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Show and Tell this week requests a picture of our favorite ornament.
Every year, we make little ornaments for the four teachers at the girls’ preschool — this is Julia’s first year. I’ve been so impressed with the richness of her watercolors that I wanted to do something to show that off. I had her paint on a sheet of watercolor paper, both sides over the course of a few days, and I cut the paper into squares, then cut a slit into each square and slid two together to make these. (One sheet of watercolor paper made six 2 1/2-inch ornaments.) I had to add a dab of white glue to keep the shape — I’d hoped that I would be able to flatten them for storage, but the paper was so thick that I had to widen the slit a little, and then they wouldn’t quite stay together.
I think all of our ornaments are my favorites — but possibly this one is this year’s favorite! Laura usually leaves a lot of white space on her watercolors, but Julia uses every inch, so for me these are instantly recognizable as being her work.
We found out quite by accident that Laura’s kindergarten teacher is a new knitter, so we made a "custom" pair of needles for her, by painting the little knob at the end with her favorite color. It was a bit fiddly, but Laura did the painting all by herself. (Sorry that the photo is a little blurry — we were running out the door to get to early-day on time!)
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"What with Christmas coming and all…" Booking Through Thursday asks about our holiday reading —
- Do you read Christmas-themed (or Hanukkah, or?) stories this time of year? If so, what kind? I don’t purposely read holiday stories, except for Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which we often listen to in Patrick Stewart’s audio version at this time of year.
- Do you have any stories you traditionally read this time every year? If so, what? How did your tradition start? To be honest, we have more "traditions" in movies than in books — "It’s a Wonderful Life", one of the many "Christmas Carol" versions, or "A Christmas Story"!
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Blackbird requests decorations for Show and Tell this week —
Since Laura’s birthday is in the middle of December, we wait until after her party to decorate for Christmas, but this wreath arrived in the mail from a cousin who won’t be here for the holidays, so this is all we have for now, bar the anticpation!
In Cinxia news, I finished it off and blocked it, even wore it to the theatre on Sunday when we took the girls to a Christmas matinee. But I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that I should have made it with a bit more ease, as it tends to slip back off my shoulders a bit, and possibly a bit longer. I like it anyways, and for my first determined resizing attempt, it is wildly successful — everything is in proportion, and it looks pretty much exactly like the picture! But I like it too much to not want to wear it, and I don’t want it to sit in the bottom of a drawer because I tug at it constantly (I was aiming at a size M, 42 inches for my 39 bust, so would recommend a little more ease than one might think for a bit of embonpoint). So, back on the needles she goes! C’est la vie.
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Booking Through Thursday wants to know what’s on our holiday lists!
- What’s on your book/reading wish list? A surprise was finding on Amazon a biography of Amelia B. Edwards, Victorian lady traveller/novelist/Egyptologist, that I didn’t know existed! Ever since I read her Nothing to Do But Stay, Carrie Young’s Prairie Cooks: Glorified Rice, Three-Day Buns, and Other Reminiscences has been on my list — her lovely, simple, rich prose of late-pioneer life on the prairies is wonderful. Donna Druchunas’ The Knitted Rug is very intriguing — I haven’t seen the book yet, but the rug on the cover is stunning! And I must confess to a rather wistful longing for English Gardens in the Twentieth Century and Walking Shakespeare’s London: 20 Original Walks In and Around London, too.
- What books are you giving this year? I haven’t gotten all of my shopping done yet, but ready to wrap is Uncle Blue’s New Boat by Elsa Beskow for my daughters, another title in Beskow’s "Peter and Lotte" series that we like so much — old-fashioned (even when they were written a hundred years ago) but not sappy, with charming illustrations. One of these days I’m going to have to break down and start using the out-of-print dealers in the UK and build our collection of Susanna Gretz’s Teddy Bears books, which we love and are getting hard to find even at the library! I’m not going to say more, because a goodish number of family members actually read this blog…!
