9/11 families, kmkat, as that story has faded away on closer investigation (it was in fairly unreliable newspaper to start with), but they did get the numbers and addresses of 7/7 families, probably from someone in the police. That's the sort of news that gives you a cold feeling in the pit of the stomach. When most people were running about making a difference, someone was making a quick buck. It has been replaced in the rolling news schedules by the more immediately awful events in Norway. I've stopped watching the news constantly because it was so annoying, as well as deeply disturbing. When the carnage in Norway began, the interviewers all but asked, 'Did you see a dark-skinned man wearing a head-cloth running away?' It was as if we'd never heard of blue-eyed blonds causing any trouble. Or Christians.

And then on Saturday when Amy Winehouse was found, they all became experts on addiction and started second-guessing that too. A lot of them seemed to think that it would be less of a shock and less distressing for her family because of her history, and didn't hesitate to say so rather placidly, but anyone who has been close to an addict knows that this isn't true.

Let's remember her at her best instead, singing a Carole King song.

(I think I got the size a bit better this time, Zippiknits!)

Still Striping Steadily

2011-07-11T03:37:00.000+01:00

Knitting
I'm on the last stretch of the weathered Stripe Study. I sort of abandoned it for a little while when I started another Veera shawl.

'Only' an inch or so to go on the final stripe. These two shades of madelinetosh Merino Light are different yarns. I understand they changed the base yarn. The off-white one is much softer. I hope it's the later version of the yarn.

And I've reached the end of the stripes on the Different Lines, which you haven't seen at all.

The blue is from Jessie at What Housework?, who now has an Etsy shop. I think it was called Jabberwocky, which would have been enough to make me buy it even if it hadn't been a lovely colour. It's over the edge of blue and into indigo / violet, with lots of tiny particles of other shades. The pale green is from The Yarn Yard and was called 612. I think they're perfect together, like a scattering of flowers across a meadow or a machair.

I've done the 14 stripes required by the pattern, and I've paused because I think it may not be quite big enough. It's in line with the measurements in the pattern but other people's look larger: in particular, the pointy bit at the beginning looks small on mine. I know it'll grow in time but still. I may as well do another stripe anyway, because it's not as if I can do much else with the remaining 21 grams of yarn.

Scandal
I would have posted sooner, but I have been absolutely glued to the television news and Twitter, following the Murdoch affair. I sometimes put the television on pause while I check Twitter, and then fast-forward so that I can catch up again. I have been following this story for as long as The Guardian has been covering it but things really took off towards the end of last week. I think the extraordinary aspect is that there is so far no apparent end to it. People talk of drawing a line in the sand, but so far the tide has always come in and washed it away.

Usually when we're riveted by a story, it hangs on a single event and a single area of public life. Will X be elected? Will Y resign? Will Z be convicted? Once the question is answered, matters are resolved no matter how shocking they may be. But this one has leapt in unexpected directions, like the closure of a Sunday newspaper on Thursday afternoon (which Murdoch may well have been planning to close anyway) - I went out for a couple of hours and missed it - and it is still unclear which individuals might crash and burn. Will the Prime Minister suffer because of his appointment of Andy Coulson - it turns out that everyone and his granny advised him against it, but he took the line that he knew best.

On Friday when he was interviewed by the police for nine hours, did Andy Coulson sing like a canary or did he say, 'No comment,' until it was time to go home?

How many police were involved in the bribes? We used to be given the impression that it was a few uniformed plods pocketing wads of crumpled fivers, but it must have gone higher and wider. How high? Who was the most senior officer involved? How could a newspaper spend tens of thousands of pounds paying off policemen without the people who countersigned the claims being aware?

And of course there is BSkyB, which Murdoch was planning to take over shortly. And what if a spark is ignited across the pond? What did Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones, know? And which other newspapers are going to be discovered to have been doing the same? Sometimes it seems that the only event which comes close is Watergate.

And now this story tonight that they tried to get the mobile phone numbers of British victims of 9/11, with a view to hacking them. Every time we think we've heard the worst, they trump themselves.

So far there are still few prepared to say openly that the reason a lot of these people went along with the News International crew is because they would be royally stitched up in one of their newspapers if they didn't. Dossiers were kept, and dirt could always be discovered, or invented. Like J. Edgar Hoover, who could, and did threaten presidents. Perhaps one of the consequences of these events will be that they will lose that power.

Whatever happens, it will all greatly facilitate chewing through large quantities of garter stitch.

In the Interests of Fairness

2011-06-29T02:01:00.001+01:00

Greenpeace used a variation on the Darth Vader ad to attack Volvo over their refusal to sign up for a couple of anti-global-warming laws.

I'm sorry I can't get the YouTube videos to fit into the blog column. The only way I could improve it would be to change the proportions of the template, and I'm worried that if I do that something terrible might happen and I might have to re-arrange all the posts back to the beginning, so bear with me. As they work their way down the page, they fit better.

Yet More Stripes

2011-06-28T00:58:00.003+01:00

I've reached the last chunk of the watery stripes. From here it's just knitting, without any counting or wrapping and turning. You're right, Annie, there is a twang of seaside and beach huts about it. (I just frightened myself by going to my last post and seeing that photograph of Rafe Spall unexpectedly.) I think the greyish tinge of the blue makes me think of the Atlantic, as it rolls up on the beaches of the Outer Hebrides and the coast of Massachusetts, and the sand in the Outer Hebrides really is very pale, almost white. My Dad used to stand on the beach at Bornish at sunset and say that on a clear day you could see straight up the St Lawrence Seaway. Not entirely true, but it brought home the connection between the places. His ashes were scattered at Loch Bornish.

At this stage, one row takes about one gram of yarn. I was worried about having enough of the pale colour but it's going to be okay. I used 26 grams of the second skein of Well Water, about a fifth of a skein. Madelinetosh Merino Light doesn't have a weight on the label, just a yardage of 440 yards but they seem to weigh around 120 grams, give or take a few grams.

The shawl is a bit small just now, but that's probably because it's scrunched up on a shortish circ and I expect it to grow and bloom once it's washed. I can't wait.

I gave the Green Stripe Study to its new owner on Sunday, so it will be going to California on its holidays soon. I didn't think she'd need a warm wrap in San Francisco, but I suspect Yosemite can be chilly even in July.

While I'm on this very straightforward stretch of these stripes, I'm going to allow myself to start Veera's Different Lines pattern, which is an even cleverer arrangement of short rows. My head is a little clearer. May the muttering commence.

Meanwhile, I just caught up with this lovely ad. I expect everyone else has seen it already, but just in case.

And here's the behind-the-scenes.

It brings back what a great piece of music that is. It was tongue-in-cheek, but it rises to the occasion too. I first heard it in a cinema in Tottenham Court Road when it came out in 19- ahem, a few years ago.

Stripes So Far

2011-06-15T20:56:00.000+01:00

The latest Stripe Study is coming along. The colours are Well Water and Chambray, in Madelinetosh Merino Light. The yarn is finer and limper than the Wollmeise I used for the first one, but I'm still using 4mm needles. I swatched it and it firms up with washing.

The Chambray is paler and less shaded than I expected, and it has a greenish cast. It's more like an infinitely pale celadon than a very pale blue. Never mind. It's still very good with the Well Water. I was going for a sort of weathered, watery look, sort of distressed New England. I wanted the blue of the Atlantic, and the white of weathered clapboard (yes, I can hear your eyes rolling).

The colours aren't quite right here. When it's finished I'll spend some time calibrating things so that I get a proper picture. I wonder if I will suddenly get very sick of this pattern if I knit too many. It has been a godsend, as I've been a iller than usual the last few weeks and haven't really been able to do anything more taxing, not even the little denim baby trousers that I want to finish. I did have a go at them, but I ended up with two identical legs instead of mirror-image legs, so I've put them aside for the moment.

I upgraded my iPod Touch this week. My inner Presbyterian is horrified, but my inner hedonist is delighted. This one has a camera but I don't think it's any truer with blues than my camera-which-is-only-a-camera, but we'll see. I toyed with the idea of getting an iPad but could think of no reason to justify the expense and rather a lot of reasons for not, so I did this instead.

At the weekend I watched all six episodes of The Shadow Line on iPlayer. I was completely baffled by what I thought was the last episode, but then I discovered there's a seventh on Thursday night. It's very good, and has more outstanding actors to the square inch than just about anything else I've seen recently. Rafe Spall is in it, playing nasty, and every time he appears I want to turn the television off and check that the front door is locked.

Stephen Rea is in too: I would have watched it sooner if I'd realized he was in it, because he doesn't do much television. He was the betrayed husband in The End of the Affair, but you will probably remember him as the surprised lover in The Crying Game. Everybody else in it is pretty fab too. Worth catching.

Mini Movies

2011-06-10T01:47:00.003+01:00

The second shade of Madeline Tosh Merino Light that I need for the latest Stripe Study arrived today, so here are some films for you to watch while I am obsessively knitting garter stitch.

This is a temporary installation in Stockholm. Mette wrote recently about trompe l'oeil and I always find it curiously exhilarating.

This shows you a bit about how they did it.

It makes me want to jump on the next flight to Stockholm.

I went to see Loudon Wainwright III when he played Glasgow recently. It was a very relaxed evening: everyone plainly knew the songs inside out and had seen him perform more than once. He started with a playlist but he soon gave up and played mostly requests. He forgot the words to this one but the audience was able to get him back on track.

Lastly, this is quite a short clip. It's a bit dull at the beginning, but it gets better. Stay with it.

Mostly Mouses

2011-06-08T00:27:00.001+01:00

I finished the green Stripe Study last week. I think I'm pleased with it, although since it's for someone else I won't know until I've seen it on her. I only did eleven stripes instead of twelve because I thought that Felted Tweed and 5mm needles would make it a lot bigger than sock yarn on 4mm needles, but there doesn't seem to be much difference and I think it would have been fine with twelve.

I gave it a soak and dried it flat. It grew much more sideways than it did lengthways, but I don't know if this is because of the Felted Tweed or because of the garter stitch.

On both of my Stripe Studies, the spine has a pronounced curve: I must do my M1Ls more tightly than my M1Rs.

I made a swatch with some of the ripped-out Summer Tweed and decided that although knots were the way to go, the yarn doesn't work with this pattern so it'll have to be something else.

I was going to say that I fell off the yarn wagon again, but I don't think I could convincingly say that I have been on it for a while: suffice to say that I got come lovely Madeline Tosh Merino Light in Well Water, from a Ravelry destash. I suspect that well water is actually a murky greenish black, but the yarn is a lovely dark watery blue and is destined for another Stripe Study.

This yarn is not a lot of fun to wind into a ball as it kinks and knots and eludes you, but it is lovely to knit with so it's all right in the end. It took me an eternity to choose the other colour, and it is now on its way across the seas. I didn't want to start a project that would only have to be interrupted when the parcel arrives, but fortunately one of my friends got a new kitten and I decided that a catnip mouse was required.

One thing led to another...

And another...

And before I knew it, there was a family...

This is the Embellished Catnip Mouse Toy, and the ears are knitted in, so clever. I only knit bobbles for people that I love very much, and cats. There are eyes in the pattern as well but I preferred this streamlined look. These ones are waiting to be stuffed and sewn up, apart from the tiny grey one which is made from Wollmeise in Maus Jung (har har) on 2mm needles. All the rest are knitted on 3mm.

You can knit one up in no time and within minutes it can be torn apart by its tiny owner.

More Stripes

2011-05-26T01:52:00.004+01:00

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.

Grey Stripes

2011-05-09T22:20:00.003+01:00

I've recovered my knitting nerve. I made a Stripe Study Shawl and I'm embarrassed by how much I like it.

The yarn I couldn't being myself to tell you about was a skein of Wollmeise Sock in Jung Maus, a wonderful blend of light greys.

I got it in a destash by lovely Linda, who pointed out that Wollmeise skeins are 150 grams and thus it's not an extravagance at all and is cheaper than, for instance, Lorna's Laces Sock, which you need to buy two skeins to make a pair of socks. This cheers me enormously, as you can imagine. I combined it with a skein of Dream in Color Smooshy in Black Parade, which is black with flashes of green and blue, but for some reason the blue looks green in the final result.

I ran out of that, so the last one-and-a-half stripes are done with Auricania Ranco in PT489, which is a semi-solid charcoal.

This pattern is brilliant. I admired the shawl from the first time I saw it, but it was only when I started knitting it that the full cleverness dawned on me. On the return rows of the stripes, you keep wrapping and turning and going back to the beginning, so that one side of the V becomes hugely extended and flappy. This asymmetry continually made me think of a fiddler crab.

It makes a very mathematical knit, which is always sort of exciting. There's another mathematical / optical thing that happens - what would you say is the 'main' colour?

When I started knitting, I saw the grey as dominant and it is described as the main colour, but as I went on I realized that there is more of the black - and yet, as you look at it, the grey becomes dominant again and the eye switches back and forth so that the two balance each other. When you look at a lot of the projects on Ravelry, you see the same thing.

Please excuse the Monday Morning floor. I was going to soak it and dry it, without actually blocking it, but so far I can't stop wearing it. I went up two needle sizes from 4mm to 5mm and I expect it will grow, but at the moment it is almost exactly the right size. I had thought that I might skip the final stripe in any future ones, but in fact I like this size and I don't think I would want it to be much smaller. Future ones? Well, at the moment I want to do several and I'm sure I will do one in blue and green, but after that we'll have to see.

The pattern is beautifully written and is possibly the best four euros I ever spent, although I did find the yarn requirements confusing. Presumably a lot of people did as many of the projects mention running out. I used 470 yards of the grey and a total of about 600 yards for the black.

Even Less to See

2011-04-22T14:47:00.001+01:00

Knitting
There's even less to see now. Knittingwise, I seem to be moving backwards in time. I've ripped the denim cardi.

And you remember I had to rip back part of the Swallowtail Shawl? You may have wondered if I put in a lifeline when I did that. Did I? Well, no, I didn't, and I've just had to rip it back again.

I knew I wasn't particularly well last week, but I hadn't realized that I had lost the ability to count to three quite so spectacularly. The second row of the pattern was a bit tricky, amd the third was impossible. I'm still managing to look forward to how this is going to look when it's finished but it's taking all my resources of stamina and perseverance. Have I ever shown you my school badge?

Also, I was born on a Thursday, so I have far to go. It seems that I still do, at least with this blessed shawl.

So, now, we shall talk of other things, of ospreys and of films that I have watched while I have been pointlessly purling.

Ospreys
The ospreys are back at Loch Garten. EJ, the female, came back first, and then Odin showed up some days later.That link is to the webcam: the link doesn't work for me but I think it's something to do with my settings for Windows Media Player, which I have set up so that I can stream stuff through the dongle on my blu-ray player. . . having got that set up, I am reluctant to tamper with it, as you can imagine. They can also be seen on YouTube. Here she is getting rid of the grass that has grown on the nest during the winter.

Remember, she's bigger than she looks here: she has a six-foot wingspan and the nest is wider than that. Since then she has laid her first egg of the year, and another, and another.

Movies
I saw The Illusionist last week, the animated film by Sylvain Chomet, from a screenplay by Jacques Tati which was originally set in Prague but is now set in Edinburgh. It has been described as a love letter to Scotland, and it is.

Not only has he got the 'fifties setting right, he hasn't prettified it which can be difficult to avoid, especially with Edinburgh. He has captured the city's sootiness, as well as her beauty.

I liked his Belleville Rendez-Vous very much, (which seems to have been re-named The Belleville Triplets...) but haven't felt any impulse to watch it again. I'm sure I will watch this again lots, although that may be because of the familiarity of the setting. Well worth catching, even if you you're not a Scot. Like Belleville, it has little dialogue and what there is is more background noise than text, which adds to the dreamlike quality.

