Better News

It appears that I was premature in my gloom and despondency. My Everest-bound neighbour was up to see me about the window-cleaner last night, and I showed her the cowl. Not having had any expectations about it, or even known it existed, she was delighted with it. Apparently she hates trying to keep scarves tied so she was thrilled to have something cosy that would stay in place on her neck and liked the idea of the snood too. So, there we are. I was being silly. Thank you for all the comforting comments. I will try not to be silly in the future.

I finally sat down and got to grips with Dapper. I had to rip a bit, but not as much as I feared and I've now finished the left front and set off on the right. I am scrupulously ticking off the instructions line-by-line on the photocopy this time. I still love the colour.

Alice in Wonderland was fun. It's the first 3-D film I've seen and I only flinched about four times when things leapt out at me. There were trailers for some very promising-looking films which are due later this year, Shrek 3 and Toy Story 3. Sequels of animated films seem to be more successful than sequels of em, human, films. I wonder why that is.

Some of Alice is more Disney - the Red Queen's Castle, and the horrible frightening bits and the silly futterwacking - but lots of it is Lewis Carroll and lots of it is Tim Burton. I was unimpressed beforehand when I saw that Alice is older, but TB says that Alice has been filmed umpteen times in the past and the concern has always been to 'get it right', so he felt he could afford to stray from the path pf pedantry a bit, which sounds reasonable. So it's set some years after the first, and features Alice's return to Wonderland.

Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen is too witty and clever to be a baddie, but I liked her very much. Pig here!



I wondered why the March Hare had a Scottish accent - I don't mind him having one but I was puzzled. And I'm fairly sure they'd tampered with Stephen Fry's voice (the Cheshire Cat) so that he didn't sound so much like Stephen and was more like a generic Englishman. Are they worried about Bible Belt parents who might disapprove of homosexual cats? Alan Rickman's Blue Caterpillar was splendid. Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter was touching and sweet, and did lead me to wonder a great deal about how the effects are created: his eyes were enlarged, but the expressions were all his and it was unmistakably Johnny. All very clever, and you can see here how some of it is done, although this is about Avatar, not Alice. I don't know that I'll be in a great hurry to see Alice again, but I would watch it on the telly at Christmas.

Also this week, I saw Bright Star which is wonderful. I will watch it again, long before Christmas. In theory I don't buy dvds, but I think I'll buy this one. Everything, the writing, direction, acting, all seamless. I had forgotten it was Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne and it never occurred to me it wasn't an English actress; not just the accent, but everthing including the historical feel - and we all know how pedantic I can be about that. I last saw Ben Whishaw being impressive in Criminal Justice as a possibly shifty 21st-century teenager, and here he was as impressive as a penniless 18th-cntury poet.



Everyone else was spot-on too. There's a Scottish accent that shifts into Irish sometimes, but I've been known to do that myself. It presents another bafflement about this year's Oscars, as to why this was only up for Best Costume. Did somebody at the Academy think there couldn't couldn't be two women up for Best Director in the same year? It certainly knocks Up in the Air clean out of the room. IMHO.

One of the nice things for a pedant like me is that the interiors weren't overdone; the characters lived in sparsely decorated spaces, not overdone gorgeousnesses. People who are claiming to be poor are shown in bare rooms, which can't always be said of films of Jane Austen novels.

Post Knitting Disappointment Disorder, Again*

I finished the Everest Cowl today. It's too big. The yarn and the pattern are both very pretty, but it's too big. It works as a snood, but it's very loose as a cowl, and it doesn't work at all as an ear-warmer. I'm feeling more sad than cross. It's not the pattern's fault; I was worrying so much that it might be too small that the opposite didn't cross my mind. And no, I didn't swatch. I don't swatch lace, but then I don't usually make lace that has to fit. Sigh.

I was too dispirited to take photographs by daylight today so these are a bit murky.

I'm very tempted to find some very warm, thick wool and knit something more obviously intended for extreme weather. I'll sleep on it.


Pattern, Vent d'est, vent d'ouest Yarn, Hedgehog Fibres' Pure Cashmere Lace in Hurricane. The colourway is still compelling and I have been having fantasies of buying a sweaterfull. At the moment I don't feel I deserve it, bit I suppose eventually I'll realize that I can't afford it, which is more to the point.

I haven't been knitting anything else because I was so anxious to finish this, and I haven't even been thinking about what I would knit next. I'm feeling a bit better this week, so I'll probably feel more inspired soon.

