I'm down to the toe-shaping on the first Garter Heel sock — the pin is where I stopped however many years ago it was. I wasn't sure about the heel as written, as I'm not much of a fan of short-row heels, but in for a penny, in for a pound — and it went along quite smoothly.
The sock is draped artfully over my stack of Christmas books — a wonderfully diverse selection. Actually, the Susannah Stacey mysteries were my gift to David, though technically from my own wish list — I had read the whole series years ago and liked them very much, and was so disappointed to find that our public library had tossed every single one in the Great Weed of 2010, that I started to pick them up here and there second-hand. When I discovered David up at two a.m. one morning in November, guiltily reading them ("don't you have the other ones?"), I put them on my wish list, then at Christmas decided to add them to his presents — everybody wins!
I started reading The Lodger Shakespeare and The Detective as Historian on Christmas Day, in fact, and have since finished Body of Opinion (the third Inspector Bone book) and started on Grave Responsibility — and of course pretty thoroughly browsed Cententary Stitches, which has a great many interesting patterns in it. But no (thrusting it aside nobly) I'm going to finish other things first …!
This is an 1859 illustration of "Twelfth Night" titled "Viola and the Countess", by Frederick Richard Pickersgill, rather in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, though I don't think he was a member of that circle. He also did some years earlier a painting of "Orsino and Viola" with the same Viola, looking if possible even less like a boy than she does here.
Well, it's a new year, a clean slate and a fresh start and whatnot, and as I started to clear out drawers I haven't opened since Hector was a pup, I saw the corner of something under a bag of those little balls left over from socks through the years. "Oh my goodness, it's that Setesdal scarf!" Right, I thought, it's time to do something about those unfinished projects still sitting around. Yes, they have come bubbling up to the surface of my conscience with uncomfortable regularity — it's just that until now I haven't had the nerve to publicly out myself. So, snagging the idea from Rose Red, I am instigating my own WIP-apalooza for this year. With a button, of course.
Nine works-in-progress to finish in twelve months — I can do this! Here they are, I think in order of ancient-ness …
Setesdal-style scarf, in fine black and white wools. I bought this wool at Super Yarn Mart, which tells you how long I've had it. The WIP isn't quite that old, but nearly. In my own defense, I misplaced it for quite some time, but I had set it aside in the first place because although I like knitting at a fine gauge, I had got to the "dull" lice section, and the idea of another mile and a half of it was starting to get me down. This — I will get my confession out of the way up front — is by far my oldest UFO, probably twenty years, maybe 25. Shameful — especially because I still like it. I'll photograph the ball band next time, for those of you who remember Super Yarn Mart with affection.
Mother-in-law socks, the Blueberry Waffles, in Shepherd Sock's "Purple Club" colorway. I chose this pattern partly because it was touted elsewhere as being good for avoiding the pool-and-flash problem, and partly — I admit — because Purple Club in this pattern looks just like mashed blueberries and cream. I got distracted by something else, can't remember now what, and put these away out of trouble, and forgot where they were.
Cousin socks in Shepherd Sock's "Pink Blossom". I had grand plans of cables and patterned legs to make a splendid pair of knee socks, and gradually realized that all of the already-written patterns wouldn't fit M.'s shapely legs, so gradually got plainer and plainer, and more and more disappointed with the results. If they had been for me, I wouldn't have minded — I like vanilla, after all — but when you've got a reputation to uphold, well. Of course, now my reputation is as a dawdler! Part of the trouble is that I was also beginning to suspect that I do not have enough yarn….
Garter Heel Socks, from the Vogue sock book, started in May 2009. This is Chameleon Colorworks Bambino superwash merino/bamboo/nylon blend, in Viridian. These didn't quite speak to me at the time, so I felt little compunction in pulling out the needles when I wanted them for something else, and here they still are. I don't know why I felt so indifferent about them, as I like the color, and the pattern goes well with the yarn.