I also watched The Ghost (aka The Ghost Writer, it's all very confusing), in which not a lot happens but it's all beautifully photographed. It starts well but I felt that it fizzled out into a predictable hash of the CIA and other baddies. I never quite felt that Ewan McGregor's character (the writer) would have got such an important contract, and Pierce Brosnan was far too cool to be any British politician that ever lived - they're not a glamourous lot. But the setting, in the wild wastes of coastal Massachusetts is stunning, and there's always lots of nice clothes and furniture - not what one usually looks for in a Polanski movie but it gives you something to look at while everyone's walking about. It's from a novel by Robert Harris and I find that while he has original ideas, he doesn't write very three-dimensional human beings: the films based on them tend to have the same qualities, which is fine but makes it difficult to care about the characters.

Telly
What I have been totally glued to however is the American tv series, Justified. The first series was shown here on FX and is available on DVD, and the second series is just starting on Five USA on Wednesday nghts at ten o'clock. It's based on stories by Elmore Leonard, who writes the best dialogue ever. It is set in rural Kentucky - where UK stands for the University of Kentucky - and the storyline follows a Deputy U.S. Marshal from the area who has been sent back home against his will after one too many 'justified' shootings. The acting is exceptional, and the faces - there are so many people in it who don't look like actors, but look like people who haven't had many square meals or much medical attention - and although the young women are pretty and well kempt, the older ones are downright frightening. A check of IMDB demonstrates that they are indeed all actors, just ones who valued acting lessons above trips to the surgeon and the waxer.

Timothy Olyphant and Walt Goggins (no, really) in character,

and looking like themselves. You can tell because they don't look as if they're thinking about whether they might have to kill each other.

Margo Martindale as Mags Bennett

It can be quite violent, and there have been a couple of times when I have watched it through my fingers or with the sound turned off, but the writing and the acting make it all worthwhile. Graham Linehan, co-writer of Father Ted, said on Twitter that watching it 'is like eating really good pie', and he's right.

Have a Happy Easter and if you're knitting, I hope you don't have to rip anything back.

Not Much to See Here

2011-04-16T14:03:00.000+01:00

Knitting
There isn't much to show for the last couple of weeks. I sewed the Debbie Bliss Denim Cardi together roughly and tried it on. It fits, but you know what? I'm not in love. I've tried it on again a few times and although it gets bigger all the the time because of the garter stitch, that's not really the problem. I didn't burst into noisy tears at this realization, but just started to think about what else I could do with the yarn. I think I'm going to have to stick to raglan sleeves in future: Ive got narrow shoulders and as the rest of me has got wider, they haven't, so things that fit in one place are falling off in another. I could of course do extensive measuring and altering, but I know I'm not going to so I think t's better to stick to raglans. I think also that the garter stitch might have had a slight Michelin Man effect. There's a raglan cardi in stocking stitch in the same book so I might try that. I feel quite sanguine about knitting that in the same yarn, which is a relief, and I don't feel a great sense of loss over the lace-edged one, so that's OK.

I think I've mentioned here before the usefulness of actually taking a look at the pattern now and again while you're making something, even if you've knitted it four times already. I find myself in the embarrassing position of making this observation again, having spent two days ripping the latest Swallowtail Shawl and getting it back on the needles. I consoled myself with the thought that a couple of years ago I wouldn't have had the skills to do that, but really, it would be better if my need for them weren't owing to my own thoughtlessness. Sigh. Anyway. We're heading off on the first part of the edging now, and it's still looking beautiful. A friend told me recently that she's getting married next year and I am already hatching schemes for knitting her something huge and intricate and white: I might use this as part of the persuasion process.

I also might use this. I got distracted by a lovely shawl that a Ravelry Friend knitted, without a pattern, called Snow on my Flowers. She was kind enough to direct me to the pattern for the edging so I've taken the risk of casting on.

The original has regularly spaced holes, but after spending some hours wrestling with graph paper, I decided that this would probably end in tears and that random would be safer in my case. It's some very fine spun Yeoman Polo merino lace that lovely Linda gave me, two strands held together. The yarn is Italian spun, one bright white strand from Australia and the other a creamier shade from Tasmania, which seems so much more exotic than Australia. I used this combination for the Baby Swallowtail, so I know it works well.

I finally thought what to do with the silk that was brought back to me from the trip to Everest Base Camp last year, and I made a long, skinny, garter-stitch band with it. It's ever so slightly greener than it looks here.

I asked my friend where she bought the yarn and she said, 'A wee shop in Kathmandu.' She's not a Scot; she's from New Zealand, but she's picked up the language.

I love it. It's about 80 inches long and averages three inches wide. It feels unbelievably soft and supple and I'm a bit worried about it falling apart because it's so loosely spun but it is probably tougher than it looks. Silk usually is.

I've done another ball of the RYC Silk Aran on the elongated Clapoktus, but it looks much the same, only longer, so I won't trouble you with a photograph.

I bought some yarn last week, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you what it is. I'll show you when I cast on.

Inspiring the Young
The young relation that I sometimes knit pink things for has expressed an interest in learning to knit and I'm planning a pink garter stitch scarf for a doll as the first project, but I'm not sure what might come after that. She's a very keen reader and regards books as IMPORTANT, so I think a book might be a good way of keeping her enthused. Does anyone have recommendations? Lucinda Guy's Kids Learn to Knit looks promising, but I'm concerned that it might appeal more to trendy adults than actual children.

Peg Blanchette's 12 Easy Knitting Projects loks genuinely childish and Bonnie Gosse's First Book of Kntting for Children has good reviews. There are so many that I'm a bt lost. Any advice will be appreciated.

I'm going to put the non-knitting in a separate post, because this is getting ridiculous.

More Distractions

2011-03-29T03:21:00.002+01:00

All the bits of the Debbie Bliss Denim Cardi are finished. The back seems to be the right size after all, but I'm going to tack the whole thing together first so that I can check, before I undertake the massive seaming project. Yes, the yarn is discontinued, Mette, but it still crops up on eBay all the time.

And I've finished another ball of RYC Silk Aran on the Clapo-Ktus scarf. This is two-balls worth and I have four balls left so I think this is one third of the final length, although I might make it shorter if it gets too heavy.. I did the increases during the first ball, and have gone straight for the second.

I got distracted by something else bright and shiny. It was the Yarn Harlot's fault. She made a pair of mittens. I'm somewhat obssessed with silk. One of my more embarrassing secrets is a small collection of kimonos that I've bought on eBay because I couldn't resist their fabulousness, and when I spent 36 hours in Shanghai, I devoted two of them to going round a silk factory.

This angry little person is a decorated silk cocoon which I think I bought in one of the shops at the Smithsonian - can that be right? Anyway, it's about an-inch-and-a-half long, and if you shake it you can hear its owner and builder rattling about inside it. The filament for one cocoon unwinds to a length of about one mile. These 'hankies' each use one cocoon and aren't woven; they're sort of spread out on a frame - very good tutorial here in Knitty from the redoubtable Amy Singer. This form of silk is also known as mawata.

I had managed to ignore silk for spinning because if I allow myself to be diverted by spinning, I won't be able to knit all the things I want to knit, but the Harlot's unspun mawata seduced me completely and she offers the possibility of knitting it without the spinning. I found a British supplier who hadn't sold out, George Weil, and ordered some.

They sent purple, pink and blue and I started tearing them apart as soon as I'd opened the parcel.

I even knitted up a couple of little swatches.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it's lovely stuff.

Telly
First of all, British viewers of The Killing must go here. I made some open sandwiches for the final episodes of The Killing on Saturday night - pickled herring, shrimp, salami and gherkins, on dark rye bread (I don't dare drink cofee after 5 p.m., Gretchen. and I didn't think of beer, so I was forced to drink wine). I put the lights out for Earth Hour - I know, I should have put the television off too, but really - and lit a candle. I discovered there are hazards to eating open sandwiches in the dark. I won't say anything specific here, because you might be going to catch the repeat, or you may be waiting for the American version which starts soon, but I wasn't disappointed. It was the person that I suspected quite a long time ago. I don't see Sarah Lund as some sort of feminist heroine, because she seemed to do the same things as male characters in her situation do (i.e. the television maverick), which is disappointing, and I'm curious to see how she's re-instated - we know she is because we've seen the trailer for Series 2 - but at least she didn't spend a lot of time bursting into tears. Actually, she didn't burst into tears once, which is good going for a woman on television these days. Gripping stuff.

It's the last episode of Silk on Tuesday night: there are three storylines to be resolved - who is going to get silk, will Billy be ousted, and the obssessed former client - and I think I can also see something sad looming on the horizon. I hope there's going to be another series.

King's Bench Walk, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

I think it's a very likely candidate for showing on BBC America, Mary Lou, as it has lawyers in wigs, and judges in robes, and fleeting glimpses of picturesque bits of London, so keep your fingers crossed. In spite of what one thinks of as the ubiquity of the Internet, there are a lot of American programmes which we still can't see. Even on television, we can't always get what we want - Boardwalk Empire is only available to Sky subscribers: I'm not one and even if I wanted to be, I can't because I live in a 'listed' building, i.e. one of architectural or historical importance, so I have cable. In Edinburgh, it's quite difficult not to live in a listed building. And cruellest of all, Channel 4 took Southland for the first two series, but didn't take the third. I thought Southland was superb, James Ellroy meets The Sopranos, and I can't forgive Channel 4 for the oversight, presumably casued by Southland switching channels in the States.I wish the providers would get themselves sorted out.

Catching Up

2011-03-24T01:51:00.000Z

Knitting
There's some catching up to do. You may remember the Cool Clapo-Ktus, which is heading to Australia soon. We left it just before the half-way stage.

It's Rowan's discontinued Bamboo Soft, 100% bamboo fibre. My idea about only doing rib on one side and purling straight across the back worked out well, and the stitches dropped beautifully.

The whole thing has the most beautiful, whippy drape and hangs perfectly either as a shawl or can be concertina'd into a scarf. I love it.

So much so that I cast on another for myself. Mine is in some charcoal RYC Natural Silk Aran that I got when the yarn was discontinued. I used this yarn for Aria, one of the scarves I made from Knitting New Scarves, and it has great drape and swing so I have high hopes. The Clapo-Ktus pattern is well written and the designer, Loredana Gianferri, has some other very nice things...

I'm not planning to make it the full width of the shawl; I think I'll keep it slender so that it''s a scarf. That way it shouldn't be so heavy. This time I'm knitting the rib on both sides as the silk makes it a bit sticky.

I did 17 repeats of the first pattern on the Anne Swallowtail, and now I've finished the second repeat of lily of the valley. I think I'll do another. I'm having a short rest so that I can face the idea with enthusiasm rather than regarding it as a chore.

I'm glad I waited so long to find the right pattern for this yarn.

Telly
I'll be very interested to hear what you think of Silk, Anita (Comments, last post). I've caught up a little bit with North Square and am glued, albeit a bit alarmed to discover that it's true to life. It isn't available on dvd, but it's on Channel 4 On Demand, and it can be streamed free from the LoveFilm site. I can't imagine why I didn't watch it first time round, as it has lots of people I like - Rupert PJ again, Kevid McKidd, Phil Davis and so on. Fab.

I was joking when I suggested that Sarah Lund might venture into another large, dark abandoned building, but it was almost the first thing she did in Saturday night's episodes of The Killing, with very sad consequences. I suppose I should have realized that it was about time for someone else to be bumped off, but I hadn't and it was a shock. One of the disadvantages of making the series so long is that you have time to think about things and reflect on the way your expectations are being manipulated, and I am getting very tired indeed of maverick detectives. I watched a doco once about culprits who attract attention to themselves by wanting to do television appeals to 'help' the police, and one detective said - he was neatly dressed, in a suit, white shirt and tie, as mavericks never are - and he said that he had learnt not to jump to conclusions based on how suspects react when they are told of the death of their loved one, but that in one case his mother rang him immediately after the tv appeal and asked why they hadn't arrested the husband yet. I would like to see a series based on that neatly dressed detective and his mum.

The advantage however of making the series so long, is that one is compulsively drawn into it, responding to every hint and glance, and I will be glued on Saturday night. I might get the proper accompaniments - I can't drink spirits or I would buy a bottle of schnapps, but maybe some rye bread and pickled herring...

I can't let this post finish without a mention of Elizabeth Taylor. Who else could still have got her obituary in the headlines on a day when so much is happening in the world?

It's difficult find one clip or one photograph, or even one husband, that represents such a life, but I like this one. With Richard Burton, during their first marriage I think.

Deciding

2011-03-19T14:35:00.015Z

Knitting and Yarn
I've just ripped back the right front of the Debbie Bliss Denim Cardi because I was doing the decreases in the wrong place. Actually, I was doing them in the right place, but apparently I did them wrong on the left front and it's easier to rip back the one I've just started. Since the cardi is knitted in garter stitch, I was expecting the fronts to be identical, but I suppose there's a difference of one row.

I still like it, although when I told a knitter friend the other day that I was nearly finished, she said, 'That's usually when it all starts to go wrong,' and she's right. I'm holding my breath just a little.

The back doesn't look long enough at the armholes and I'll have to review it once I've finished both fronts. The sleeves seem a bit long, especially when you consider that they are still to have a lace border added, but they may shorten when stretched over my arms. The yarn hasn't been hard on my hands at all: I usually find 10o% cotton heavy going but this is plied quite loosely and I can knit with it for hours. Which is a good thing, as I still seem to be snapping it up on eBay and possibly on my way to cornering the market. I wonder if the lace border would look good done in the solid navy, instead of the marl?

Talking about buying yarn on eBay, I've had a search for Wollmeise 100% Merino Superwash in the Barist "O" colourway for some time. I never thought of actually buying it because Wollmeise goes for such astonishing prices, often approaching a hundred pounds for a skein, but it's a very pretty shade and I did like to watch it as shimmered past, beyond my reach. Then one night recently a skein got stuck at about the £22 mark. My eBay bidding instincts kicked in and I snatched it for about £25. Which is only about twice as much as I might have considered spending on a skein of rather special sock yarn.

It is very lovely, and I don't regret it, but I have noticed that this seems to be the going rate for Wollmeise now. What happened? Did she suddenly start dyeing it in truckloads? Is it all fake? Or is it just that nobody has any money?

The blue at the top is really green, but it won't photograph as such. The answer to the obvious question is, I don't know but probably a shawl or some other neck thing.

Telly
The Danish crime serial, The Killing, continues. We have two episodes tonight, and then the last two are on next Saturday. Up until now I've been recording it and watching it as a daytime treat on Tuesday or so. I know that next week I won't be able to wait but shall be glued to the television while it is actually broadcasting, something I almost never do, but I'm not sure about tonight.

Will I be able to wait to see Sarah enter yet another dark and abandoned warehouse alone? She's still wearing that jumper, although she occasionally wears another in the reversed colours. At 280 euros, it's far too expensive for someone on a police detective's salary: is she on the take, or did her nice Swedish boyfriend buy it for her? Or is he actually nice? At this stage in the proceedings, I'm suspicious of everyone.

Staying with television, we have a snappy new legal series on BBC2 called Silk, set in a barristers' chambers, to which I seem to have become very attached. I so completely lack the ability to think on my feet that I can only gaze in awe.

Neil Stuke is in it, who doesn't do enough television by my standards (well, he was in the remake of Reggie Perrin, but we're trying to forget that). He used to be in a legal series called Trust which I liked and which only ran for one series; he got to wear better suits in that. Rupert Penry-Jones is in it too; he often plays awfully decent chaps who haven't realized just how incredibly handsome they are, but in this he plays an absolutely copper-bottomed sh*t, who is only too aware of how delicious he is, and how clever. The lead is Maxine Peake, whose character is well up to all of them. It's very tightly written and it's worth watching from the first episode, as a lot happens. Not great art, but very good television. I do hope it gets a second series. I will now have to catch up with North Square, which was another legal series by the same writer, which I missed.

