More Stripes, Believe It or Not

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.