Klaralund, for a friend, who has either shown enormous patience or has completely forgotten I ever offered to knit her one with this yarn, which is the fabulous Noro Silk Garden #39. I had got pretty far along with a Rosedale cardigan and decided that I looked like a blimp wearing a Noro cardy, so I frogged it and the yarn sat in the drawer for a long time until I'd made a Klaralund for myself, and thought, "hey! that stash of #39! –"
Muriwai Bath Mat, by Mel Clark in her Knit 2 Together book. Another rather dull project, miles of garter stitch in the round. I set this aside for two reasons, actually, one because I was knitting it at a purposely tight gauge so that it would make a thick, absorbent bath mat, and it made my hands ache if I worked on it for very long, and also because it was getting so big that I needed yet another circular needle to hold all of the stitches, and I'd already incorporated all of both mine and my mom's. (Sorry, mom, I still have your needles!)
Selbu mittens, also — coincidentally — in that same Super Yarn Mart wool. I was working on these in January 2011, I see. Love these, but because I loved everything about them so very much — the colors, the feel, the Norwegianness — wanted nothing less than perfection, which because I was making it up as I went along, kept eluding me.
This is number 6 of a set of felted place mats in Araucania Nature Wool, in a funky random stripe. Mats 1-5 have been in use on the dining-room table for some months, and I like them a lot. I've started to run out of colors, though, so I wasn't sure if I should just carry on in the narrow-stripes manner, make them considerably wider, or just go for broke and make a solid — I have lots of green wool left.
Yoga socks, not strictly a UFO since it's only been about a month since I started them — but technically, yes, they are still unfinished. This is my former Invercargill scarf, which rolled mercilessly. I don't like the yarn that much, as it has a weird squishy feel to it, and I don't especially want acrylic on my feet — and then I had the brilliant idea of yoga-style socks, which I could wear over regular cotton ones. I still haven't got to the halfway point of the ball yet, and it's nearing knee-height …
Almond kringle from O&H Bakery, via Trader Joe's. Thought I'd died and gone to heaven. There was a pumpkin version just before Thanksgiving, our first taste of this delightful stuff. Now I find that you can order it online, singly or by the case, in a wide variety of mouth-watering flavors.
But I've not just been eating, I've also been felting — found an old skein of Super Yarn Mart wool in a bag somewhere, was just about to toss it in the compost when I thought, "No, I'll experiment with another pincushion!" I knitted up two 6×6-inch squares in garter stitch, sewed them together with an overcast stitch to leave about a half-inch flange around the edges, and filled it with the rest of the skein, chopped up into 1-inch or so lengths. (This was actually not as difficult as I'd expected, simply hacking the skein with a pair of very sharp sewing scissors.) I left the flange because I did't want the pincushion to be round. After it was all sewed up, I tossed it into the laundry with a load of rags, and then the tumble-dryer, I think four or five times over the next few weeks.
It isn't quite as hard as I'd like, but it seems so convenient to make it with just one skein of wool that I'm not terribly disappointed — it's still pretty firm, anyway, sort of very-ripe-avocado. It's a good size for a pincushion, big but not too big, about 4 inches "square" and 2 inches high. The flange has completely disappeared into the body of the pincushion — I was hoping for a little more edge around it, so I might try a deeper one next time.
(Most of these photos came up when I searched for noncommercial-reuse images, but I didn't note their origins, though, sorry.)
No, this one's a viola, just wanted to see if you were paying attention. But it's a Strad! to be more specific, the Macdonald viola, dated 1719.