There's much more, but I have to get a couple of things done before The Killing starts. Just in case I decide to watch it tonight.

I Spoke Too Soon

2011-02-18T00:12:00.012Z

Knitting
I did manage to fit in a couple of repeats on the latest Swallowtail Shawl before I got sidetracked by donor knitting again. Now I can't decide how many repeats to do.

Someone is going on a very hot holiday, and I kept having this irrational impulse to knit her something. I dismissed this as craziness, but then I thought that a simple linen stole might be acceptable - cue endless pageing through Ravelry for simple linen stoles.

Nothing really drew me in, and then I had a better idea. Bamboo fibre is deliciously cool, and would actually be useful on a hot day or a clammy evening. I thought about a Clapotis a bit as I've never actually made one and I still find the contradictory diagonals sort of fascinating. I did swatch it a long time ago, before I had done any lace knitting and I remember thinking there must be an easier way to do this. I checked out Rowan Bamboo Soft and discovered that my local John Lewis had it at an astonishingly good price - the colours are very beautiful, sugared-almond shades and not my sort of thing at all so it was nice to have the excuse. I was warned of extreme splittiness, but I knit slowly enough that it's not been a huge problem.

After looking at smaller variations of the Clapotis, I tried the Augustine, which is a triangular shawl, not a stole. It has a nice way of slipping two stitches in order to flatten the edges, but several repeats in I still wasn't reading the pattern and couldn't see whether I was on line 1 or 3 of the 4-row pattern.

Then I was saved by another cool Ravelry friend who faved the Klapo-Ktus, where the Clapotis meets the Baktus. The way the to-be-dropped stitches are handled in this is very neat and easy to read; they're just purled. I did this for a while, while mentally oohing and aahing over the heavenly feel of the yarn, and then I thought, these plain stitches on the even rows are really slowing me down. Would it be OK if I purled them, or would this lead to some horrible error at the critical half-way point? I messaged the designer (isn't Ravelry wonderful?) and she replied amazingly quickly and said, Why not? The only problem she could see might come when I was dropping the stitches, when if it was a sticky yarn they might not drop, but with the ultra-slippy bamboo I thought everything should be OK. So that's what I did. This is the back, so that you can see where the rib changes.

I've knitted two balls of the Bamboo Soft and I've now reached the unbearably exciting point where I start dropping stitches - I thought I might use another ball but the point is to create a sliver of coolness, not an enormous shawl, and I think we can be sure that the bamboo will stretch, and it's at least 29 inches long already.

The colour reminds me of the little lace sleeveless tops my Granny used to knit, in pale lemon and pink and green, for wearing with a tweed skirt and a cardigan. The yarn is a treat.

I've also been making good progress with the Debbie Bliss denim cardi. I finished the back and I'm well up the first sleeve. That's very interesting what you say, Anonymous, (comments on previous post) about the shaping on the Molly shrug. I'm very glad I didn't spend ages trying to get it 'right'.

Watching
One of the reasons I've spent a lot of time on this is because BBC4 is showing a very long Danish television series, The Killing, or Forbrydelsen. It's a detective story and it's in 20 parts; the BBC is showing them two at a time, so that we won't have forgotten the beginning by the time we get to the end I think. It's very gripping, with a second story about a politician and it's still not really clear how the two stories are going to be linked in the end. We thought we had found the murderer this week, although a little voice in my head was saying, it can't be him, we still have twelve episodes to go, and I was right. It wasn't him.

The detective, Lund, has the obligatory complications in her private life, and an unusually nagging mother. Her colleague seems to have a huge problem with authority, which is an unusual characteristic in a policeman, I would have thought. She has a nice knitted sweater which she has been wearing for weeks now, in spite of it getting badly torn in the sleeve when she was injured. It's been very neatly repaired since then.

The politician has a vey ambitious PA that he's sleeping with, although I don't think that's going to last much longer as I think she'll dump him the minute he's not in the lead. She reminds me of that thing they used to say about how Hillary Rodham's husband would have become President, whether or not he was Bill Clinton.

And there's a character that I'm very suspicious of, but I also suspect that it's clever writing that's making me suspicious and that he may well turn out to be a red herring too. No spoilers, please, Mette.

So with two hours a week where I can't take my eyes off the screen because I don't understand a word, miles of garter stitch are very welcome. I wonder if this trend for foreign crime telly, with Inspector Montalbano and Wallander and now this, might encourage someone to show us some other foreign telly drama: or do they think we'll only watch if it's a very familiar genre?

I saw a very good French film called Fair Play (that's the title in France too) which really took me by surprise. I thought it was going to continue in the light-hearted way that it started, but it became a lot darker - very dark. All the scenes took place between characters playing games and sports - squash, golf and so on - and ended on an extreme adventures outing. I did wonder if the last scene had been tacked on or changed as it felt slightly out of place, but it didn't spoil it. The only actor in it that I recognized was Marion Cotillard. I probably wouldn't have watched it if I'd known more about it, and it would have been my loss.

I also saw The King's Speech. I'm not sure why since I'm not remotely interested in the royal family (I can't decide if they're more boring than annoying, or vice versa) but I suppose I didn't want to be left out. There are some good scenes because Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth are such good actors, but overall it suffered from some odd casting (I love Tim Spall, but as Churchill? Was Warren Clarke busy? And an unrecognisable Claire Bloom and an even more unrecognizable Jennifer Ehle, both plastered in so much makeup that there was no room for them to act at all.) And don't get me started on the ahem, adaptations they made to history.

What else? Saving Face, which is romantic comedy about a Chinese-American Lesbian in New York. No, really. It's surpisingly Woody-Allen-esque, not just because of the New York setting but also perhaps because of the traditions of match-making and interfering mothers which the Jewish and Chinese cultures appear to share. It's funnier than a lot of romantic comedies remember to be and is full of appealing characters.

An End to Plain Knitting

2011-02-05T10:07:00.009Z

Knitting
There's been a bit more finishing. The little pink shrug / ballet cardi worked out very well. It's Debbie Bliss's Molly from Junior Knits. The Rowan Kid Classic was a perfect sub for the Cashmerino Aran. Everone says this comes out big so I skipped one set of increases in the sleeves, and I did 1 x 1 rib on the cuffs to make it look a little daintier.

I couldn't see the point of doing the collar and back ribbing in two sections and then sewing the side seams, so I did it the other way round and did the ribbing in the round.

I winged the picking up and the short rows and it came out a little bit wonky, but you can't see it in wear.

Not unless you pay her extra to stand still.

Anyway, it's a success and some of the other ballet mums want to place orders so I must have done something right.

I dashed off another infinity scarf, this time from the GAP-tastic Cowl pattern. It's Rowan Cocoon in Bilberry. The Cocoon is as lovely to knit with as I hoped it would be, and has a lovely silky drape owing to its untwistiness. Sadly no model shots this time.

This is an excellent pattern, a simple idea very effectively executed. I cast on fewer stitches because the recipient isn't a tall girl and I didn't want to swamp her. While it was on the needles it kept looking as if it would suit being narrow, but every time I cast off it started to look skimpy instead so I used the whole two balls. It's about 40 inches by nine.

I posted it off and got a delighted email this morning, but apparently it started to unravel shortly afterwards. Ooops.

That's pretty well the end of the knitting-for-other-people for the moment and I cast on for the cardi for me that's been in my mind since I scored that Debbie Bliss Denim Cotton on eBay last August. It's the Lace Edged Cardigan in her Denim book. It's very simple and I think it's something I would get a lot of wear out of: at the moment I'm planning to do the lace but one Raveller left it off so I'm keeping an open mind.

I'm currently on a stretch that consists of knitting garter stitch for 50 rows.

So it's time to look around and see what I was doing before that Christmas Blitzkrieg started, and to think about what else I want to do. I really, really, really want to make a Shadow[]box, but the thought of starting another garter-stitch project just now makes my brain bleed, so I think it'll be that Swallowtail Shawl in Schaefer Anne that I set down in November, and back to the second Venus de Merino, the Venus de Mud, and time for some counting and cursing and maybe even a few nupps. Can't wait.

Finally, an Eternity

2011-01-13T10:42:00.014Z

Knitting
I managed to finish the Eternity Scarf at the third attempt. I thought black would look good against the pale taupe and I had some of the same yarn (Jaeger Matchmaker Merino) in aran weight in a dark charcoal, but when I tried it, it looked too harsh. So I ripped it again, and tried some of the same yarn in a mid-grey. I did three rows of garter stitch, and then a lace cast-off. Phew.

It's very nice, and I like wearing it. I'll try and get a decent model shot: I did some but they're too dark. It's a really useful sort of scarf if you use a walking stick, because you can't accidentally strangle or hobble yourself with the loose ends. Not that that would be an effective marketing angle, but still.

And I now have my three shades of grey Kidsilk Aura. And a little pink.

Now I only have to decide what to do with them.

Once I have finished my stock of Wool Mix, I'll try the Ecover, Judith. I used to use their stuff, but got out of the habit. Eucalan is an absolutely shocking price here (£10.50 for 500mls, compared to about £5 for 1.5 litres of Wool Mix) so although I might get it for soaking, I probably won't be pouring into my washing machine.

I'm sorry 2010 was so awful for you, Joan. I hope 2011 is already setting a shining example in contrast.

Movies
I saw The Duchess last week, which was even more disappointing than I expected it to be. If you've read the book, you'll know what a thorough piece of work it is and how much of it covers Georgiana's life in politics. The film concerns itself solely with her romantic life and implies that her political role consisted of turning up at a few meetings. The Duke is obliged to display every vice known to the Wicked Georgian Husband, and (Richard Brinsley) Sheridan and (Charles James) Fox are given those awful cameos of the 'And how are you today, Mr Fox?' type, which I thought Monty Python had banished forever. Sheridan doesn't have a single line which suggests he was a wit or might have been capable of cobbling together a play. I can understand why they didn't want the screenplay to be cluttered with prithees but it had no historical feel at all, and I know that Ralph Fiennes and Kiera Knightley can deliver more than one-note performances because I've seen them do it, but there was no evidence of it here - all very flat. I think television does historical dramas so well, although people like me carp on about the make-up and so on, and films have a hard time keeping up. This film doesn't come close.

My favourite thing in it was Georgiana's hat trimmed with fox tails, to indicate her support for Charles James Fox. I should probably watch it again with the sound off, and concentrate on the costumes and interiors.

There's lots more information about it and other costumes here.

I also watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, which is a doco about Banksy, the street artist, and may or may not be a mockumentary about the man who filmed much of his work. Or did he? Either way, it is a commentary on contemporary art. Or it is a piece of contemporary art. Worth seeing and not as annoying as it sounds.

Natural Disasters
You might remember the two Daisy Hats I sent off to my newest relation and her sister in Australia last October. They're the daughters of my cousin's son, and they live in Brisbane, Queensland in the path of the devastating floods. The area they live in is called Cannon Hill, so I was hoping they are on high ground, and they are. He emailed me today to tell me that they and their house are safe and dry. His office is closed because of power cuts and possible flooding, so he's been able to be at home with the family, but it's obviously an anxious time.

Here's a link to the Denver Post's photo blog of the flooding and here are some pix from the blog. Some of the areas which are affected haven't had rain for ten years, and now this. Most of the pix are from Rockhampton, through which the waters passed on their way to Brisbane, but the last is from Brisbane itself.

Felines find refuge on a fence above the flood water level on January 6, 2011 in Rockhampton, Australia. (Photo by Jonathan Wood/Getty Images)

Buildings in the city centre are reflected by remaining flood water at dusk on January 6, 2011 in Rockhampton, Australia. (Photo by Jonathan Wood/Getty Images)

A local resident walks past a flooded building as the Brisbane river burst its banks to cause widespread flooding in Brisbane, Australia, on Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011. Queensland has been in the grip of its worst flooding for more than two weeks, after tropical downpours across a vast area of the state covered an area the size of France and Germany combined. (AP Photo/Tertius Pickard)

Happy New Year

2011-01-09T16:17:00.021Z

Happy New Year. I don't think anyone's looking forward to 2011 very much, and it's already got off to a not very good start, but let's be positive. I hope it is a good one for some of us, especially my lovely readers.

After all the extra work associated with Christmas and New Year, and all the extra play, there's been quite a lot of this going on chez Chronic Knitting.

LOLCAT courtesy of ICanHasCheezburger

Knitting
You'll be astonished to hear that most of the Christmas knitting was handed over as planned. I think it all fitted. I washed the Risers Hat and Cowl in order to soften up the yarn (I was assured by an expert that this would do it, and she was right) and they grew slightly, so I was worried that the hat might be too big but apparently it wasn't.

The Malabrigo infinity scarf and beret turned out very well. I had thought the Amoroso would look good against her dark hair, but she'd just become a blonde. It still looked good.

Sorry she's a bit blurred, but it was Boxing Day and we were all a bit blurred. Both great patterns and I would knit them again happily.

Koolhaas was the only thing that was delayed.

I completed one repeat of the pattern and then decided that we didn't really have enough in common for it to be worth persevering with the relationship, so we had a clean break. I think I would have got on better if the pattern had been written out as well as charted: I usually need both to get me started. Maybe larger needles would have helped although that would have raised the spectre of it being too big. I've done a pattern a bit like this before, when I did Norah Gaughan's Sunflower Tam (from the days before the blog) and I found it very compulsive, but this time I just couldn't bring myself to care.

So I spent almost an entire day looking at hat patterns, especially double-layered ones, without coming up with anything at all and I cast on to do another Marsan Watch Cap somewhat reluctantly. I only did a couple of rows. Then the next morning when I opened up Ravelry I noticed that one of my Friends, one who can always be relied up to spot the coolest and the chicest, had faved a doubled hat pattern that I had completely failed to notice - the Christopher. This was so exactly what I was looking for that I felt my hair stand on end briefly.

The yarn is Malabrigo Worsted in Pearl Ten, and the stripes are leftover Vaa from the Marsan Cap, also Malabrigo Worsted.

Curiously, the Vaa looks brighter when it's in stripes contrasting against the Pearl Ten, which is a lovely purplish cocoa.

The first stripe is cleverly placed so that when the hat is plain-side-out, the colour just peeps out.

The giftee was too shy for a model shot, but his son was persuaded.

I love it, and am looking for an excuse to knit another.

I realized afterwards that I had knitted up seven balls of Malabrigo Worsted in not much more than a month, which is about a sweaterful. Hmmm. Something to bear in mind.

The ballet cardi for the little pink person wasn't exactly intended a a Christmas present but I should try and get it done in time for the start of term. It isn't a proper wrap cardi, as all the patterns were not-quite-right, but it's close. It's Debbie Bliss's Molly, from Junior Knits.

It's in Rowan Kid Classic instead of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino, in Tea Rose. (Although it's not actually the colour of a tea rose, but never mind.) It's come on quite a bit since then. Everyone says it comes out very big, so I did one less increase on the sleeves and I might not do the fold back on the cuffs.

The Eternity Scarf which might be for me has reached what Mette will think is a very interesting stage.

I have run out of yarn, half-way through the cast-off. I could take it back a row and then cast off but that would leave it a bit narrow. Or I could finish the cast-off with a different yarn, or I could take back the cast-off and do a couple of rows with a different yarn before the cast-off so that it has a border. I wonder if a black stripe would be good, or a charcoal one. Or a brown one. I'm still very pleased with this pattern, on the second time of doing. It's a bit tight on the circ, so it's going to stretch engagingly when it's finished and it has a nice weight and hang (three strands of Jaeger Matchmaker 4 Ply, held together on a 5.5mm needle).