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I’ve joined the Kaffe Fassett knitalong over at Blithe Dance — will be using that famously reclusive Yorkshire Tweed and Rowanspun, for a Toothed Stripe Waistcoat, one of the patterns in Glorious Knits. Haven’t swatched yet, but I think I will need more wool. (Still no satisfying answer from TypePad as to why the photos don’t show up.)
I was also very happy to see the Winter 2005 Interweave Knits in my mailbox yesterday afternoon, as I’d asked David (who was in Hong Kong when the preview came out) to pick me up a stash of Jaeger Extrafine Merino DK for this —
the Pearl Buck Swing Jacket. It’s an elegant design, deceptively simple-looking, I think, and I look forward to the challenge. The wool David bought is the same shade as in the magazine photo, elderberry — my photo is a bit bluer, but the close-up shows something of the beautifully subtle mottling of colors.
And the other day, I ordered some Sheepswool 2-Ply from Schoolhouse Press for the Aran cardigan in Elizabeth Zimmermann’s "Knitter’s Almanac" — I have been tossing around the thought of working my way through the whole book, and have decided to start it next month.
This is not a particularly original idea — I find now that other knitters have done it, although I’ve decided not to explore on other people’s blogs just yet — and my inspiration was a similar project done with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julie Powell, who started with a blog and now even has a book about it. But I’ve been enjoying so much the fact that I’m learning new things simply by blogging — the discipline of writing about my knitting is leading me to explore new things, techniques and patterns and yarns, things that I wouldn’t have bothered pondering a year ago — and I would like the challenge of exploring something, in this case, Zimmermann’s mentoring through her book, more fully than simply by doing any one piece or two from it. I like the structure of the almanac, and it is obviously set up perfectly for this kind of thing!
New skill for next month: steeks (cue terrifying music)….
And just to show how easily distracted I can get sometimes, instead of knitting or even planning my knitting, I was playing around with PhotoPlus and came up with this! —
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Booking Through Thursday for this week involves translations —
- Have you ever read a book in a language other than your native language? I tried, once, to read a novel in Norwegian — one of Terje Stigen’s, I think, because I was studying the language at the time and for some reason which I can’t remember now, that particular one was at hand. (I do have a knitting book that I bought in Norway, packed with lovely new-but-traditionally-minded sweater designs, all in Norwegian, of course….)
- If so, how would you describe your experience? Well, the novel was rather ambitious of me, as I was (still am) at the beginner level, and it was of course very idiomatic. I still remember feeling quite triumphant when I read "som sardin i boxen" (like a sardine in the box, referring to a crowded train or bus) and I actually understood it without having to refer to the dictionary! But I had to give up in the middle of the first chapter.
- Have you ever read a book translated from another language into your native language? Oh, many times, of course! I used to have a lot more access to translations when I was working (as a library cataloger), and they would come to me instead of having to search them out myself — things like Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Humberto Costantini’s The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis. These are things that I would not have ordinarily chosen from the library shelf, but looked interesting enough for me to take them home. I also read a memorably madcap French novel and its sequel, the author and titles of which completely escape me, but were sort of a comedy/mystery involving a cat (pictured on the cover of the American edition), a mysterious girl, etc. etc. etc.
- Why or why not? Well, you can’t get through a World Lit class otherwise, either!
- If so, how would you describe your experience? Aside from missing out on a world of great literature, not reading translations shuts a person off from other cultures, other places, other lives. Not reading translations is like not traveling, and I can’t imagine that for myself.
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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!
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A Cinxia sleeve in progress —
I had to start it over when I realized that the cuff was a bit tight and made the sleeve pull in rather unattractively, so I reworked the cuff on needles a size larger, then went back to the usual size for the twisted-stockinette. I’m converting the pattern to fit the Shetland Aran’s gauge, using this formula — it’s something I haven’t really tried before, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. (And yes, it is hard to knit with your fingers crossed.) The Shetland Aran is so nice to work with that it’s keeping my mind off any possible unpleasantness in the yoke section that is fast approaching.
By the way, I’ve posted an album in the sidebar of some of my Hong Kong photos from our adventure….
