Mavis Reaches the Sleeves

I haven't posted the last few days because I was only progressing with Mavis and I thought you had probably seen enough photographs of minute changes, minute advances and retreats, over that particular garment. I managed to separate the back and front satisfactorily this time, and finished it off up to the shoulders. I'm very pleased that I've got a charcoal stripe one one shoulder, and a purple stripe on the other. I don't believe in making random yarns look symmetrical. The friend for whom I'm knitting this jumper did enquire whether the stripes on the sleeves could be matched, and I told her that they could, but they won't. Cranky, moi?

I didn't get much done at the weekend because I went to stay with my niece and her family. For Sunday breakfast she made me a smoked salmon bagel with scrambled eggs on the side; I am thinking of changing my will in her favour.
Today I got started on the first sleeve. I had considered doing the sleeves on four needles, but I decided it was probably more trouble than seaming them. The holey bit of the chevrons would probably get even more holey if I were juggling needles, or using circs. I've tried two circs and the magic loop and I always end up feeling as if I'm spending more time yanking the stitches round cables than I am actually knitting. And before you tell me that that's a circ in the photo, it is but I am knitting backwards and forwards.

I'm thinking this might best be blocked before I sew it together. It might be easier to get the chevrons on the body properly stretched if I'm not wrestling with sleeves at the same time, and the sleeves might be easier to block when they're flat.

We had a surprisingly lovely sunny morning today, which made it all too easy to believe that we may be going to have an early spring, although the general Scottish tendency about weather like this, whenever it occurs, is to look bleakly at the sky, shake our heads, and say, 'Aye, we'll pay for this.' Whatever may be to come, it certainly brightened up the knitting of this yarn and I still love the colours.

On Friday evening all this thinking and counting overwhelmed me and I did a little bit of fast gratification with the beginning of a Log Cabin washcloth. It's fun. I'll finish it off when I've done the first sleeve. Unless I crack and do it before that.

I'm beginning to look out for the vintage Boyes I bought last week. I think I can reasonably expect them to arrive this week and I might get slightly impatient about them soon. Once they arrive, I can cast on for Scaruffle, or for the Kusha Kusha Scarf.

Colours

I'm afraid I dropped the Mavis and the Kidsilk and ran up a little bit of instant colour gratification. When I won the lovely Cheesehead's comments competition and she sent me some beautiful coral pink Louet Gems merino fingering, she also sent me some Americana in the form of four balls of washcloth cotton. You can see two of them here - one Peaches & Creme and one Sugar 'n' Cream.
I can remember knitting a cotton dishcloth many, many years ago which was just a plain old lump of garter stitch in white cotton. I must have knitted it at school, because when I took it home my mother laughed. I can't really say I blame her. This is an entirely different kettle of fish. It's the ballband pattern, which can also be found here, except that I accidentally did a variation. I'm going to try not to get obsessed, or at least not yet, but I can see that's going to be difficult. Criminy Jickets got obsessed and had a dishcloth deluge. I've put a washcloth jigsaw in the sidebar.

Talking about washcloths, the cutest one ever can be seen on the knitty bloggy baby bumbers blog. I'm racking my brains to think of someone who's expecting a baby.

I watched The Bourne Ultimatum the other night and was really disappointed. Too many chases and not enough plot. The script was poorer than the others and it had some really clunking lines; poor David Strathairn had to deliver a lot of them and had to look like possibly the stupidest man working at the CIA as he kept issuing orders which were either contradicted by Joan Allen or were executed and completely failed to achieve the desired effect. He kept telling people to do the things they would already have done and I kept expecting one of them to say, 'Well, d-u-u-h.' I decided some years ago that if I were watching a television drama and a character came in and said, 'Listen up, people,' it was probably a good idea to change channels. In the film, it's said three times. (Actually, they said, 'People, listen up,' but I don't think this is a big enough difference to support any claims of originality.) I sometimes think there's an inverse relationship between the amount of technology used in a film and the attention paid to the script

I found the scene in Waterloo Station at the beginning quite exciting, perhaps because I know the station and could understand where they were; in the other chases I lost track of that. But I kept on thinking that if Jason Bourne were trying to direct me away from assassins by giving me instructions over a mobile phone, I probably wouldn't last very long because I would be saying, 'What? Did you say left? Which escalator? I can't see a newsagent.'

It's a pity because I enjoyed the first two but I suppose as my mother used to say, you can have too much of a good thing.

What sad news tonight about Heath Ledger. He was a very gifted actor and was one of many excellent things about Brokebank Mountain; he gave the character of Ennis such depth. He was only 28.