Sales
I stumbled a bit in the John Lewis sale. Twice. I mean on two separate days, not just two lots of yarn. The first time I got some Rowan Kidsilk Aura, in Cypress.

It's not quite as blue as it looks here. It'll go well with the Aura in Steel that I bought last year which I still haven't found a purpose for. I might go back and see if they've got some Pumice, which is the palest grey and then I would have three shades of grey. Wow.

And when I went back the next week, I got some Kid Classic in Lipstick.

If the ballet cardi is a success, I'll knit a not-ballet cardi in this shade. If the ballet cardi isn't a success, God knows what I'll do with it, because it sure ain't my colour.

And I surprised myself by buying this ball of Aura in Coral. Although I'm not a pink girl, being an unremittingly grey girl, the salmony coral shades do whisper to me and this one is lovely.

Even if I don't knit anything with it, the sight of it is enough to lift my heart. And it would make rather a nice contrast with all those greys.

I also got this, not in the sale. It's Rowan Cocoon in Bilberry, which is one of those greyish brownish purples which can be hard to make out, but when it's beside purple it is definitely purple.

I want to make an infinity scarf for someone and am making the final decision between two patterns. You can imagine how well that's going. One of them will be interesting to knit, the other not so.

Washing
One of the worrying things about the start to 2011, is that Lakeland have decided to stop stocking Wool Mix, the wonderful Australian lavender wash that I've been using for years. I use it for soaking before blocking -one of the best things about it is that you don't need conditioner and you don't need to rinse too emphatically - and in the washing machine for delicates, and often for dark washes, as it doesn't contain brighteners. I can't imagine why they're discontinuing it as all the reviews on the website are five-star, and I'm fairly sure no-one else imports it. Perhaps an Australian reader can enlighten. So I ordered a supply.

I went back later and tried to order more, but it was All Gone. Eeeek.

Just a Quick One

2010-12-24T20:20:00.005Z

I thought you would be riveted to know that I finished the Marsan Watch Cap in time. I even photographed it. It was a bit of a dash at the end, but that was more because I got up so late than anything else. And last night I took the time to do a Christmas manicure, which didn't really help.

I didn't do the foldy bit, because I decided the giftee would probably rather have it just as a beanie. I would have liked to do it, as a knitterly experiment, but I resisted.

I like the look of twisted rib very much and for a while I always did ribbing that way; I'm not sure why I stopped. Combined with the Malabrigo Worsted, it makes a beautifully bouncy and squidgy fabric.

Having done so much twisted rib in the last few days however, and up against a deadline, I now feel mysteriously drawn to doing several miles of stocking stitch in the round, so I'm not sure where that leaves Koolhaas. He might just get a nice plain hat instead, or come midnight I might be tempted again. We'll see.

In order to help me decide, I'm now going to have rather a lot to eat and drink. I hope you are too, and Merry Christmas.

Mostly Christmas Knitting

2010-12-23T01:02:00.018Z

Christmas cards
The images in the photo of the Eternity Scarf in my previous post are some of my Christmas cards, which I had finally got round to writing. Well spotted, Judith. They're from the National Galleries of Scotland: these links won't work for long but the choirboys are here and the Dutch scene is here. The choirboys are by Mabel Royds, who excelled in woodcuts. The Dutch scene is a detail from one of Avercamp's winter landscapes, paintings that can keep you occupied for hours.

The chaps in this detail are playing a game called 'kolf' apparently.

Knitting
I forgot to tell you about my adventures with the Wild Saffron pattern, from Rowan's Purelife Autumn book.

I fell for this design like a ton of bricks when I saw it, and got a ball of Renew in Diesel to try it out. The reason I didn't immediately buy enough yarn for the whole thing was that a small voice of reason was pointing out to me that although this was the sort of thing that I would have loved (and suited) when I was young and slim, it might not make me so happy now that I'm not-so-young and not-so-slim.

The pattern rquires some concentration, so my first task was to blow it up so that I could see one section at a time, and concentrate on it.

I found this worked well and was a small amount of trouble for the benefits. I did a swatch, which I realize now I didn't photograph, but I found that when a row didn't seem to have the right stitch in the right place on the row below (the number of stitches isn't the same from one row to the next) I didn't quite care enough to go back and find out where it went wrong. I think that if I had been more convinced about the outcome being something that that I, in 2011 rather than 1983, might actually wear, I would have persevered but the small voices were getting louder and I decided that in this instance it might be wiser not to be as determined as I know I can be. I could almost hear the gunpowder running out at the heels of my boots. So I ripped it. I still think it's a lovely pattern. The Renew has a nice hand, and I'd like to do one of the other patterns in the book at some time.

I got these goodies recently, lots of nice Rowan-y things. I'm scared to use the keyring in case she gets grubby, but I suppose she would dispel dirt quite easily, being 100% wool.

The new Rowan book is out very soon, and I realize I never got round to mentioning number 48, which is one of my favourites ever, when it came out. It has chunky classics, intricate colourwork and fine evening wear, all at their Rowany-est and I think I would like to be buried with it.

I may not ever knit anything from it, of course, but that is genuinely another matter. I don't think I would have been a knitter without Rowan: obviously I have used other designs and other yarns, but it was the Rowan style and the availability of their ideas which encouraged me and even from time to time inspired me, so even when I don't knit anything from a particular book, they still make me want to knit.

Xmas knitting
I seem to be keepingup with all my self-imposed challenges. I finished the Eternity in Stone and handed it over in time for the giftee to head to Gothenburg at 5 o'clock on Wednesday morning. I'm sort of hoping for a model shot but you'll have to be satisfied with this meanwhile.

It doesn't look totally knockout in the pic, but I was very pleased with it. I finished it three times: I decided it was too narrow the first time, and that the rolled edge rolled too much the second time, so I did a few rows of garter stitch instead. It still rolls a bit, but it doesn't vanish. I think the Malabrigo rolls more than some yarns would. I'd like to knit more of these.

And I finally finished the Beret: I decreased another 8 stitches and that seems to be right. I tried it on a friend with a small head and it fitted. I've bought some elastic anyway, so if it flops over the giftee's ears, help will be at hand.

Again, I'm impressed with this recipe and would like to do it again. In spite of all the finishing, I feel I've got it right in the end.

The matching cowl is still mysteriously at the stage where it 'only' needs to be kitchenered.

The Risers Cowl and Hat are finished. I did the short version, although I used more stitches because my tension was different.

And I may have done a different number of repeats: I just did it until it seemed about the right depth and then I stopped. If you click on this, you can see all the tweedy shades - Rowan's discontinued Yorkshire Tweed Chunky, shade Coast.

Lovely. It's simple, but very effective, and its willingness to crumple and fold makes it perfect for a warm cowl. Thank you, Mary Lou.

And I've cast on the two chaps' hats. The one which has to be handed over first is a Marsan Watch Cap, in yet more Malabrigo Worsted.

The colour is Vaa. It's a little darker in reality.

And the later one is the Koolhaas, in Malabrigo Worsted in Pearl Ten, the perfect mannish mix of brown and purple and greige and mushroom.

I'm getting started with this more slowly than I expected. After re-starting the rib, I completely misunderstood the beginning of the pattern repeat so I had to undo lots of twisted stitches and get it back on the needles again. Jared at Brooklyn Tweed is obviously a very thoughtful and painstaking designer and I think I had expected it to be smoother exercise, but I'll get there.

And I still have to cast on a little pink ballet cardi for a little pink ballet dancer, but that's not so critical time-wise, so I am feeling fairly calm about it all at present. Fairly.

Forwards and Backwards

2010-12-16T00:46:00.008Z

I've just re-done the ribbing on that pigging hat for the third time, and am casting off again. I cast off another eight stitches and did it on a circ this time, because I think I do ribbing very loosely when I'm working on four needles.

If this doesn't work I'm just going to put some elastic through it. Sue me.

The Eternity Scarf is going a lot better and I was mad to think I wouldn't finish it in time. Of course, now I'm thinking of making a hat as well and tempting fate all over again. The colour, Chapel Stone, isn't one that I would have chosen usually, but it's perfect for this person and it's growing on me.

I noticed that most of the versions of this made in Malabrigo Worsted had got very long and since the giftee is quite slight I didn't want her to be swamped by it. I cast on 170 stitches instead of 200 and it's come out just right. I could have got it out of one skein of the Malabrigo but I've decided to do another inch or so, so that it provides lots of cover. I don't want any sneaky gaps for the wind to get in.

I also cast on for a Koolhaas Hat in another shade of Malabrigo, but I made a daft mistake for about three rows so that's to be started again. Blame it on the cold weather. I think I must be the last knitter on the western hemisphere to embark on this project, but I'm looking forward to it. And this time I get the ribbing over at the beginning.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas over at The Big Picture.

Santa Sunday at Sunday River, Newry, Maine, 5 December 2010. AP Photo / Joel Page

Donice, I hope your snow isn't too awful and inconvenient. Your comment provoked a slight attack of Tourette's in me. Whenever I hear of Columbus, Ohio, I blurt out, 'The high water mark of our life in Columbus Ohio, was the night the bed fell on Father.' I was raised on, amongst other things, the works of James Thurber and S.J. Perelman (I often think how my father must have quailed at the sight of me waddling towards him with a New Yorker Album in my chubby hands, pointing at a cartoon and saying, 'What does this one mean?') and I know chunks of them off by heart. So this seems a good time to link to that story: it may not be very Christmassy in itself but it's a good tale for a winter afternoon.

More Snow and More Knitting

2010-12-10T02:52:00.016Z

Another snowy photo, this time of a giant bootprint. It's from the BBC News website. An Edinburgher called Nial Smith did it in his back green - it's a sort of snowy crop circle, I suppose. What I want to know is, how did he not leave any footprints?

Big version here.

I think I promised you a model shot of the Cowl that Became a Balaclava.

As you can see, it can be worn in such a way as to provide maximum coverage. And minimum recognition.

I have been getting on well with some of my Malabrigo and Christmas knitting. The Amoroso became a beret, but then I ripped back the ribbing and I'm doing it again with slightly fewer stitches. The One Day Beret is a very good recipe. It might make me an aficionado of top-down hats. I made the top 12 inches across, and did just over 2 inches of stocking stitch between the increases and the decreases, and then got worried about it being too slouchy, but now I don't think it will be.

As you can see, it has plenty of lifelines.

I finished one ball of wool on the Burberry cowl and took its photograph.

Tonight I finished the second ball and now I 'just' have kitchener it. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this pattern; it's exactly the right mixture of paying attention and sailing along, and if you do an extra row now and again it doesn't matter. There's always something happening and it turns into what it's meant to be. I had some bother with it gaping at the cables, and I couldn't work out what I was doing differently when it did and when it didn't, but because of the general squidginess it doesn't matter.

I've not been doing so well with the two skeins of Malabrigo in Chapel Stone.

I thought I could cheat and I started an Eternity Scarf with two strands on an 8mm circ, but it's not working. I expected two strands of Malabrigo to be heaven, but it's too loose and slides about on the Addi Turbo. I allowed myself 24 hours off to think about it, and I'm now in overtime. This is the present that has to be handed over first, on the 22nd, so I had better get my deciding cap on.

If you're stll in the mood for snow photos, this is one of my favourite things, the Angel of the North.

The Angel of the North, by Antony Gormley, in snow, December 2010 Copyright North News and Pictures

If you're not familiar with him in fair weather, you can see him here.

Cold and Hot

2010-12-02T20:51:00.009Z

Two pictures and a little film tonight.

One of a white UK, totally snowed out. You can see a little patch of green, although presumably in forty shades, on the west coast of Ireland. The image was received from a NASA satellite called Terra by the University of Dundee Satellite Receiving Station.

NEODAAS/ University of Dundee

You can see lots of Scottish snow here.

Two, an ad which you may have seen before but which I think is worth resurrecting this week. Turn on the speakers.

And three, a cosy one of the Burberry Inspired Cowl, in Malabrigo Worsted. The colour is Amoroso.

I can't believe how fast this is knitting up. I knitted the above in an evening, although you have to bear in mind that the evening starts around 3.30 at the moment, and I stayed up late. Still. I can't believe how quickly the next pattern row comes along. The pattern is very good for such a squidgy yarn, as it's self-squidging.

Click on the picture and you can warm your hands at it.

Come to Cowl Country

2010-11-30T01:46:00.022Z

I finished the cowl that became a balaclava. It has a rather Easter Island look, doesn't it? I wasn't able to test Mette's theory that things only start to become interesting when you run out of yarn, rather to my relief.

I finished it the night before the snow started and left it in a bag on my neighbour's door handle, so it was very well timed. I'm waiting for a model shot.

I seem to have gone from a state of not knitting any Christmas presents to knitting rather a lot of them. I made that Miss Marple Shawl and wasn't going to do any more and then the person I was going to give the shawl to said, could I knit her a hat? So I'm making her a hat and a cowl. And I asked someone, if I were going to knit her something, would she rather have something lacy and pretty or something for keeping off the campus gales, and she said very emphatically that something warm would be appreciated.

Then a Polish friend said that she's going home for Christmas and on to Stockholm for New Year and I thought, well, she has to have something warm, doesn't she?

I started to make Mary Lou's new cowl, the Risers Cowl, in some Rowan Yorkshire Chunky Tweed (discontinued) in a lovely chilly bluish grey called Coast. I made the smaller size but I didn't check my tension and after a while it became clear that although it might fit as a cowl, it would really be better as a hat. So I did some decreases and a hat it is. I'm still in two minds about whether to pick up some stitches around the bottom and add some rib: I need to see it on someone with a smaller head than mine.

I cast on again for the cowl with an extra pattern repeat (16 stitches) and it's progressing well. The yarn feels a little cardboardy to handle, but it makes a nice soft fabric.

The pattern, being a spiral, gives you that gratifying feeling of going faster and faster, and knits up very quickly. It also settles into air-trapping corrugations which help to make it warm. A winner.

I also cast on an Eternity Scarf, which is a double-length cowl, but I'm re-thinking it. I have wanted to knit this since I first saw the pattern, and had chosen this very neutral Jaeger Matchmaker Merino because it's a perfect colour for my Polish friend, but I've ordered a different yarn now.

You see, what happened was, I ordered some Malabrigo Worsted for the campus cowl (pattern not yet chosen at this stage). She said 'purple or red, something rich', and I got, after much squinting at the monitor, three skeins of Amoroso. I got it from nutterknitter on eBay, who has a very good range of colours. I wasn't prepared for how fabulous it is, but it's impossible to photograph. It's a bit like Lorna's Lace's Bittersweet, but without the peach.

It's pink and burgundy and tomato and everything in between. So I was swatching it - it looks like a 4mm needle yarn, but it's actually a 5.5mm. I want it to be windproof so I'm using 5mms just to be sure. And I was swatching away, and thinking why does anyone ever knit with anything else, and I thought I would rather use Malabrigo than the Matchmaker for the Eternity Cowl, so now I've ordered that in Chapel Stone.

As for the patterns for the rich reds, well, that took up the whole of Sunday. What did we do before Ravelry? A lot more knitting, that's for sure, but not such well informed knitting. I didn't want a beanie sort of hat and I didn't want too much ribbing, because doing ribbing on dpns drives me a bit crazy. I'm not too keen on cables, but I was prepared to consider them. (Generous, huh?)

I quite liked one pattern, but on reflection thought it might look like brains. It does in quite a lot of the photos. I looked at a lot of slouchy berets, but you know a lot of them weren't very slouchy, and some of them weren't even berets. I didn't want lacy, because it has to be warm. I did make a final decision at one point, but it was for a diferent weight of yarn and I couldn't face a) doing the sums, or b) the possibility of ending up with a totally wrong-sized hat. Sigh.