Here is one of my favorite violin concertos, Vivaldi's Concerto a minor for two violins, beautifully played by the Orchestra Perpetuum Mobile, conducted by Igor Longato, in a concert in Lugano in December 2009 —
My mom saved an article for me from the November "Saturday Evening Post", Sarah J. Gim's "Pumpkin Pie and I" because she knows I like to bake, and that I love pie. Gim thinks that pumpkin pie is okay, but has never understood why others love it, so when she found this version in "Cook's Illustrated" she felt she'd found the answer. There are a couple of things interesting from the start of the recipe — supplementing the pumpkin with canned sweet potato for "more flavor complexity" and using a tablespoon of vodka in the crust to make it more tender. Now, I'm one of those who likes pumpkin pie the way it is, so I don't really understand Gim's kick against its "mealiness", but I thought I'd give the recipe a try. What's the worst thing that could happen? a plateful of pumpkin pie?!
Right off, let me warn you that this version is much more labor-intensive than the usual pumpkin pie. In order to maximize flavor, Cook's Illustrated says, you need to "concentrate the pumpkin’s liquid rather than remove it," which involves cooking the pumpkin purée and mashed sweet potatoes with the spices and maple syrup on the stove, stirring constantly, for 15 to 20 minutes. The mixture was noticeably less liquid afterwards, but 20 minutes is a long time to stand there stirring, even if you are listening to Christmas carols. Then to avoid that "grainy texture that plagues most custard" (really? "plaguing"?) you run the mixture through a strainer. It sounds so easy in the instructions — but after you've cooked out a good deal of the extra water it doesn't want to go through a strainer very easily, I can tell you; it took me a good ten minutes of pushing it with the back of a spoon, and scraping off the underside of the strainer, to get it all through.
(I also found that this recipe makes quite a lot of filling, enough to fill my 9-inch crust and two oven-proof serving bowls in addition.)
I also found it a bit of a balancing act to get the crust ready at the same time that the filling was ready. "If you’re tempted," they warn, "to bake the pie crust way ahead of time, don’t. It’s imperative that the pie crust is warm when you add the hot filling" or the pie will be soggy. It isn't entirely clear in the recipe, but I assumed from the context that they want you to not partly-bake but fully bake the crust before filling it, and I found that mine took some time longer than the recipe said to get a "deep golden brown", and then became a little too golden-brown with the additional time spent in the oven after filling.
I've not had any problems before with pumpkin pies being unevenly baked through, so perhaps it is this version — which is noticeably different in texture — that requires the blast of 400 °F for 10 minutes, then another half-hour or so at 300°F, but mine was beautifully done throughout once it had cooled; I did take very seriously the advice to take the pie out of the oven when only the center 2 inches or so was still jiggly.
Aside from my crust being a little toasted, it was very tender and flaky, so I will definitely try the vodka trick again, though it did shrink noticeably. I thought it a little funny that Gim is so revolted by pumpkin pie's having the "mealy, squishy consistency of baby food" when this version is pretty soft and baby-food like too. It is lighter than usual, though, almost chiffon-like, and certainly very pleasant in itself — I wonder if this is from the sweet potatoes? the only way to tell would be to make this version again with all-pumpkin — but I'm not sure that the effort it takes is really worth it, as I found that I missed the heft and substance of the traditional pumpkin pie.
I was watching an old episode of Louis Henry Gates's PBS series "Finding Your Roots" last night, and after having been intrigued yet again by the pie charts he provides to each of his guests, thought I'd make something similar for myself. I haven't done the DNA testing because barring unforseen circumstances (i.e., a parent not being the actual biological parent), I already know where most of my ancestors came from. (Not all, though — Addison A. Long, I'm talking to you!)
Here is a fairly simple way to figure out the percentages of your heritage:
Multiply the number of foreign-born …
… parents by 50.
… grandparents by 25.
… great-grandparents by 12.5.
… gg-grandparents by 6.25.
… ggg-grandparents by 3.125.
… gggg-grandparents by 1.5625.
… ggggg-grandparents by 0.78125.
Theoretically, you can go further back than this, simply by halving the multiplier, but obviously the percentages are going to get microscopically small very quickly. (Note again that this is not your genetic profile, but the much-more fluid cultural heritage; DNA is actually a random mix from each of your parents, and in turn a random mix from their parents, and so on, so that there is actually a 1 in 64 chance that you inherited no DNA at all from your gg-grandparent instead of the 1/16th you would expect from simple math. It can get complicated. Gates's charts are DNA-based percentages.)
