A Bluestocking Knits

Show and Tell Friday requests our car — I thought I’d combine two things and show my Backyard Leaves progress at the same time.  I don’t usually see the inside of my car from this angle, so this is kind of new to me, too.  The car is a 1997 Honda CR-V, forest green, which we bought used a month or two before Julia was born.  I had a no-frills Honda Civic hatchback before that, which I’d had since, believe it or not, 1987.  (Heavens, even to me it sounds like 1492.)  We are very happy with the "new" car — spacious enough for all four of us to get in and out easily, good gas mileage, and it’s handsome withal.  I won’t show the outside right now, because, well, I’ve been parking it under the pine tree for a while, and it’s not a pretty sight.  (Note to self: clean out the garage!)

I had a marathon knitting session the other night, when I borrowed the 1971 Granada "Persuasion" from the library and watched all four hours straight through, after the girls went to bed.  I have to confess that I have read the novel only once, and am far more familiar with the story through the brilliant 1995 version, so I can’t say which is more true to the book — but I wasn’t very impressed with this one.  I’ve noticed that older historical ("historical") movies tend to have more accurate costumes and hair for the minor characters than for the stars, and this was no exception — Ann Firbank as Anne had a very au courant hairstyle for 1971, and not until almost the end did she even vaguely resemble the period she was playing.  The costumes were also obviously polyester, especially the solid-colored fabrics, and not terribly attractive — Anne in fact looked much more like she was playing 1840s, with her dresses emphasizing her sloping shoulders.  But production values aside, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the acting, either — it’s difficult to fault actors in 1971 acting like actors in 1971, who often had quite a different style from today, but this seemed very stagy to me.  I have to wonder at this point if the realistic acting style of the 1995 cast will seem dated to me thirty years from now! but it doesn’t really matter, because I believed the 1995 cast, believed that Amanda Root loves Ciarán Hinds and is convinced that she has lost him forever, that he is still deeply wounded by her eight-years-ago rejection but loves her possibly more than he did before.  The 1971 Anne was so reserved and cool that it was hard to believe, even though I wanted to, that she felt anything passionately.  It was also rather difficult to believe that there was any spark of feeling between her and Captain Wentworth.  The scene that in the 1995 version always brings tears to my eyes, near the end when Charles is escorting the shaken Anne home, they meet Wentworth in the street, Charles says to him, "Which way are you going?" —  and Wentworth says, with a world of meaning, "I hardly know" — this came out rather dry and matter-of-fact in the 1971 version, whereas Ciarán Hinds and Amanda Root invest it with so much that it would take many more paragraphs than this for me to do it justice (and Simon Russell Beale’s sweet but oblivous Charles is just a bonus).  Sigh!

I also really have no idea if off-duty sailors wore their uniforms around town in the 1810s, but it seemed a little odd to have all this talk of the Navy and not see a single uniform.  (Richard Vernon’s beard as Admiral Croft was, er, very impressive, but I must say he looked to me more like he belonged in the Charge of the Light Brigade.)

(And by the way, who is that man on the cover of the DVD?  It certainly isn’t the movie’s Capt. Wentworth, and it isn’t even Mr. Elliott!)

So this is as far as I got with Cinxia, to the start of the collar.  Four hours of uninterrupted knitting!

The twisted stockinette is kind of fun after a while — I’d heard a number of Cinxia knitters mention how much their hands hurt while working it.  You do hold your wrist a little differently while knitting into the backs of the stitches, and combined with my nearsightedness, which means that I hold my knitting much closer to my eyes than I should, I noticed more than a bit of repetitive-stress ache too.  But after a while, it all smoothed out, and I remembered to flex my wrists every few rows, and I’m liking the way the fabric looks too!