At the same time I was looking at cowls: I don't want them to be too matchy, but they shouldn't be in totally different styles. You can imagine.

And then on Monday morning when I went on to Ravelry, on of my Ravelry Friends had produced a cowl which looked fabulous and would be perfect for the Chapel Stone Malabrigo. Oh god. So that one is slightly up in air again, at least until the yarn arrives.

Hat-wise, I was rescued by Kirsten Kapur's One Day Beret. This is a top-down pattern so I can make it as slouchy as I like, and even adjust it after it's been handed over, if necessary. It's a bit like knitting a Pinwheel Blanket, with KFBs instead of YOs and I'm mostly knitting it in daylight so that I can admire the colours.

And the bit with the provisonal cast on is a Burberry Inspired Cowl, which again I've had my eye on for a while. The plan at present is to make it double length, but we'll see how that goes.

Thanks for the advice about pilling. I'm a bit nervous about taking scissors near my knitting, but I have a small pair with curved blades which should be a bit safer so I'll try them.

And Orlando, India! He hardly seems to be in print any more, and neither is Kathleen Hale's autobiography, although I remember it being very well received. I wonder if her literary executor isn't doing a very good job, or maybe she didn't have one. What a pity. That's actually a postcard that's on my mantelpiece, and it says on the back, 'Only available from the Aldeburgh Bookshop'. I was sent it by a friend who was visiting Aldeburgh but it and others, and a couple of the books, are available here.

This is KH with the original Orlando: I got the pic from this website.

I forgot to show you the Swallowtail in Schaefer Anne (remember this?) which I cast on before the Great Cowl Convention began. I don't think it'll be picked up again until Boxing Day.

Endings and Beginnings

2010-11-24T01:07:00.011Z

Knitting
I finished the Feather Duster. I did one extra repeat.

At the left of the photo you can see the Christmas cards that I bought and put on the floor beside the sofa in the hope that they will write themselves. I blocked the Duster but I didn't do a very good job so I'm going to do it again. You'll just have to wait. Part of the problem is that it's cold in the bedroom and I was reluctant to hang about, shifting pins.

When the weather cooled down, I got Kaari out. When I first put it on, I thought I would unpick the sewing on the collar and make it a bit deeper, but after I'd worn it a bit, I remembered that I find it ever so slightly itchy-making on my neck, so I decided not to. I wear it on top of a long-sleeved tee- shirt. But it is really needing de-pilling: I don't think this is going to be a cotinuing problem; I'm pretty sure it's just an initial shedding of surface fluff. I've had a couple of those little sweater shaver gadgets, but I never found them very satisfactory. They either fill up instantly, or they don't do anything at all, and the batteries go flat very quickly. Do those Sweater Stones work?

If you were listening for the sound of me falling off the yarn wagon, you would have heard a loud thud on Saturday.

This is one of Colourmart's merino laceweight packs, complete with free cones. I have had this in my eBay watch list for a while and a couple of days ago I got tired of the sound of me arguing with myself and I ordered it. It's about 8,000 metres of yarn, God help me, but I'm not planning to knit it single-stranded - inasmuch as I can be said to be planning at all. I do have a plan for it but I am not prepared to give a hostage to fortune by telling you what it is, so we shall have to wait and see.

I began a pink rabbit in September, which I was planning to give to someone who was starting university, because I thought she might like to have a companion. I took so long to finish it that the moment was past: she probably has lots of friends by now and doesn't need a rabbit, however charming.

So I gave it to her little sister instead.

She doesn't always have such perfectly co-ordinated nail polish: it was for a special day at school. The rabbit's sweater is made of two strands of Kidsilk Haze, which probably isn't very practical but it's gorgeous - as Mary Lou said in the comments to my previous post, KH improves everything and is the bacon of yarn. Brilliant.

I persuaded a friend that she would like a knitted Venus, and she requested one in proper earthy pottery colours. I exhumed this ball of Rowan Scottish Tweed Aran which doesn't have a label but could reasonably be called Lentil Soup. Or Cow Pat. I call her the Venus de Mud and she's going to be quite a bit bigger than her alabaster sister.

The same friend cycles around Edinburgh in all weathers and I've been thnking for a while about maing her a cosy cowl. I reconstituted the two skeins of Mirasol Sulka which I made into a scarf and have never worn or given away, and started a plain 1 x 1 rib cowl but when I reached the top I decided to keep going and turn it into a balaclava. It's delicious, like knitting with whipped cream.

I've reached the stage where I need to switch to dpns, and I don't seem to have any in 6mm, so I've ordered some. I don't like faffing around with two circulars or whatever. I'm a bit worried about running out of yarn but am refusing to obssess.

Other knitters
Ravelry has reached their one millionth member. This makes the number of friends I have look even more pathetic, but they are a carefully chosen and highly regarded few.

Most of you probably remember Ruth Sorensens's wonderful Kauni cardigan. Ruth has been missing from her blog for a while owing to injury, but she is back now, in the company of a new pattern for a shawl, the Daisy Shawl. The motif is the daisy from her Flower Hat, which I bought the pattern for but haven't knitted yet. I loved her stuff before, but the Daisy Shawl is shown in Noro Sock yarn which takes it to new heights of fabulousness. It requires nine skeins, which is a bit of an investment, but Noro has the advantage that it can be bought a ball at a time as dye lots don't matter, so you could pay as you go. I don't suppose I'll ever knit the whole shawl, but I hope to utilise the idea on something smaller.

Another recent return to blogging is My Fashionable Life, who designs lovely stuff and writes a charming blog.

Yet More Shawls

2010-11-08T23:33:00.015Z

Cats
If you don't already follow the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, go and look at this post. It is so cute that your teeth will probably drop out of your head if you look at it for too long.

Knitting
I've nearly finished the Feather Duster. I'm half-way through the seventh repeat, which is one more than the pattern calls for and I think I'll finish it there. It doesn't have a border and is intended to have a feathery edge, but I'm not sure me and my back are up to all the pinning required. It can be pinned out into points instead and I might do that.

While I was doing it I cast on for and finished another Miss Marple, this time in a dark earthy green (I think it was called Highland) which has been discontinued. Some years ago I laboured under the delusion that I was going to knit Brandon Mably's Game Board Cardigan and I devoted a lot of energy to getting obscure shades of Felted Tweed.

I thought I had a whole pack of Midnight (which isn't obscure) but when I went and dug it out of the back of the wardrobe it was actually this green. So I combined it with a strand of a pale watery greeny Kidsilk Haze and I was off.

It's going to be a Christmas present. It isn't as deliciously soft as the blue one I knitted for myself, but it's still a nice squishy scarf. I did more increases in the frill, two out of three stitches instead of alternate stitches, but it doesn't look much different. I think I'll just have to go the whole hog and increase in every stitch next time.

While I was doing the Duster and the Marple, I decided that whizzing backwards and forwards on ever-increasing rows of shawl wasn't very challenging, and I ran up something a bit fiddly in between times. It's something I've been meaning to try for a while.

Can you tell what it is yet?

This is intended as a test run to get the hang of the pattern, which is the Venus de Merino, a woolly version of the Venus de Willendorff. I think it's a wonderful pattern and the sort of thing you want to produce in ten different yarns just to see what it looks like. I wonder if I could persuade some people that they would like one for Christmas.

This one is alabaster (Rowan Pure Wool 4 Ply in Snow) with nips of rosy quartz (Rowan Kid Classic in Sherbet Dip). She's about five inches high. I think I had in mind the Amarna Princess, who is a beautiful forgery.

I had a little photo shoot with her this afternoon. I didn't understand the instructions for the increases in the legs so they aren't right. She can have a tight perm or tumbling dreadlocks, but I decided to stay plain on this one.

Venus is best knitted to a firm tension so that she keeps her shape, and so that the stuffing doesn't show through. I used kapok for the stuffing, which is perhaps not malleable enough. I might try polyester next time.

I can't resist showing one of my favourite paintings here. Ms Willendorf isn't in it, but it's worth clicking to see who is.

Peter Blake The Venuses' Outing to Weymouth Waddington Galleries

Comments
Yes, Joan, I've seen Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring, and yes, I did like it. I mostly remember water lilies.

I would recommend the Forest Canopy Shawl, Sea, if it's your first lace. It's written out and charted, and very easy to follow. For some reason I have a blind spot with the first chart and I always read the instructions for it, and then switch to the charts for the rest. I think it's a very good pattern for learning to 'read' the lace. It wasn't the first lace pattern I made, but it was the first one that really gave me confidence.

And I swatched for the Aeolian Shawl, Amy, but I haven't settled on a yarn yet: nothing seems quite right. Perhaps it's time dig out the Lace Club stuff and re-direct some of it.

Knitting Inspectors

2010-10-23T12:49:00.013+01:00

Knitting. And Cats.
Doesn't baby knitting always look better with a baby? This is Cora with her Pinwheel Blanket. Isn't she lovely?

She doesn't need a christening shawl after all, because she's going to wear her Daddy's, so it's just as well I didn't knit a vast surprise shawl.

Given the astonishing synchronicity between Mary Lou and myself in the matter of Knitting Inspectors, I thought I'd have a little google. (I use a capital letter when referring to the company, but a lower case when using it as a verb: I hope this passes the grammar inspectors.) It appears that the term is in use in two ways: one, as a perfectly sensible job in a textile factory, and as a whimsical way of describing one's cat. Or very occasionally, dog or rabbit. Dogs don't seem to be so good at it. It got me thinking about those ladies who used to teach us to knit and sew and what a sour bunch they were. I always assumed that they were soured by years of dealing with ghastly little girls, but thinking about it last night I reaized that we weren't that bad. I was a nice little girl, very anxious to please. One of my fellow pupils was told to unpick something and do it again; she waited a suitable length of time and took the original work back. 'See, that's much better, isn't it?' said the teacher. I was quite baffled by this: I think it was a turning point.

On the subject of cats, you have probably seen Spinning Fishwife's post about the IKEA cats ad. There has been a further development, in the form of a parody of the behind-the-scenes.

I couldn't stop watching it. It was posted very quickly so he must have practically made it up on the spot. Brilliant.

Thank you for the compliments on Billie. I've been wearing it and it's been receiving compliments in person too. I thought I was going to knit another Kid Classic cardi next, but when I went into John Lewis this week I was seduced by the Rowan Purelife Autumn book. I had looked at this online and not been grabbed, but when I saw the pix full size I melted. I'm very taken with Wild Saffron, a tunic with a sort of basketweave yoke, and there are a couple of nice shrugs. I keep meaning to knit a shrug.

Meanwhile, I've finished off the latest little Daisy Hats. These are for a new baby and her big sister: I've posted them to Australia. They are the cousins of the little girls who got these Daisy Hats: they're living in Saudi just now, I think. It's hard to keep up.

The larger one started off as a Daisy Hat but I used the Berry Baby Hat pattern for the top, just for a change. I think it worked well.

And this has mysteriously alighted (alit?) upon my needles. I don't quite know how that happened.

It's a Feather Duster in Kidsilk Night - can you see the tiny sparkles? The pattern's by Susan Lawrence, who designed my beloved Forest Canopy shawl. It took me nearly two full pattern repeats to realize that the pattern is the same on every pattern row, apart from a few stitches at each end to set up the next duster; I can be excused slightly on the grounds that there is only one pattern row in every four rows, the rest being stocking stitch. This makes the lace slightly harder to read while you're knitting, but it's what diffuses the pattern and gives it that lovely floaty floomfiness.

She says you don't need markers, bless her, but you can see I'm not taking any chances. I think I might do an extra repeat or two, but then we always think that at the beginning when the rows are short. There are some lovely examples on Ravelry: it's one of those patterns that looks good in all sorts of yarns.

The Flickering Screen
I watched a very beautiful film last night called 3-Iron, a South Korean film.

When it started, my friend said suspiciously, 'This isn't about golf, is it?' The original title means Empty Houses and I think it might have been better to stick with that, as anyone misled by the title would be fairly bewildered.

At the beginning I thought it was going to be rather light-hearted, and then it became much darker, and then it changed again. A young man lets himself into the homes of people who are away, and lives in them for a day or two.

He doesn't steal anything; in fact he sometimes carries out small repairs and in one place he adjusts the bathroom scales so that the occupants think they weigh less. Then, in a house full of photographs of a beautiful young woman (the young man is very beautiful too) he discovers that he isn't alone.

Long steretches of it have no dialogue, and I think one could watch it without subtitles and not miss very much at all as it is full of wonderful images.

I liked it a lot and will watch it again.

Also last night, I watched the first 45 minutes of The Event - from the sublime to the ridiculous. I had recorded the first two episodes but 45 minutes was much as I could stand. It's full of actors - I use the term loosely - who have obviously spent more money on having their teeth whitened than on acting lessons, and ideas that have been lifted from other series. Every now and again there would be a startling shot that would make me think I might stick with it, and then we'd be back to the teeth and the whining. Pity. I was looking forward to a nice gripping serial for the winter but this plainly isn't going to be it.

Last weekend I watched Heartburn, twice. It's a film I have a great weakness for - Meryl, Jack and a clever script. I don't really do all those Magnolias and Beaches sort of films - Biddy Movies I call them - but I do like Heartburn. I think it's the sharpest of Nora Ephron's romcoms; When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail get progressively slushier and less funny. I wonder if she changed or if the studios brought about the change. I've just noticed she has the same birthday as I do (and you, Raveller) although she's not as young as we are. Anyway, I like the snappy dialogue and the 'eighties clothes and the Carly Simon soundtrack, and everyone's in it, including Kevin Spacey whose first flm it was, and Meryl's little girl is played by - Meryl's little girl. I can't find a decent clip from it, so here instead is Cam from Modern Family telling us how he feels about Meryl.

Phew

2010-10-12T22:33:00.009+01:00

Billie
I finished Billie and I'm very happy with it. Phew. This is what I sat down with.

I like sewing, and there are no horrors associated with sewing with this yarn (sewing with Bamboo Tape scarred me a bit) so I was quite contented. I kept on going through and trying it on as I did each bit (going through to a room with a mirror, that is) in happy anticipation. I grafted the hood first and it didn't look right so I did a three-needle bind-off instead. I think I didn't do the grafting properly, and I like doing three-needle bind-offs, so that was fine.

I then had sleeve panic when I discovered that the sleeve caps were far too long. This isn't Kim Hargreaves' fault; it's mine because I used a slightly larger needle in order to size everything up a bit, and the sleeve caps is the only place where this mattered. So I ripped them back and with some pins and a bit of experimentation I adjusted them in situ. In the end, I did what I often used to do in my sewing days, and took a larger seam on the body (I have narrow shoulders) and sort of cobbled it. A knitting inspector looking at the inside would be horrified, but with any luck no knitting inspectors will ever see it.*

It's looking a little rumpled in the pix because I've been keeping it on the sofa beside me so that I can admire it, but it's carefully tidied away now. The three stitches of garter stitch on the fronts are curling inwards so that you can't see them, but I expect they will be revealed once it's been washed and dried flat. I changed the cuffs, which were ribbed, and used the cuffs from the same designer's Georgie instead. The sleeves came out a little long but they can roll up.

Every time I try it on, it gets a little bit longer, which is fine. The hood is huge, which is also fine, and there is lots of wrapover. I'm wondering about wearing a pin on it, although I'm nervous about putting pins near knitted things. It so often ends in tears.

What next?
I have been contemplating Christmas knitting. Scarves are so fashionable this year, especially those infinity scarf loopy things which are shorter and much quicker to knit than ordinary scarves.

