Dis 'n' Dat

Two of my current non-knitting obsessions were combined on Sunday night in Britain from Above, when Andrew Marr showed the track made by an osprey's GPS signal on its way from Africa to the north of Scotland. It starts at 2:30 into this clip. Do you think he's been reading the blog? I got quite excited as you can imagine, and re-played it several times. Apparently pigeons are known to follow motorways when they're on the last stretch of the journey home - and have been observed to fly around roundabouts. I wonder if they give way to the right or the left?

I have belatedly realized that there were two series of BFA being shown at the same time, one showing current activities and one showing the effects of history. I expect they will be repeated endlessly and I will have plenty of opportunities to catch up on television as well as on the web.

Icarus has reached the stage where I need to choose beads, so there will be a short pause while I swatch and dither.

I've picked up the baby shawl again and am on the edging. I have to decide whether to ask Heike to spin a little more yarn, or take it back one pattern. I know it'll grow a lot in the blocking, but I still think it might be too small if I rip any of it.
You can see here that I've placed a marker earlier; now I can't remember what it marks. Sigh.

I don't know about watching Sleepers online, Knitting Linguist. I don't know much about watching things online legally. It's available on DVD in the USA and Canada, but not in the UK - althugh we can buy the Region 1 version. It's time the dvd business started thinking globally, or they're going to be left behind the like the record companies.

Speaking, or rather writing, of old television series, Takin' Over the Asylum is being repeated on BBC4 just now and has been released on DVD in the UK. This is a superb drama, set in a psychiatric hospital: there are lots of excellent performances, but the outstanding one is by David Tennant - he was 21 and was already clearly something special. He plays a boy with bi-polar disorder and is, well, luminous.
The DVD release has been held up until now because the soundtrack includes some Beatles songs and it was too expensive or complicated to get the rights for the DVD. I have had this on a dodgy DVD made from an ancient videotape, so it will be good to upgrade. Katy Murphy is in it too, whom we don't see often enough.

While I'm swatching and dithering, and deciding whether to rip back the baby shawl, I'll cast on for a hat for the shawl baby.

Gretchen - yes, I have Big Girl Knits and I think it's very good. I haven't actually knitted anything from it, but that doesn't mean anything. I've got the second one on my wishlist.

Empty Nest Syndrome

The osprey chicks are gone, on their way to Africa. Their mum left over a week ago, before they had learnt to fish, but they've been seen with muddy feet so presumably they mastered it without her. Neither of them brought a fish back to the nest but that's maybe because they didn't want a hungry brother or sister to take it from them. You can track them here: you can see that Deshar (the male, who is a few days younger) made a big loop out over the sea while Nethy, his big sister, headed south right away. Maybe he was looking for something to eat.

Icarus is progressing: this was yesterday afternoon. Since then I have finished Chart 3 and am one third of the way through Chart 4.
I've just started the fourth ball of yarn. I'm not too worried about running out because I've almost decided to finish off with two or four rows of plain black -well, maybe not too plain; Kidsilk Night comes in a black with little twinkles in it which I think I like. I've ordered the beads, but it's a holiday weekend in the south so I expect they won't get here for ages.


In the ball the Graphite is very grey but the black and white are more pronounced when it's knitted up. I think the twinkly black will add definition to the edge.

It doesn't look like much at the moment but blocking will work wonders. Honest.

I have been asked to provide a stripy hat and scarf for my youngest relation so I think I might try brooklyn tweed's Turn a Square hat: it will give me an opportunity to practise jogless stripes. The colours will probably be purp and pinkle.

BBC4 has recently repeated Sleepers which I must have missed first time round in 1991: I can't imagine why I missed it because I had a television that year and I like the actors - Warren Clarke and Nigel Havers - and it's a lovely script. It's about two Russian deep cover spies who got forgotten in Britain for 25 years and then go on the run and are chased by MI5, the KGB and the CIA. The comedy arises from the three agencies misinterpreting each others' actions, and the fact that the two spies have absorbed the prejudices of their adopted classes, and it's very gently done. I've watched most of it and am saving the last half-hour as a treat.

Socks, Sweaters and Sunday Roasts

I wasn't well enough to go out on Saturday, so I didn't get to K1Yarns for Old Maiden Aunt's do. I hope the shop still has some left when I do get there to buy the lace needles for Adamas: maybe once the Festival's over. I was going to buy some yarn online as a consolation, but I decided to save my pennies for some beads to put on Icarus. Not in huge numbers, but on the edge and at the beginning of the border, I think: crystal or silver.

I finished the first ball, the Kidsilk Haze, and moved onto the Kidsilk Spray. I ordered a longer Addi bamboo needle but somebody at Royal Mail has eaten it or thrown it away, or possibly sent it to Beijing to be used as the handover in the relay races, and the 60cm needle I was using had got very crowded, so I had a dig around and wrenched the Kauni off its needle (remember that? still waiting for me to decide on the last pattern) and transferred the Icarus.

The rows are getting r-a-t-h-e-r long now. I've started on Chart 2, the feathers, which is very exciting. When I started the third row I realized that I had forgotten about the plain stitches in Row 2 so I unhitched them and reversed them while I was doing Row 3. I'm sure I bought a tiny crochet hook recently which would have been excellent for this purpose, but I couldn't find it. I did, however, find the camera batteries I was looking for last week, so that wasn't completely wasted time. (Which is just as well, because Royal Mail has thrown away the replacement batteries I ordered too.)

I think I will change some of the plain stitches in the pattern in Icarus: I have been peering at Icaruses on Ravelry and quite a few people seem to have done this without disaster striking. I also caught myself referring to it as 'Uterus' instead of Icarus: I shall have to watch out for that.

Mentioning that my mother knitted the cat sweater in my last post set me thinking, plus the fact that it was her birthday on Saturday: she would have been 87. She didn't always knit: she took it up whenever she was trying to give up smoking, which was often. Although she was a woman of immense will-power, she always struggled with that. The needles would replace the cigarette, and 'Just one more row' replaced 'Just one more cigarette,' while a garment grew rapidly beneath her hands: I sometimes think she just started smoking again because she got bored with knitting. Perhaps she should have tried lace - a Forest Canopy Shawl and Kidsilk crack might have taken care of a mere nicotine habit.

The Swallowtail Shawl has arrived safely with its new owner in Canada, on Vancouver Island.













Maureen, aka Nellie, sent me these pictures of its new surroundings. The deer are in her garden: she reckons they don't like yellow plants so she grows quite a lot of them.



I like the look of injured innocence on the one on the right.





This one has given up pretending.

I watched the second Britain from Above tonight and am totally hooked. It was about how human activities have shaped the land and itincluded a bit about how grazing sheep have changed the landscape, which is where I got the title for this post. Andrew Marr said that it was our weakness for 'socks, sweaters and Sunday roasts' which had caused the absence of trees in large parts of the country. So many people on television try to be cool, I find his enthusiasm a welcome change: he's good too at drawing knowledge out of experts, although one of the English Heritage archaeologists was so unforthcoming one wondered why he had agreed to go up in a plane in the first place, but never mind. Maybe he didn't agree: maybe his line manager made him do it.

The film was full of riveting shots which made me shout, 'Yes, but where is it?' as another distraction whizzed by, especially the bit about follies. I suppose I'll have to examine the website more closely. It's got all sorts of riveting things on it. In tonight's show there was a satellite-controlled combine harvester which can work for 24 hours every day. I'll try not to think about that when I'm falling asleep tonight.