Here is an example using my mom, whose pie chart is at the top of this post — her family has that amazing American characteristic of immigration ranging from pre-Revolution to fairly recent. I use only the immigrant ancestors for these calculations; obviously, the parents of a German-born ancestor will probably (but not always, of course) be German-born. Both of my mom's parents were American-born, so I skip that step, and that of her grandparents, who were also all American-born. Two of her great-grandparents were German-born, and one was a Scot. Two of her gg-grandparents were German-born. One of her ggg-grandparents was Swiss. Five of her gggg-grandparents were German. Two of her ggggg-grandparents were Moravian, seven were German, and three were Swiss. (This last is one of the places where the figures are a bit misleading, partly because I'm using only immigrant ancestors to do the calculations, and partly because the term "Moravian" can refer to people from Moravia or to the religious group, or in Mom's case both. Her ancestors who came from Moravia — and also happened to be some of the early members of the Moravian Church — were her 5th-great-grandparents, so their percentage in the chart below is very small, but her father was culturally almost completely Moravian (since most of his German and Swiss ancestors were also part of the church) — so Mom's Moravian heritage is 1.5625% or as much as 50%, depending on how you look at it!)
Now I do the math …
Then I add the like percentages together, all of the Germans, all of the Swiss, and so on. This gives me German = 50.78125%, Scottish = 12.5% Swiss = 5.46875%, and Moravian = 1.5625%. The "other" is probably German or Swiss, and English.
Word has a pie-chart maker, so all I have to do is plug in the numbers and decide which color scheme I want. The chart maker rounds up the numbers to the nearest whole, and apparently also adjusts them so that the total is 100%.
My dad's ancestry is noticeably different, as his immigrant ancestors were almost all much more recent, six out of his eight great-grandparents. Here is his pie chart — I list Germans and Bavarians separately because it amuses me, Bavarians being famously nationalistic —
This is that lovely Blue-faced Leicester wool that I got for a song at Tuesday Morning a month or so ago. I decided that it wants to be some Fair Isle mitts, so I'm currently swatching. These are all on 3mm needles, so a bit less than the 4mm/US6 the ball band recommends — gauge about 6.5 sts per inch.
The wool is very pleasant to knit with — smooth and soft, with just a bit of sheen. The colorwork looks great even without blocking. The first time I put my hand in the swatch, I said "Oh!" out loud, it felt so good.
Swatch one is a riff on a riff of the colorwork of the Muckle Mitts, a simple zig-zag with crosses — I used the blue and the mouse as background colors, and the cream and the beige for the pattern. I like the way this turned out — and first one out of the gate, too! — though it's a little blue-heavy, using about twice as much as any of the other colors.
Swatch 2 is less successful. I wanted to do a simple OXO Fair Isle, but it doesn't really read at this scale, I guess. Three rows of the second background color didn't work at all, so I changed the first chart, at the bottom, to just one row of the second background color, at the top — it works a bit better, but still not really. On the whole, it does have a slighly more balanced use of the four colors. To my eye, though, the band of the mouse-brown across the very middle probably should be the cream, too.
Swatch 3 is not much of a winner, either. I like the pattern itself, which is cribbed from some Lion Brand scarf that keeps popping up when I Google "free fair isle chart", but these colors don't have enough contrast to bring it out. I'm afraid I wasn't very careful with the tension, either, which the longer floats definitely require. I added in some single stitches in the bottom third, to get the floats shorter, but it doesn't really speak to me that way.