Infinity Scarf by James Perse 100% Cashmere $250

Or perhaps a Citron. Or I could finish that Karius. Or some more Miss Marples. I was planning to do a few and had actually started one with some of the leftover Kid Classic from Billie, and then I started to have doubts. I went through my stash and nothing was the right colour and the right weight. Maybe I would just spend a lot of time producing things that weren't really the right colour or in some other way not what is wanted. Maybe they would rather have shower gel or a good book. I'm not sure if these thoughts are produced by a waft of depression or by a breath of clarity. I'm rather tempted to put my newly discovered ability to knit vast swathes of Kid Classic to my own advantage and make another cardi. Teal is nice, and I have the book.

I have a little time to think about it, because the new Australian baby has arrived and I have to make her and her big sister a pair of Daisy Hats. That's the fourth and fifth Daisy Hats this year alone. Phew again.

* You'll hardly credit this, but I wrote that before Mary Lou had her Knitting Inspector dream. We are a worried lot.

Nobody Talks Like That

2010-09-30T20:57:00.005+01:00

I couldn't let today go by without noting that Tony Curtis has died. Here, inevitably, is a scene from Some Like It Hot.

And here, I hope somewhat less inevitably, he is offscreen talking about Cary Grant onscreen.

I can remember my brother spending hours in front of the mirror before he went out, trying to get his hair like this. I don't suppose it was really hours but it seemed like that to me. All I had to do then was tie bows on my pigtails.

Tony Curtis

1925 - 2010

Mostly Not Knitting

2010-09-27T21:32:00.010+01:00

Blogs
I think another reason I didn't post for a while there was because I lost contact with part of my bloggiverse. I use Sage as my RSS feed and blog reader and the last time Firefox had a big upgrade, Sage didn't upgrade. I struggled with Bloglines for a while as a temporary measure, but then it died. So I switched to Google Reader, but I had lost some more blogs on the way and it never behaved quite as I wanted it to and I always ended up with more tabs open than seemed necessary or desirable, and I couldn't keep track of who I'd read and who I still had to catch up with. It meant that I had to keep signing in, because I have more than one Google identity, which is a bore. Also, Google Reader would really prefer you to read blogs through their viewer, but I prefer to read them in the blogger's own page, so that I get more of the feel, and in case they've added some new photos or patterns or whatever in the sidebar.

So I had the feeling that some of my friends were out there chatting and I couldn't hear them or keep up with the jokes. It was a bit like being suddenly deaf, I suppose. But at the end of last week, Sage sprang into life again and I installed the upgrade. I've spent an inordinate amount of time getting everything back again as I want it but now, the sound's back on, and the lights are on, and the heating, and I'm up-to-date with everyone again. It's good to be back.

Photography
I haven't linked to the Big Picture much lately because so many of the collections have illustrated disasters and tragedies, and I thought you could probably find enough sad things on the Internet without any help from me. But this week they have Fall Is in the Air as the theme, which is a lot more bearable.

Two cows traditionally decorated for the 'Desalpe' when the cows are led back to the plain for the autumn after summering on mountain pastures, in Charmey, Switzerland on 25 September 2010 (Reuters / Valentin Chauraud)

There's also a jolly series on Oktoberfest.

If you're really into historical photography and you have some time to spare, there's a set from the Denver Post Plog of America in Color, 1939 -1943 which I keep going back to. I just can't get over the level of detail in these, both visual and historical.

Woman working on a Vengeance dive bomber, Tennessee, November 1943 Photo by Alfred T. Palmer. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Weather Pixie
Thanks for the comment, Amy, and for your concern. I'm not sure what's happened to the Weather Pixie. She says she'll be back soon, but she's been gone for a while. I think she was on Twitter but she's disappeared from there.

There's a little description of what she does and how she does it here. The brains behind it, Tamsin Bowles, appears to be alive and well according to Google, so maybe it just got to be too much trouble.

I've left the link in my sidebar just in case she comes back. I wouldn't want her to think we'd all gone away.

Rude Words
If, after that, you have any time left at all for internetting, I can recommend this blacklist of words that Google Instant doesn't want you to help you look for. It reminds me of the stoplist for car registration numbers, so that people don't have to drive about in cars that say BUM or TIT, only taken considerably further. It's not for those of a sensitive dispostition and whatever you do, don't do a Google Image search for any words you don't recognize. I won't be held responsible.

Billie and Some Little Things

2010-09-26T19:39:00.017+01:00

That was a long silence. I think a lot of it was down to the fact that I've mostly been working on Billie, which is very nice for me but not hugely interesting for a spectator. I just keep accumulating more and more pieces of greyish bluey green knitting.

When I finished the armhole shapings on the second front I realized that I'd misunderstood them and on checking I discovered that I'd misunderstood them on the first front too, in the same way. The armholes are followed by a huge section of hood so I decided to press on and leave them both wrong but not impossibly so, rather than re-do both of them. In addition to that, the sleeve caps don't seem to be very roomy, not as roomy as I would expect a jacket or cardigan to be, so this gives me quite a lot to worry about, although I test-sewed the first sleeve when I finished it and it s-e-e-m-e-d to be OK.

The cuffs on this are ribbed so I borrowed the sleeves from Georgie instead (the two are startlingly alike, apart from the yarn and the tension). The Georgie sleeves are rolled and have a join formed by casting off and picking up again, which I really like the look of. I'm on the second sleeve now, the last bit, so I'm alternating between looking forward to having it finished and dreading the possibility that either the bits won't fit together or that it won't fit me. I'll find out soon enough.

I've been really surprised by how I've kept going with this. I thought I didn't do that sort of knitting, that I needed to be kept amused. Although I did knit five Harry Potter sweaters some years ago, for the nephewlets and niecelet, and when one of them went in the drier (the largest one, of course) and shrank, I knitted another without complaint so I must have more endurance than I thought. The yarn has a lot to do with it, and with that in mind I've bought the latest Kim Hargreaves book, Touching Elegance. It has a lovely sweater called Isadora, made with Kid Classic.

I expect it would seat quite a lot, but that doesn't really matter with that ballon shape. I'm very tempted and there are some other nice things in the book. I'm very taken with Lois.

I finished another Looped Bracelet in the leftovers from the Beachy Blue Swallowtail. This knitted up much faster than the Koigu, within a day, but the result is a bit floppy.

I haven't finished the bunny I had started in my last post. I made one of these a few years ago, before I started the blog: it's Debbie Bliss's Small Rabbit with Sweater. It's a very clear pattern and there's enough going on that I don't get angry with the fiddly bits.

This one had two sweaters.

I always find with this sort of knitting that the first half takes an evening and the second part takes a week, but I've exceeded that this time. The bunny's done, but her sweater is nowhere near finished, and I want to knit her another sweater too so that she has a change. But Billie keeps seducing me away.

A special occasion sweater with two strands of Kidsilk Haze.

I finished the Blue Jeans Pinwheel with the pink border. I didn't block it, but I gave it a gentle wash and dry. I have to confess, I'm thinking of making one of these for me, without the pink.

And I made some wash cloths from the leftovers.

I expect Baby can't have too many wash cloths.

Blue, Blue, Blue and Pink

2010-09-07T23:17:00.018+01:00

Knitting
I blocked the Beachy Blue Swallowtail and I'm fairly happy with it. It's a bit small but it's still a pretty colour and the yarn became very drapey after soaking, which is nice. I sort of wish I had done another repeat of the first pattern but not so much that it's spoiling it for me.

You can see below how the buds pattern flows into the lily of the valley after I upsized the stitch count of the lilies to a 12-stitch pattern. I think it may be because of my cleverness that the third pattern doesn't flow properly and is a tiny bit too tight. Anyway. I still like it and have no plans to give it away.

I might even wear it.

I reached the shoulder of the first front of Billie and expected to cast off, but then discovered that I had a huge chunk of hood to do. It's done now. I had thought the hood was knitted on afterwards by picking up stitches from the back and fronts, but it isn't.

That piece is about 43 inches long. I've started on the right front now. Still love it.

I think I know what pattern I might use with the lovely Mamba colourway that I bought from Fyberspates at Woolfest last year. On this hunch I wound the first skein into ahem, three balls. This is nothing to do with Fyberspates but is entirely down to my poor housekeeping and the luxurious habits of my moths, who insist on the finest Kidsilk Haze and on this occasion, the softest blue-faced leicester wool.

I discovered that the colours look utterly fabulous in sunshine (I wound in the morning) and just sort of ordinarily fabulous later in the day and by electric light. I have done a little swatch but a) I might change my mind and b) I can't find it.

One of my niecelets is starting university this month and I thought she might like to have a friend to take with her.

Can you tell what it is yet?

Movies
While all this was going on I watched a very good Japanese film called Departures, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009 and was recommended to me by Valerie of Idiosyncratic Fashionistas. I sort of hesitate to tell you what it's about but the synopsis on IMDB begins, 'A newly unemployed cellist takes a job preparing the dead for funerals...' There's lots of life in too though, and some nice warm human beings.

The cellist and his wife live in the loveliest house too. I realize that might sound shallow but sometimes one of the pleasures of foreign films is simply seeing how other people live, and how this young couple live in the house which his mother left him is an important part of the movie.

I also watched a film which is unashamedly shallow and totally delightful - Priceless or Hors de Prix. Audrey Tatou is in it, again, and it is frothy, frivolous and angst-free. After an hour and a half of beautiful photography, luxury hotels on the Cote d'Azur, gorgeous clothes (Audrey wears more than one Chanel frock) and some fairly ghastly people, we arrive at the conclusion that love is more important than money, which is always good to know.

Clearing the Air

2010-08-26T22:32:00.006+01:00

I mentioned recently that eBay is absolutely lethal at the moment. By this I meant that bags and balls of yarn are going for such low prices that well, one couldn't possibly let them go.

I've had my eye open for some Debbie Bliss Cotton Denim Aran for a while, because I want to make the Lace Edge Cardigan from the pattern book of that name. It's all garter stitch so it uses a vast amount of yarn and any lots that came up were 5 balls, or dark purple, or in some other way not quite what I was looking for. And then recently someone posted 26 balls of it at a very reasonable Buy It Now.

Did I actually have the money? Well, not exactly, but it wasn't going to get any cheaper if I waited, was it? I've done a swatch but I'm not going to let myself cast on until I've finished, or at least got to the hood of, Billie.

And then a Ravelry friend faved the Sprout baby blanket, which is very tempting.

It could be knitted with All Seasons Cotton so I idly checked eBay and someone was selling a bag of that in a splendid green called - Sprout! I would say it's more sort of Spinach, but I wasn't in the mood to quibble.

The same person subsequently posted some Rowan Pure Wool 4 Ply in white, which would be perfect for a christening blanket. Or something else. And then, a fortnight later, she posted another three balls of the same.

No-one else bid for any of these - what else was I supposed to do?

And now, an explanation of the photo of the green yarn. This is a Handy Tip. The yarn had a very faint whiff of cigarette smoke about it. It probably would have aired out while I was knitting it, but I didn't want to wait. If you burn a candle, any candle, in a room containing cigarette smoke, the smell of smoke will disappear. It takes a longer or a shorter time according to the size of the room and the amount of smoke, but it works. This isn't anything to do with masking smells, but is something to do with carbon chemistry which I wouldn't claim to understand. If you use more candles, it will happen quicker.

Thus, if you have a garment which smells of smoke, hang it in the bathroom - or any other small room - and burn a candle. The smell of smoke will vanish as if by magic. I usually use the bathroom because it's quicker and because I reckon it's a safer place to leave candles burning.

So you see, in the photo I wasn't worshipping at the altar of the yarn, I was just cleansing the atmosphere. It works for curtains and everything, even your hair.

But I really must stop checking for yarn on eBay.

I finished casting off the Beachy Blue Swallowtail Shawl and it's waiting to be blocked.

And I'm finishing the denimy Pinwheel. Depending on which pattern you use, this blanket can have eight sections or ten: by some cunning maneouvre, I 've got nine. Oh well. Once I knew Baby is a girl, I was going to put a pink frill around the dge, but after peering at Ravelry for a while, I've done some rows of garter stitch and a picot bind off, which is what I did on the Blue Pinwheel I made last year.

I like this a lot - if the yarn looks hauntingly familiar, it's the same as the Distressed Sweater. It's discontinued but you can still get it at Cucumber Patch. I love it, and the blanket is very soft and cosy.
I think I might have to make one of these for myself.

There was a doco about online dating on BBC2 on Tuesday night, Wink, Meet, Delete. It was fairly light-hearted and mostly consisted of people telling their favourite stories about their experiences. They all emphasised how addictive it got for them for a while, how much time they spent clicking another photo, and another, and another. It made me very glad that I spend my time online looking for the perfect sweater rather than the perfect man.

Sunset Boulevard, Two Fashion Docos and the Cutest Baby Hat Evah

2010-08-23T00:12:00.026+01:00

I watched Sunset Boulevard again recently. Between viewings I tend to forget how good it is. What a script, what actors. I always enjoy William Holden's performances, although I don't think anyone who worked with him latterly is on record as saying he was a great guy. And Gloria Swanson, well - one thing about watching it again over the years is how one's attitude to Norma Desmond changes. At first you think she's old, then you think she's not so old and then you think, 'My God, she's only fifty!' The first time I saw it, I thought William Holden was old too. He was 32.

For me, the best thing about Sunset Boulevard is the script, but I can't get enough of the behind-the-scenes Hollywood stuff too - the lots, the writers' offices, the blend of the real with the invented. Cecil B. de Mille playing Cecil B. de Mille, how cool is that?

Here's Gloria Swanson some years later, describing making Male and Female in 1919, with Cecil B. de Mille. Watch it to the end for the punchline.

I put Beyond Biba on my LoveFilm list rcently, but it showed up on television first.

I was a total Biba fan in my day.

Biba poster

Your correspondent

My beret was dark blue and my mother crocheted it. I couldn't learn to crochet from my mother because she was left-handed. Yes, I did paint on my lower lashes individually - didn't everybody?

I enjoyed the film but the earlier part of her career was covered too much by people talking about it and not enough by photographs or artefacts. There must be some copies of her mail order catalogue intact in fashion libraries, even although my mother threw mine out when she threw out a lot of other stuff when she moved house, and there must be plenty of the clothes in museum collections - or they could have bought some off eBay. It would have made the first part much livelier. I remember the shop in Kensington Church Street, and I think I bought one dress there. I think I bought a pair of trousers too, although I may have dreamt that. The fashion world's idea of 'affordable' fashion has never quite coincided with mine. I had moved to London by the time she opened the big shop in Ken High Street and I haunted it; I can't remember that I bought much but I must have because I still have the carrier bags. I use them as drawer liners.

She moved to Florida and began a second career designing hotel and bar interiors. She seems like a patient, unfussy kind of a person but unless you have a special interest in her, I don't think you need to track it down.

I also caught up with Lagerfeld Confidential. There's not enough frocks in this, hardly any at all, but there is a lot of Karl. I loved it. For a man who uses La Prairie skincare, he's remarkably down to earth. The interviewer spends too much time asking him silly questions like whether he believes in God (who is going to change their minds on this subject because of what a dress designer says?), but he also talks to him about more relevant things too. Some of the interviews take place while Karl sits on a sofa draped in a fabulous white cotton bedspread of knitted octagons. I can't find a still so you'll have to watch the film.

One of my favourite bits is when he's asked about his childhood and his mother. I must have watched that bit five times. His mother was wonderful, all other mothers were stupid. He was rather a spoilt little boy, nothing was ever quite good enough. We see a little of his apartment, or perhaps it's a house. His bedroom looks like a library with a bed in it, albeit a white frilly bed with four posts consisting of white neon tubes. Sounds good to me.

He is constantly surrounded by books and apparently has a vast collection, some of it stored in rolling stacks, although this part is more picturesque.