I haven't seen Goya's Ghosts, Janet. I've added it to my LoveFilm list now, but they can be dreadfully slow and I shall probably have forgotten why I ordered it by the time it arrives. That happens quite a lot.

I'm going to see Alice in Wonderland on Wednesday.


I usually like Tim Burton's films and it's got Johnny in it, and it's in 3D, so I'm allowing myself the luxury of looking forward to it. Some of the reviews say it's too much Disney and not enough Burton; we'll see. But now I have to go and put on my Alice in Wonderland nail polish.

I'm going with the sparkly blue one. But you guessed that, didn't you?

* With acknowledgements to Knit Forwards, Understand Backwards, who invented this necessary phrase

Inching Along

Sorry for the disgracefully long silence. I have been even more feeble than usual and there has been very little to report, in the way of knitting or anything else.

I've finished the second repeat of the pattern for the Everest Cowl, so I have another to go. That should make it the right length and I have enough yarn.


I don't think I'll be tempted to do any more than that; the pattern is pretty enough but doing it doesn't make my heart beat faster while I'm doing it. I don't know why one arrangement of YOs and k2togs should be more satisfying than another but it is, for me anyway. I'm rather taken by the Handkerchief Tee in the latest IK, but the lace is similar to this so I probably won't be bothered. It's a pretty shape though.

The East Wind pattern is good, though, well written and easy to understand. Because it's in the round there are no purl rows to trudge back along and although I miss having a rest and a change in rhythm, for some people that will be an advantage.

I don't often buy Knitscene- the last one I got was Winter 2005 - but I got the latest one because it has a couple of nice things in it, one of which at least wouldn't take too much knitting - the Tattoo Tank.

I must check whether it would work in Rowan's Summer Tweed. I have an embarrassing stash of ST from an abandoned project and this would use up, oh, at least a fifth of it.

Those of you with keen memories may be wondering what has happened to Dapper. It hasn't been abandoned, but I got to the stage where I realized that I was going to have to photocopy the pattern and scribble on it instead of just looking at it, and that took a few days to get round to. It's quite difficult to fit a Rowan mag into a copier, which is probably a good thing from their point of view. I've done it now but I haven't quite got round to co-ordinating the pattern, the knitting and the pen. I think there is also a suspicion at the back of my mind that if I put the Cowl down, I might not pick it up again in time.

To make up for the long silence, here's some more from School for Scoundrels.



I remember going to see this with my mother, probably not long after it came out. She was never one for trailing round shops, so if we had to go and buy shoes after school or something, we would bunk off afterwards to see a film. Sometimes it was the news cinema, for a newsreel and cartoons, and sometimes it was the latest Ealing comedy or a Powell and Pressburger. She took me to see my first 'X', Only Two Can Play, and I was a long way short of 16 at the time. I think I survived the experience without becoming hopelessly corrupted.

Here's the last scene of Scoundrels, just in case any of you were worrying that it didn't all come right at the end. Lovely flat, very modern, we thought.

Tiny Legwarmers All Done

I got the two pairs of legwarmers finished and sent them off with the headband.

The headband has gone down well.

I finished the last legwarmer quicker than I expected because my upstairs neighbour came down on Monday night with a dvd and a bottle of wine, and then I produced another dvd and perhaps another bottle of wine, and it all went on rather later than planned and I had finished an entire legwarmer. We watched Don Juan de Marco, which I imagine would be incredibly annoying if you took it too seriously but as a piece of fun went down well. It has Johnny Depp in it so it doesn't really matter. It was released the same year as Ed Wood, but isn't anything like as dazzling.

The Everest cowl is moving on. The lace pattern isn't making my heart beat very fast, but it might as I progress. I don't think I'm mad about knitting lace in the round: it's quite like Queen Anne's Lace, but it isn't as thrilling - I know QAL was knitted on circs, and was sort of in the round, but it wasn't a tube. I have mastered doing a purl stitch after a YO, something I always avoided in the past. One of the websites I consulted suggested leaving the yarn at the back and then inserting the needle into the purl stitch before bringing the yarn over, and that worked very well. The yarn is lovely anyway (Hedgehog Fibres pure cashmere lace).

I was rather taken with a couple of the other new Berroco books after being disappointed by the latest Norah Gaughan, so I got them from WEBS because I was too impatient to wait and see if anyone was going to stock them over here. The p&p was $5.40 which is about £3.42: Loop in London charged me £4 for delivery last time I got a Berroco book from them - I don't think Loop is overcharging, or at least not by much, but postage here has got very expensive.