For the "Clash of Civilizations" unit in the FutureLearn "Shakespeare and His World" course, we discussed "the outsiders" in Elizabethan society. I watched two productions of "Othello", first the Trevor Nunn film from 1990, with Ian McKellen as Iago and Willard White as Othello. This production is set in a vaguely American Civil War-era, I'm not entirely sure why, perhaps some commentary on race, though it doesn't quite carry through since if Othello is black he would not be a general, surely! — but after a while it is not distracting. White is a majestic and compelling Othello, and McKellen is pure poison as Iago. Imogen Stubbs is delicate and trusting as Desdemona, and Zoë Wanamaker is excellent as Emilia, as is the rest of the cast.
I also watched the 1995 film with Irène Jacob, Laurence Fishburne, and Kenneth Branagh. Jacob was an unexpected choice, as she is a little old for Desdemona, and her accent was a little distracting, but she is lovely to look at and one can see why Othello was so taken with her, and she conveys a real sense of shy love for him, and distress when he is cruel to her later in the story. Fishburne handles himself very well both with the verse and the magnetism of the soldierly Othello, and with his headlong descent into jealousy, and Branagh is brilliant as usual as Iago. Iago's motivations on the page seem not entirely clear, but Branagh's Iago certainly makes us feel that he himself feels justified.
I don't think I quite agreed with the director's choice to make it obvious that Cassio slips a dagger to Othello in the last scene, perhaps because it's a little too ambiguous as to why he does it. I suppose we are to think that Cassio is allowing Othello "a noble exit", but it just doesn't ring true to me. It doesn't "ruin" the film for me, but the fact that it comes so near the end makes it stick in the mind longer, as it were, so it looms a bit larger than it should.
Last week the theme was "The Roman Example" and, instead of choosing the more obvious "Julius Caesar", Bate went with "Antony and Cleopatra," and so I watched the 1981 BBC Shakespeare production, with Colin Blakely and Jane Lapotaire. Colin Blakely is not someone I ever would have thought of as playing Mark Antony, but he does remarkably well, and he has the legs for it. Perhaps his working-class-yob air helps bring out the sense of Antony's being out of his depth here. This production goes for a rather Shakespearean look to it, with not Roman or Egyptian costumes, but "contemporary" Italian Renaissance ones. Not one of my favorite plays, but with some really gorgeous poetry.
For this last week of play-viewing, titled "O Brave New World", I watched 1980's BBC Shakespeare production of "The Tempest", here with David Dixon as a seriously creepy Ariel and Michael Hordern as Prospero. This version starts out with an exciting storm, but beyond that it turns bland, with little sense of magic or wonder. Christopher Guard is dull as Ferdinand, and there is no chemistry between him and Pippa Guard (his cousin in real life) who plays Miranda. Warren Clarke is a weirdly hairy yet effective Caliban, but other than a mildly amusing turn from Nigel Hawthorne as Stephano, Hordern is the only one who is at all interesting. A shame, really.
(By the way, despite the much-vaunted premise of the BBC Shakespeare series being that the plays are produced with minimal cuts, the Ambrose DVD version I have is surely edited, as I've seen images of this fey Ariel sprouting enormous wings and alighting on a table at one point in the play, which is certainly not in the one I saw. Good heavens, I would have remembered that. Iris, Ceres, and Juno appear in the credits, yet their lines, in IV.i, are not here. Curiously, the DVD box gives the running time as 150 minutes, while both IMDB and Wikipedia give it as 124 or 125 minutes.)