Why do gay men store books on their sides instead of properly shelved? I know they do, because I see it all the time in interiors mags and in my gay friends' houses. It's bad for books' spines.

There is a selection of extras, some of which are more interesting than the actual film. He doesn't take himself too seriously, certainly not as seriously as the interviewer takes him.

For frocks, watch the multi-part doco; for the man, watch this.

Just a little bit of knitting, before I go. Here's Baby Cora in her new hat.

The baby daddy is a flying buff, so I made her an aviatrix's hat in white Paton's Jet.

The first one was too big, so I made another in Rowan Pure Wool 4 Ply.

This pattern is tremendous - a brilliant idea and one of the best written patterns ever. I often find myself re-writing patterns in my head while I'm knitting them but with this one I just nodded approvingly and gasped in admiration. And the hat is cutest thing. I'm looking forward to knitting it many times.

Patience and a Crochet Hook

2010-08-17T14:19:00.009+01:00

Sorry about the long silence. I have, as usual at this time of year, been very relapsey and pathetic. I always hope it won't happen but it unfailingly does. Galloping insomnia does help with the knitting though, albeit largely of the simpler kind. Billie is still progressing steadily and I'm doing the shaping for the first front armhole.

I finished the two baby hats, forgot to photograph them, and posted them along with the green stripy Pinwheel. Maybe I'll get a photo of them in situ.

The possible owner of the third arrived last night and is a girl, so she will be the actual owner. She's called Cora, which is rather lovely. Here is her hat. I've photographed it in a pot of lavender on the windowsill because I can't find a tidy place in the flat.

I've also started a denimy blanket for her, a Pinwheel in All Seasons Cotton Print. I'll do another couple of balls of the blue, and then finish off with a frilly edge in the pink.

You may have noticed a suspicious silence about the Blue Swallowtail. This wasn't because I had thrown it in a corner and forgotten about it, but because I kept on frogging it. I changed the lily of the valley pattern to a 12-stitch repeat as planned, so that it flowed from the 6-stitch earlier pattern. That all worked and I'm happy with that bit.

I had intended to alter the next pattern too. I put in a lifeline and then knitted it and ripped it three times. I kept on ending up too many sitches, and not in a good way. In the end, I just did the pattern as written, on a 10-stitch repeat. I finished that satisfactorily, removed the lifeline and started on the border. I didn't need to put in a lifeline before the border, did I? I mean, I've knitted that border plenty of times. Sigh. After about eight rows I finally listened to the voices, which were saying, 'This doesn't look right.' I tried inserting a lifeline after the fact, but that proved more difficult and likely to lead to insanity than just ripping it and picking up the stitches, which is where patience and the crochet hook came in.

Since I took this photo, I've finished the border and I'm now casting off. It's going to be a bit small, but that's fine. Fabulous yarn though; after all of this handling it is still smooth, unfrayed, bouncy and cheerful. Ella Rae Merino Lace, in the Seven Seas colourway. If I had to knit with one colourway for the rest of my life, this would be my choice. I cannot tire of the water and pebbles in it.

Oh and I finished the third pink Looped Bracelet and have sent them off to the set of girls they are for. The owner of the smallest one started school yesterday and was rather disappointed that she didn't learn to read during the three hours she was there.

Less knitting and more movies in the next post. Oh and some accidental yarn purchases. eBay is absolutely lethal at the moment.

Knitting in Circles

2010-07-30T12:50:00.012+01:00

I realized that the baby who is getting the stripy green Pinwheel Blanket

will also need a Daisy Hat.

Then it occurred to me that her big sister should have a Daisy Hat too, since she has probably outgrown the one I made for her when she was born, so I bought some Handknit Cotton in Delphinium but I haven't cast on yet.

Then I realized that of the two babies due before the end of the year, at least one may be a girl so I had better have a Daisy Hat ready for that baby.

And whatever the one in Australia is, her/his big sister will need a new hat too. I wonder what colour she would like.

The new ball of Rowan Handknit Cotton, the beautiful tender pale pink which I thought might be called Peony, but is called Shell, is noticeably softer than the bits and pieces of Handknit that I already had in my stash. It's softer to the touch, and it wasn't nearly so tough on my pore ole hands. I usually can't knit for very long with 100% cotton, but this was fine.

I blocked the white Swallowtail Shawl and although it's very pretty, it is indubitably also too small to be used as a christening shawl.

I'll have to have a think. Perhaps the mother would like to have it for herself, as a reward. Is white too limiting a colour?

I did three repeats of Lily of the Valley pattern. I think it might be because I used the yarn double that it didn't grow so much when I blocked it. A single strand of cobweb seemed impossible to knit with, but now that I've used it doubled, I can't wait to use a single strand. Watch this space.

I did some swatches for the Aeolian Shawl but none of them really works.

From the top: Rowan Kidsilk Spray in Medici, Kidsilk Night in um, black, and Kona Superwash Fingering in a custom dye. I need to use something lighter. As I've established before, the lace pattern is lost in the splashes of the Kidsilk Spray (the paler blue one). When the Citron Shawl pattern first appeared, I thought, 'That's lovely, but of course I would never knit it,' but as time goes by I see more and more that are lovely and I think I might. This would be a very good yarn for it.

I had an eye test recently and collected my new glasses this week. They were so shockingly expensive that I don't think I'll ever be able to buy yarn again, although a small voice is pointing out to me that if I want to make any say, sweater-sized purchases, it would be a good idea to do it before VAT goes up in January. I think I must be incorrigible, a hopeless recidivist.

Pink and White and Blue

2010-07-19T22:53:00.014+01:00

Knitting

Some finishing and some starting here. I did the tricky bit of the summer pudding Looped Bracelet,

and then I finished it. I made the tabs a bit longer this time.

I've started another one, with 10 stitches instead of 12. It's Koigu so 10 stitches should be a little daintier. Lynne has added some more bracelet patterns on her website. I've started Waves twice and am having a which-is-the-back problem, but someone on Ravelry has done it. There's a new Lynne Barr Ravelry group here.

I finished the latest Pinwheel blanket, the stripy green one, but I keep forgetting to photograph it. I finished the white Swallowtail and it looks like a piece of ectoplasm. I'll block it soon.

I've been swatching for some lace but I haven't blocked those yet so they'll have to wait.

And, before I knew it, I'd started this. It's another Swallowtail Shawl.

It's Ella Rae Merino Lace in a very beachy blue. Wendy of Wendy Knits made her Exonumist's Shawl from this yarn and I fell instantly and heavily for the colour. There are patches of a sort of pebbley colour, which I think is why it makes me think of beaches. I tried to wind the wool with my nostepinne but between my inexperience and the incredible bounciness of the yarn, I ended up with an enormous fankle which I had to rewind twice. I still love it though.

I found this knitting clock on John Naughton's blog. It's the work of Siren Elise Wilhelmsen and it takes a year to knit a two-metre scarf. I think we've all done that.

If you want to know more about it, look here.

Staring
I got the set of Yves St-Laurent docos, His Life and Times and 5 Avenue Marceau - thanks very much for the recommendation, Gretchen.
The first has a lot of talking, which is good, and the second has lots of fabric and talking and smoking, which is even better. I had no idea that being a muse was such hard work: it involves lots of cajoling and suggesting and enthusing, and long hours.

By chance a few days later I came across some more YSL visual goodies. When I'm not looking at knitting on Tinternet, one of my other vices is reading the Real Estalker, a real estate blog which concerns itself with the 'homes', never 'houses', of actors and other celebs. It's funny and well written. Just after I'd watched the YSL docos, what should I find but a post about YSL's properties. It starts by describing his pad in the 7eme (where else?) but also has links to the house in Tangiers, and the jaw-dropping Chateau Gabriel in Deauville, where the helipad has been disguised as a landscape feature.

And there's a post about the pied-a-terre in 5th Avenue, NYC. It all adds up to an awful lot of frocks. And maquillage. And scent. And shoes.

Looped Bracelets

2010-07-04T00:23:00.012+01:00

Knitting
I couldn't help it, I cast on for a Looped Bracelet on Saturday, and cast off too. I found some very vivid sock yarn in my stash. I can't remember what this was, Regia or something, but I knitted a baby hat out of it once.

When I had knitted a couple of stripes of the bracelet I discovered that I had already 'edited' the yarn and taken stripes out of it, leaving large knots behind but I couldn't bear to rip it back so I had some ends to weave in later. This is the clever bit.

Those are 2mm needles. The instructions are beautifully clear, as always with Lynne, and I was amazed at how easy it was. Here it is.

And the other way up.

I've already cast on two more - I couldn't decide between yarns so I started them both. The one on the right is some Koigu in the purps and pinkles of summer pudding and I can't remember what the other one is.

Lynne has got some other bracelet patterns on her website. I've bought Wave and expect I won't be able to resist casting on, just as soon as I have a pair of toothpicks free.

Virtual Knitting
How have you survived without any Knitting apps, Lisa? Not that I ever use any of mine, it has to be said. I'm glad you asked though, I've been meaning to write about the Vogue Knitting App for the iPhone / iPod Touch. It costs $3.99 or £2.39. You can add information about Projects, Needles, Hooks, Yarn and Books. It containds a Stitchionary, a How-To and a list of terms and Abbreviations, and has a calculator for substituting yarn.

The info about Projects doesn't link to a database, and neither does the section for recording your stash - none of it does, but I mention these because we've come to expect a pattern database and a yarn database if we've been using Ravelry. It does however enable you to record where you are in a project, row counts and increases and decreases.

The Stitchionary is odd, to say the least. Divided into Knit and Purl, Cables, and Colourwork, the selection seems arbitrary and the examples are shown in no order that I can detect. They're drawn from the volumes of the Vogue Stitchionary but I didn't see a copyright notice (I didn't look very hard, but it should be unmissable). Even the website doesn't indicate that the Stitchionary is a series of books.

I can't really see what this is for, or rather who and when. Given that the gadget that it's for has internet access and you could look these things up in a more organized fashion, I can't see why you would want to carry around this random selection. Is it useful to have a chart for leopard print when you're on the move? The same chart is available on the website anyway, without paying $3.99.

The whole thing has that VK air of lacking joined-up thinking, and there are existing apps which perform all of these functions and although I suppose it's handy to have them together, the thing is done with so little flair that it certainly didn't make my heart beat faster. I know that having done such things on an industrial scale professionally, I tend to underestimate the charms of recording one's projects or cataloguing the stash, but I can't see why anyone would record projects here when they could do the same on Ravelry (without the row counter, but still). Maybe someone who uses knitting apps on their iPhone will put me right about this.

To me, it just highlights how much we need a Ravelry app. There is one in the works and I can access the website of course, but something more specific would be zippier and possibly not such a strain on the eyesight.

Pure Tech
For those of you who are interested in the Huawei E5830, it is also apparently the same thing as the Netvigator - you might find the information given here helpful. Don't ask me any questions, though, cos I don't understand any of it!

You Have Not Selected a Floor

2010-07-01T01:06:00.011+01:00

Knitting
I didn't get on so well with my bright idea about lining up the patterns on the Swallowtail Shawl. I started off doing it, and then on the third row I found that I'd made a mistake on the first. I took it back (after waiting for the regulation three days while I calmed down) and started it again on Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile I had calculated that what I was doing would only give me four bells on the lily of the valley pattern, so I went back to the original pattern. After I had done a few rows of that, I realized where I had gone wrong in my first set of calculations but it was too late for me to face taking it back again. I was trying to line the ssos up with a budding lace patetrn, and the lily of the valley up with the next, when actually I only needed to line up one of them. Oh well. To be fair to myself, I really wasn't well on Saturday afternoon and it was only a fit of colossal stubbbornness that got me through the rows I did. I've done the first set of lilies now and am about to start the second. I might do a third.

If I knit the pattern again soon, I should be able to get it right then. The nupps really aren't bad at all, especially when you consider that I'm using the yarn double-stranded so I've got ten loops on the needle instead of just five.

I finished the back and cast on for the left front of Billie. The back was 131 stitches and the front is 102, so it's not a huge difference. Still very happy with it.

Lynne Barr has added a brilliant post to the Knitting New Scarves Knitalong, called Turning Scarf Ideas into Bracelets. It's about doing exactly that, and she's even given us a new pattern for a Looped Bracelet. This is what they look like. Aren't they cute?

She's done a little Flapper Bracelet too. Do go and have a look.

There's also a new group started on Ravelry for fans of Lynne's work, the Lynne Barr's Genius Group - you can join here.

iPod Touch
Don't let me put you off iOS4 entirely, Mary Lou. It does sharpen up the screen resolution, which I thought couldn't be improved but it is, gasp; and it introduces folders that you can put icons into. So, for instance, if you have a lot of knitting apps, you can put them together in a folder. Do this a few times and you can reduce the number of start screens significantly.

Accents
This is a routine about Scottish people and voice recognition software: I've never had this problem in an American lift, but I've certainly had it on the telephone to England: after long experience, I now have a special accent for reciting my postcode. If you are of a sensitive nature, you may wish to skip it, as there are ahem, a couple of rather coarse expressions in it. (There, that'll make sure you all watch it.)

Nearly at the Nupps

2010-06-25T13:07:00.009+01:00

I'm trying to decide whether or not to any more repeats of the budding lace pattern on the Swallowtail before I start on the lily of the valley section. I've done 18 repeats. I think I'll stop.

I'm sort of wondering about altering the lily of the valley section ever so slightly, by making it a couple of stitches wider. I feel that it's a pity that the two patterns don't flow from one to the other: it moves from a six-stitch repeat to a ten-stitch repeat, and I think it would look better if the second one were based on a twelve-stitch repeat. But would something go horribly wrong? I suppose the thing to do is to put in a lifeline and try it. I should probably put in a lifeline anyway.

I don't make a habit of polishing my needles, Mary Lou, but when I took them out of the bag they looked very dull and I didn't like the idea of brass oxide coming off on my lovely snowy yarn, so I did. I have to confess to keeping Brasso in the house, though, and I have been known to polish the letterbox, cough.

I spent an awful lot of time yesterday trying to upgrade my iPod Touch to iOS4. It kept hanging, so finally I told it to restore to the factory setting, did the upgrade, and then re-installed everything. It took no time at all. I think I've lost some music by doing this, but frankly it was either that or throw it out of the window so I feel I made the right choice. I was then disappointed to learn that some aspects of the upgrade don't apply to the model I have (2G) because it's all of a year old. Sigh. Strange how petulant one can get about not having a wallpaper photo behind the App icons.

On the plus side, having just had another birthday, I acquired a gadget to enhance my use of last year's gadget. Using my iPod Touch when I'm out is a haphazard business as free broadband isn't always available even when it's claimed to be (railway operators, are you listening?) and it hasn't been worthwhile my subscribing to BT OpenZone or anything of that sort because they are all time limited and I simply don't get out enough to justify buying a voucher that has to be used within three days. I knew that eventually someone would invent what I need, and they have and I think it's magical.

It's a Huawei E5830, a mobile broadband wireless modem that you can carry in your pocket. Mobile wireless is called MiFi so I'm going to call this my little Mo Fo. Not only does it give me wireless broadband access while it's in my pocket, but it supports 5 items altogether, so it can support my Touch, two friends' laptops and an iPad and a camera all at the same time. It can be used with a mobile broadband Pay As You Go card, which isn't time limited. I feel as if I'm living in the future. Where's my jetpack?

Lace At Last

2010-06-20T10:42:00.008+01:00

Thank you for the suggestions about my bikini-shaped swatches, but I think the thong-wearing days of the Comtesse de Ribes (b. 1931) are past, as indeed are my own. Mostly. Thanks too for the info about the YSL docos, Gretchen. I've put them on my list.