The first is the Vintage Family book, a title which puzzled me until I realized that Vintage is the name of the yarn. I like the Australorp sweater a lot (it's a kind of chicken, to save you looking it up: all the pattern names are chickens, which at least means that they aren't duplicated on Ravelry).

And I like this Tuzo cardi while not being at all convinced that it would suit me. Or is it a shrug?

Maybe I just like it because it's turquoise: that's always a possibility.

The Sulmtaler sweater is given in adult and child sizes
and has these amazingly cool elbow patches.

Must. Have.

I also got the Origami book.
I really like the curvy hem on this, although I would have to lengthen the sleeves.


I've also ordered the new Knitscene because I liked so many things in that. Oooops. But I ordered that from Scottish Fibres so I'm not neglecting local suppliers altogether.

I've been wearing Kaari quite a lot: it's pilling but I'm assuming that's a temporary process while the fluffy stuff comes off and will stop soon. I'm ashamed to say that the pockets are still sewn on with white yarn, but I haven't worn it outside, just arouund the flat.

FilmFlex isn't the same as Netflix, Janet. It's a movies-on-demand service offered by my cable television provider; you order the film though the remote control and you have access to it for 24 hours and you can pause and fast-forward it and so on. I can remember years ago when such a service was being envisaged and it seemed quite extraordinary and magical, but unfortunately the films aren't usually very exciting. There's an awful lot of blockbusters and old, but not old enough, movies. It's a lot more expensive than renting a dvd too, but then on the other hand, you don't have to get off the couch. Not unless you've left the remote control at the other side of the room.

Janet also mentioned Grey Gardens. If you saw the original Grey Gardens documentary or the 2009 drama, you should enjoy this from the Mason-Dixon knitters.



If not, then you'll probably just be bewildered.

Gross

As I was getting up from the sofa this evening, I saw what I thought was a loop of yarn that had fallen on the floor. Expecting to pick up a strand of pale pink cashmerino softness, I was disconcerted to find a wet clammy purl of spaghetti. Eeeuw, as they say.

Lots of vanilla knitting here. Dapper inches on.


Yes, those are my toes holding the bottom edge down. When I have learnt to take photographs with my feet, I shall hold edges down with my hands.

The stripy legwarmer has been returned and the second one begun. It was on pause for a couple of days because I had lost the darker blue required for the middle stripe, but that turned up this morning so it's on the move again.


The first pale pink ballet legwarmer is finished. I didn't buy enough yarn (or, I didn't think to weigh the first one and stop halfway through the ball, take your pick) so I'm waiting for the second one. Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino.


I made a headband out of the leftovers from the first, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that every little girl who needs ballet legwarmers, needs a headband too.




I woke up at three the other morning and realized that I had better do some prioritizing, so I chose a pattern for the Everest cowl and cast on today in the daylight. I kept on coming back to Vent d'est, vent d'ouest on Ravelry, and I expect there are winds from both of those directions on Mount Everest, so I've gone with that. It's a pull-up cowl, more of a wimple, which is what I was looking for after advice from the Spinning Fishwife. The yarn is delicious and I would happily knit on it non-stop, but it's different shades of dark so I'll stick with daylight for the moment.

All this vanilla knitting has meant lots of staring at the idiot's lantern. I think I've seen every episode of The Big Bang Theory now, and lots more West Wing. Then on Sunday afternoon I watched Coco Before Chanel, which I was watching really just so that I could tick it off the list but which I found quite engrossing. It's beautifully photographed, and I think the French do historical films very well, partly because of their attention to detail and partly because they just get on with showing how things were, rather than preaching or disapproving. Little Tatou is in almost every scene and I never got tired of her: she gives a good impression of the realistic and determined person Coco must have been. For me, there could have been more in the way of fabrics and cutting and sewing, but I'm probably in a minority. I think I'll have to get the DVD (I watched it on FilmFlex) and watch the extras to get that, but I wouldn't mind watching it again anyway.

Then I saw The September Issue, so it was quite a fashion-filled forty eight hours. I enjoyed that more than I expected too. Grace Coddington was a treat, and it's good to see some grown-up women, complete with wrinkles, doing high-powered jobs. People always make out fashion is purely frivolous, but it's a serious business which requires creative ability too. I thought The Devil Wears Prada was a very dull film which needed more jokes: this is much better.

Grace Coddington with an enormous cat, from Vogue

And Ian Carmichael died at the weekend, which is jolly hard cheese for all of us.