Lastly, I watched the 2010 version directed by Julie Taymor, with Helen Mirren in the role of Prospero, rewritten for her as Prospera, wife of the Duke, who becomes Duchess upon her husband's death and then is banished as Prospero is in the original play. This actually works pretty well here, so is not terribly distracting, but it does of course lend some different aspects with a mother/daughter relationship being one of the central themes, instead of a father/daughter one. I don't always like Taymor's interpretations — I didn't much care for her "Titus Andronicus" though that may be as much Anthony Hopkins's fault as Taymor's — but I thought that this film was really wonderful, and wonderful in the sense that Shakespeare would have used the word, too. Taymor really uses the capabilities of film to convey a sense of magic, things that could not be done on the stage — Ariel's shimmering transparency, for instance, as in this photo of Ben Whishaw and Helen Mirren. In the BBC version, Ariel dashes off and, jumping into the air, simply disappears into a film cut, which even in 1980 I found anticlimactic, but here he leaves a vapor trail across the sky that really gives a sense of Ariel's otherworldliness. I also found Prospera's relationship with Ariel very touching, possibly due to cuts — I don't really know the text especially well — but I'm sure very much due to Mirren herself, the way that she speaks to him, sometimes rather cruelly, but with great fondess certainly, and that she takes his gentle chiding, towards the end, and accepts it, and learns from it. All of the supporting actors here are excellent, although perhaps Chris Cooper was the least effective with the verse, though his physical presence as the jealous brother Antonio certainly works very well. I usually find Russell Brand exhausting, to be honest, but here he was well-cast as the jesterlike Trinculo, playing off the more stolid Alfred Molina as Stephano. Djimon Hounsou is excellent as Caliban, not-quite-human yet profoundly moving at times in his primal humanity. It was also a pleasure to see Tom Conti again, perfectly cast as the gentle courtier Gonzalo, with his faintly tedious nattering.
This series of "play-going" was an interesting exercise in itself, besides the online course, in watching sometimes wildly different productions hard on the heels of each other. It's curious that, traditionalist that I tend to be, I often found the stagier productions more dull that the modern ones, even though sometimes I deplore the tendency of directors to feel that they need to fizz up Shakespeare for modern audiences (I didn't think Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" worked very often).
PS, I've recently seen an excellent and hilariously funny production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" which really brought this lesser-known play to life for me — it's the Globe production from 2008 (revived in 2010), with Christopher Benjamin as Falstaff and Sarah Woodward and Serena Evans as Mistresses Ford and Page, respectively. We all laughed so much — even the girls, who think Shakespeare is "boring" — that our sides hurt.
Here is another picture-heavy post, hard on the heels of the last one, but at least this is about knitting! I read just this morning about a small independent film in Britain, "Tell Them of Us", about a real Lincolnshire family, the Crowders of Thimbleby in Lincolnshire, during the Great War, a project inspired certainly by the centenary this year of the outbreak of that war. The call went out for knitters to help recreate the wonderful amount of knitted garments the director wanted for the film, and Mary Lou of Yarnerinas was fortunate enough to have been part of the knitting team — she tells a bit about the experience on her blog.
There is a book, called Centenary Stitches, available from Northern Lace Press, including "about 70" period patterns used in the film, rewritten for modern knitters.
Robert (played by Reece Ackerman) writing a letter, certainly with "comforts" received from his mother and sister at home, a warm knitted waistcoat and what is either a sock or a balaclava hanging on the X of the table leg.
A wonderfully jaunty ensemble, hat and matching scarf — with pompoms! — and the sailor's jumper. Love the fluffy stripes on the collar!
Notice too the hap that the woman on the left is wearing, garter stitch with a simple lace edging.
Grace (played by Victoria Rigby) is wearing a wrap-around sleeveless jumper, a natural progression from the sontag of her grandmothers' generation.
A hug-me-tight, perhaps! and Mrs. Crowder has put down her knitting to read the letter.
The dark blue cardigan is almost exactly the same shape as the light blue one Grace wears above, but in a brioche stitch here, and with the front buttoned closed.
Mary Lou admits to having knitted this cardigan, which she adapted from a photograph of the real Grace Crowder, as well as the camel-colored jumper below, which is from a 1912 "sport sweater" pattern.
Notice the wonderful assortment of knits here, from old-fashioned shawls to "modern" jumpers and hats.
I am sorry to say, though, that Robert Crowder was killed at Passchendaele in 1917. The film was in fact inspired by the local memorial, and a window in the Thimbleby church which his family dedicated to his memory.
