Pinwheeling Along

I've finished the first skein of Hawaii (of 3 in total). The radius is 10 inches, so that gives me an area so far of 314 square inches: I'm hoping this information will help me work out where to start the edging.

I've been thinking about a picot bind-off, Judith and I'm tempted by some sort of frill, but on the other hand, I don't want to end up with an insane number of stitches on the last row. But it's fun going through Ravelry looking at them all. Someone did one which is yellow in the middle, and then white, so it looks like a giant fried egg.



I realized tonight that these are the Suffragette colours, which would be fitting if the baby's a girl.






One of the nice things about the Pinwheel pattern, Cinders, is that you can make it any size at all, by varying the yarn and needles, and you can just stop when you like, so a cushion could be very quickly and easily done.

Another photograph arrived from Australia, showing Jessica going home from hospital in her Forest Canopy Shawl.

She suits it, doesn't she? She should have her pink hats by the end of the week.

Was David Crichton a War Hero?

The title of this post is the heading from an email I keep getting from Genes Reunited. A few years ago I added some of my late family members to the site, but then a couple of years later, I decided to take them off. I discovered that you can't delete entries from Genes (or at least I couldn't) but you can change the names. So I changed the names, and now I get emails about people I made up. The bitter twist of fate is that my grandfather was very far from being a war hero, so the question, had they got his name right, would have been pretty hilarious, at least for those of my living relations who know the story. He was a very brave and strongminded man, in his own way, but it was always in his own way rather than anyone else's.

Anyway. I started the Pinwheel again on 4mm needles but I haven't ripped the first one yet just in case I decide to go back to 5mm needles.
I'm quite a bit further on now from when I took this picture. At first I didn't need markers because it's so easy to se where you should do a YO, but now that the spaces between the YOs are getting longer, it's easy to forget while staring at the television screen.

I watched The Music Box, Judith, and thought it was very good. Thanks for the recommendation. One of the things I liked about it was that the heroine wasn't very sympathetic, or at least I didn't think so. Her repeated hostilities towards the prosecution lawyer seemed ill-advised. But she did the right thing in the end, showing that you don't always have to be likeable to be a good person.

Jessica Lange doesn't seem to make many movies, but I dare say if I lived with Sam Shepard on a ranch in Montana, I wouldn't be very interested in going to Hollywood either.

I also watched Married Life. I don't know if this got a cinema release in the UK, and I don't think it got a UK release on DVD because I watched it on a Region 1 DVD, but it's well worth watching. I got my wires crossed and I thought it was going to be a fairly serious film, perhaps about the end of a marriage, an Ordinary People or a Squid and the Whale - although I was hoping it wouldn't be as painful as Squid, which left me squirming for days. In fact it's a Hitchcockian drama, done as an hommage to Hitch and Douglas Sirk. I liked it better than Far from Heaven, which I found anachronistic, self-important and dull.

It's about a man who wants to leave his wife for his girlfriend but thinks that might be too much for her to bear, so out of kindness he decides to kill her instead. They are Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson: Pierce Brosnan and Rachel McAdams are in it too. There is a delicious moment when you realize that nobody in it is telling the truth to anyone else, ever. After that, it's great fun. Chris Cooper is wonderful (but I probably didn't need to tell you that, because he always is) and everybody else is too. At first I thought Pierce Brosnan was being a bit stodgy but then I decided that was deliberate and it fits perfectly with the film.

Mentioning Patricia Clarkson reminds me, I saw Lars and the Real Girl recently and I liked that a lot too. If you tell somebody what it's about, they start to look at you oddly, so I won't, but what it's really about is acceptance, and letting people work things out at their own rate, an antidote to the culture of 'moving on'. A very moving film, which stayed with me as long as Squid, but much more happily.

Here's a new puzzle. Even I could do this one.

More Baby Knitting Than I Had Anticipated

I've done a litle pink hat for the new baby. It's the Daisy hat from Itty Bitty Hats.

I think this is the fifth one of these I've made. The new baby's cousin has one: she's almost exactly one year older and she lived in the U.S. until recently. Now she lives in Dubai - very well travelled, my hats.

I also ran up this little number, in All Seasons Cotton. I keep wanting to knit warm hats, but for the moment this baby will need sun hats more than cosy ones. I'm very tempted to knit Miss Dashwood, maybe in Summer Tweed, but I think that for the brim not to flop, it would need to be knitted very tightly, and I don't fancy cotton yarn and small needles.

The friend that I knitted Mavis for was interested to hear about the handspun baby shawl because she has a new relation due in January, and we had a long talk at cross-purposes which ended with my saying, 'Oh you mean a baby blanket, not a baby shawl.' There was a short pause at the end of the line, and a sharp intake of breath. I can't really blame her.

The mother-to-be is apparently incapable of washing wool properly, so I proposed Lorna's Laces, as it's superwash. I also proposed the worsted weight, as I couldn't face knitting something this size in sock yarn, but it occurred to me later that it would be warmer in worsted, so I've stopped feeling guilty about that.
It took us a long time to choose the shade, especially since it wasn't to be too blue or too pink. The finalists were Child's Play, which is a sort of pastel rainbow; Daffodil, which is yes, yellow, but with lots of green and a bit of blue too; and Hawaii. Those of you who carry a Lorna's Laces shade card in your head will recognize this instantly as Hawaii. I've wanted to use this for something for ages because jade green and purple is one of my favourite combinations. It has a lot of white in too, which makes it very fresh and more babyish.

It's the Pinwheel Baby Blanket, of course. I started it last night on 5mm needles, and I can't decide whether to go down to a 4.5mm. I don't have a set of 4.5mm dpns, or I probably would have done it by now.

I bought the yarn on eBay, as I couldn't find a UK stockist who had this colour in this weight. While I was waiting for it to arrive, I cast on for the only Christmas present that I'm planning to knit this year. I'll show you when there's a bit more of it.

Nancym, I'm sorry I didn't answer you sooner about the Forest Canopy - I did 19 repeats this time. It's ended up being the same size as one that I did in heavier yarn and 15 repeats. An earlier one that I made in sock yarn was 15 repeats, and it was only just big enough - it's a scarf more than a shawl - but the nylon in the sock yarn probably means that it doesn't stretch so much in the blocking. Good luck!