A second cone of white laceweight merino arrived from the lovely Linda yesterday, so I will be able to do the white maybe-Christening shawl double-stranded without having to wind any off, oh joy, oh bliss. The second cone is merino from Tasmania, which is exciting. It's a creamy white which brings the bright white down to a softer shade. As soon as it arrived I started a swatch (in my pyjamas) but in fact I couldn't see a good reason to cast off so I've kept going and it's no longer a swatch but the start of the shawl. It's so nice to have something dainty on the needles again.

The sheet it's pinned to is pale blue, by the way, not dingy white. I got out the Brasso and polished my Addi lace needles before I started: they're gleaming. I'm not going to do a square or a circle. It'll just be a triangular Swallowtail. The only problem I had with the double strands was with the slip stitch in the sl 1, k 1, psso, so I'm now doing that as a k2tog through the back loops, and it's working more easily. I'll worry later about whether they will actually want a christening shawl, or whether they already have some elderly female relative to placate.

I've finished the back of Billie. I thought I wasn't going to need all the yarn but then I remembered the hood. I'm still very happy with the colour and it's going a little quicker than I expected.

The baby in Dubai has arrived and is a little girl. Both well. I'm beginning to think I might give the green and cream Pinwheel to her after all. I'm on the last cream stripe and then I have two balls of Sea Spray which would do a fancy cast off. It also occurs to me that I have some* of the distressed green version of this yarn and that could soften it a bit. Here it is, with a cabled swatch that I have no memory of knitting.

The problem with keeping it for the August baby is that in Scotland green and white stripes indicate support of a particular football team, and my friends may not be able to put up with the jokes. I'll have to make the Dubai baby a Daisy Hat, as her big sister and her cousin each have one so it's a bit of a tradition. She may be going to be named Ava.

I watched what I thought was the last Wallander of the second series. I had expected the ghastly young couple to be finally sacked because they were sucking face in a squad car while the suspect arrived and got her head caved in with a poker, but they were bright-eyed as ever, and allowed to graduate. Then the whiny girl was again put in danger and nastily beaten up (have I mentioned the amount of threatened or actual violence to women in the second series?) and again did something very stupid. Wallander then took it upon himself to risk his career and his pension in order to cover up for her. Give me a break. One always expects a series to like this to fall off a bit when they run out of the original stories but the fall here has been particularly abrupt. I have since discovered that it wasn't the last episode: there is one more, in which surprise, surprise, the female prosecutor is put in danger - it's been shown but I haven't watched it yet. I'm not sure I can stand it.

This seems a suitable time to remind ourselves of David Mitchell's superb diatribe about football coverage on the television.

During the first England match of the World Cup, my Twitter feed jammed up with disconsolate fans' comments, but by the second they had lapsed into speechlessness, or Twitterlessness. Long may it continue.

*Discovered that I actually have ten balls of it. Eeeek.

The Comtesse de Ribes Has Brought Her Own Vodka

2010-06-11T23:11:00.020+01:00

Knitting
The knitting here is mostly rather unremarkable and not really worth photographing. I've nearly finished the second ball of Kid Classic on Billie. Every 16th row I get to do two decreases, woop de doo, but I'm enjoying it. I picked up the green and white Pinwheel again last night and am flogging onwards. It occurs to me that both the upcoming babies have an Irish connection so I may not have to throw it away.

I'm still swatching for that baby shawl. This is some Yeoman Polo laceweight, 100% merino, which I bought years ago on eBay from someone who is now a Ravelry friend. It is s-o springy, it's sometimes like knitting with shirring elastic. Used single and double.

While I was doing these, I remembered that I knitted a Shetland Triangle in white angora, and it suddenly became less important to do this in Fir Cone stitch. I keep thinking how good this yarn would be for the lily of the valley pattern in the Swallowtail Shawl. It's on a cone, so if I'm going to use it double I will have to wind off a lot of it. I'm rather old school about winding yarn and like to do it by hand because it reminds me of holding skeins for my aunties, but I might have to be more practical about this or I will end up with a horrible fankle.

Little Boxes
This is an idea I stole from Fleegle, who sells Folca boxes on her Etsy site. To save on the mileage, I buy them from a fishing tackle seller on eBay UK, tradtackle. The colour is a true purpley purple although it looks blueish in these photos.

I got this one for myself, and this duo as a thank you for a friend. You have to have some special friends for them to appreciate a tackle box as a thank you present, but if you do, then these are just the job.

There's another one, which looks as if it might take a tiny pair of scissors. The labels peel off. You have to tell him you want purple, or they come in camouflage green if you prefer. Very nice, helpful seller, and fast delivery.

Viewing Pleasure
All this vanilla knitting has allowed me to spend a lot of time staring blankly at the television screen. I watched a doco about Valentino, the couturier - Valentino, the Last Emperor.

This probably isn't the place to say this, but I actually get more excited about fabric and cut than I do about yarn and stitches (please don't blacklist me) and I was interested to see that his methods are completely different from Karl Lagerfeld, whom I saw in a series about the house of Chanel. Lagerfeld draws sketches which are whisked off and rendered into life by cunning sempstresses, while Valentino works with fabric on a model - a living, walking about model. I would rather wear Armani than either of them, given the choice, but I still hyperventilate at the sight of the skills exercised by those women in ateliers. Looking at an assembly of his designs from the beginning of his career, Valentino said, 'To do this embroidery today, you would need to sell an Italian bank.'

Also fairly gobsmacking are the glimpses into the lives revealed by such a programme. At a hugely fancy party thrown by Valentino, full of important people and people who think they're important, a flunkey dashed behind the scenes and said breathessly, 'The Comtesse de Ribes has brought her own vodka.' I was brought up to eat and drink what was put in front of me when I'm in someone else's house, but plainly it's different for the Comtesse. Or maybe she was just afraid he wouldn't have enough.

The second series of the Swedish Wallander is nearing its end, and I'm rather relieved. They've used up all the Henning Mankell books and are making up their own now, and it's become quite formulaic. Almost every episode has a young female in danger - done in way which is voyeuristic, at least to my jaundiced eye - and we have far too much about the two trainees and not enough about Wallander, who spends all his time being told off by the female prosecutor and whined at by the female trainee. The latter spends a lot of time complaining about not getting anything interesting to do, and then disobeying instructions and putting her own and other peoples' lives in danger, and then getting petulant when she's told off. And they send the two trainees off together to question people, instead of sending one of them with an experienced person - I know it's not a documentary, but really. I can spot a dramatic device when I see one, and this one is getting tired. Sweetly, though, the BBC always gives us a strong language warning at the beginning, although it's subtitled. Obviously we have to be protected against Swedish swearing.

I watched a bit of Sleep, My Love this week, with Claudette Colbert as the Frightened Wife and Don Ameche as the Sinister Husband. I much prefer Don Ameche when he's allowed to be charming, as here with Rosalind Russell in The Feminine Touch.

It reminded me that there's a very good Sinister Husband film on television this coming week, Deceived (BBC1, Monday 14 June, 23.20). It's one of those films that if I catch the beginning, I'll always watch it all over again. Goldie Hawn is the Frightened Wife and John Heard is the Sinister Husband, and the last bit, in the empty apartment building, always gets to me.

Zombies don't frighten me, and vampires bore me, but those people who turn out to be someone other than they appear to be - there's always a scene with a high school yearbook and the photograph is of - Someone Else! - they scare the bejasus out of me. It's a very creepy notion, that you've revealed yourself to someone who was only pretending to exist, or at least it is for me.

It should allow quite a lot of green stocking stitch of one sort and another, so I might have something to show you in my next post.

Vegetables and Greenish Knitting

2010-06-05T10:54:00.014+01:00

Thank you for the vegetable lesson, Gretchen (yesterday's comments). I had always thought rutabaga was a leaf that you put in salads. For clarity, here is the item in question.

This is the only way I eat it, with haggis: it's good when it has enough butter and pepper on it, but then so do most things.

I was actually translating when I wrote 'Swede', because to me this is a turnip or a neep but when I lived in London that name seemed to be used for the small white ones and I've never established whether this was a local usage or a national difference, and to be fair, I didn't spend much time on the subject. I wonder why the name of this extremely humble vegetable should vary so much when carrots, which are equally humble, are so consistent. You would think that whatever else the pilgrims had with them, there would have been some of these left over when they arrived and that they would have an English-sounding name.

My aunt, who's 92 next month, says that milk used to taste horrible in the winter because the cattle were being fed on turnip, by which she meant the big yellow ones. I still tend to think of it as cattle feed.

Anyway, the swatch of neep-coloured wool served its purpose. I have 20 stitches to four inches and the pattern requires 21: this is close enough for government work and should give me the slight extra room I need to make the largest size fit me. I cast on last night and after toiling for hours, I have this, which is going to be the back.

It's Billie by Kim Hargreaves, from Precious. This is very like Georgie in Breeze, which I liked a lot but that's in Pima Cotton, while Billie is in Kid Classic. No contest. It took me a long time to choose between this colour and Tattoo, but I finally decided that I have enough dark blue things and that this will go with dark blue. Progress. It's called Teal, but it isn't at all; it's a faded bluish green verdigris with a lot of grey in, a sort of sea mist. Or perhaps Lichen. I don't think it's going to be finished in a hurry, but I hope not to need a warm hooded jacket in the next couple of months anyway.

Rue McClanahan died this week. That means Betty White is the only one of the Golden Girls left, which must be sad for her, like being the last left of siblings. Rue played Blanche, the insatiable Southern Belle.

Here's the real Rue, who is fortunately a lot calmer.

That's from a series of clips of an interview she and Betty did, along with some of the writers and others from the Girls, worth a watch if you werea fan. The bespectacled one at our left is Marc Cherry, who went on to create Desperate Housewives, which was funny until he left and it turned into what it had been a parody of in the first place. Glee seems to have done the same thing a lot faster, within the first series - first fairly savage lampoon and now, well, just a lot of singing and dancing.

I'm afraid there's another obituary; Duffy the photographer died this week. There's a good film about him, The Man Who Shot the Sixties, which is being shown again on BBC4 next Saturday, the 12th of June. He was famously grumpy and bad-tempered, and his friend David Bailey says he will have no-one to argue with now. 'If you said, "It's a nice day," to Duffy, he'd pick an argument with you.

John Lennon by Duffy

Before we get too miserable, here's another Golden Girls clip, with George Clooney.

George Clooney always lifts the spirits, I find.

Still Not Much Further Forward

2010-06-04T00:11:00.011+01:00

Knitting
I finshed Dapper and steamed it a bit, but I must admit to feeling completely indifferent towards it. I've tried it on and it's a bit big but nothing terminal. It's still a lovely colour. I think I could throw it away quite happily, but I should probably hang on to it and allow myself to re-discover it in a few months. This is more due to the yarn than the pattern: other people make lovely things with Wool Cotton, but I can't love it.

I swatched the yarn I thought I was going to use for a Queen Anne's Lace christening shawl. It's Colourmart's silk, cashmere and merino laceweight.

It's very nice, but I won't be knitting on four needles with it again. I found myself getting into a rage and could hardly bring myself to exercise enough patience to cast off. I'll be fine using it on long needles, and I've established that it suits the rosewoods very well, so that's something. It's still oiled for industrial knitting so it's not soft and delicious, but it blooms something lovely after washing.

Thanks for the baby cardi suggestion, Mary Lou. I'm not sure that my audience would appreciate it. The socks are lovely, Mette, and I just bought the Accessories book, so they are going on the list.

I've been looking at patterns. I'm very taken with the Fir Cone pattern. I was thinking of just doing a Shetland Triangle, but then I found the lovely Fir Cone Square Shawl. And then of course there's Raveller's lovely Fir Cone diamondways. And Beata has done a beautiful baby blanket. She uses that variation where instead of one big decrease, there's two wee decreases (I hope that isn't too technical for you) which gives two parallel lines of stitches. I think this is it. And now Blue Peninsula has given us this Stony Brook Stole which uses something like it but with subtle variations. I swatched the diamondways way in white Paton's Jet but it's too bulky. Back to the thinking board.

I'm making quite good progress with the latest All Seasons Cotton Pinwheel, but I think it's hideous.

The colour looked sort of sea green (it's Sea Spray, which I don't think was ever released) but beside the cream (Organic) it's turned very green. It looks like the sort of blanket you would be given by an elderly female relation, and I'm not yet ready to be that relation. The baby daddy is Irish-American so I'll wait and see; if it's a boy, I might hand it over, but it's far from a certainty.

I did a swatch tonight.

It doesn't have to be perfect, but I want to make sure I'm not using too small a needle, as I don't want to have to buy extra yarn. It's Rowan Kid Classic, one of my favourites. I'm not going to use that colour, which is called Sandstone but should be called Swede, a horrible turnip colour. Or that sort of melon which tastes like turnip. Sandstone is good for knitting Harry Potter scarves in the Gryffendor colours, but not much else, and it's been discontinued. Watch this space to see what I'm going to make and what colour I'm going to use.

It was Tony Curtis's birthday yesterday. He was 85.

And if you want o see him dressed as a man, this one from Operation Petticoat can't be embedded, but do click and go and see it on the YouTube site: Tony out-Carys Cary. Well, no-one could out-Cary Cary, but he tries.

Dis 'n' Dat

2010-05-28T12:26:00.014+01:00

Knitting
I suppose we've all had our email about Franklin's latest project.

And I suppose we all know what we want for Christmas.

I finished Gaia. I did a Picot Bind Off and had 2 grams of yarn left over, which is theoretically enough to do another row, but I don't have any regrets about not trying to squeeze another one in.

I didn't think there was much point in blocking it properly, given how loosely spun the yarn is, but I've given it a bit of a steam.

These photographs don't begin to show how vivid the colours are: the green is much darker. The green is Teal Feather (but it's not teal), and the blue is Matisse Blue. I went through a panic of thinking they were brash but I've got over that. I think it will look lovely with jeans. I'm going to give it to a friend as a thank you and I think the colours will work well on her. (Can you hear my gritted teeth?) I have some lime green tissue to wrap it in, just what it needs.

I had to rip the BSJ back, because I Wasn't Paying Attention and I'd missed a step. I've caught up again.

I heard this week about another baby, one which I want to do something quite special for. I'm wondering if there might be a christening. Most of my friends are heathens, but there's a distinct possibility this one might be sprinkled. Meanwhile I've cast on the Pinwheel Blanket in All Seasons Cotton for the Dubai baby but the photograph was too dull, so you'll just have to imagine it in cream and jade green (Organic and Sea Spray).

Kangaroo were having a birthday sale and I fell over and bought some Kidsilk Aura in steel grey - I was wondering about an Opal, but I think it'll be another Miss Marple Shawl; I just can't resist that frill. I think I'll increase in every stitch for the border this time, instead of every second stitch.

But that's all vanilla knitting and I'm still dithering about what piece of lace to do. The baby shawl is very tempting, but so are other things. Zetor is nice. I might get some decisions made if I didn't keep watching Janelle Monae. What a girl.

Here she is live. Same song, with added hommage to James Brown.

Woolfest
Woolfest is on in a few weeks, on Friday 25 and Saturday 26 June. It looks as fab as ever, but I can't go this year for an accumulation of reasons. If I were going, I would catch the Scottish Fibres bus, which is excellent - it's the sort of bus which has large storage space underneath for stashing everyone's outrageous purchases. If you want to go on the bus, you can book it here. But do it soon, becaue if there isn't enough interest, there won't be no bus.

Not Knitting
I got this recently. Something for the Knitter who has Everything.

I wonder what 'extract' of cashmere is. It didn't cost any more than any other brand, so it can't be the finest pashmina. And in answer to your question, No, not at all.

Appropriately enough, it's that special time again, when the poo project falls due. I'm not finding it so hysterical this time: maybe I'm growing up at last. Still quite funny though.