Swatch Done; Now Moving On

One crap Johnny Depp film later, and I finished my Rowan Fine Tweed sampler/swatch. I still need to steek and block it, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. I also learned that I have to watch my tension on the diagonal stripes section as it does pull in a bit. I cannot wait to start knitting the jumper in the DK weight.

The yarn is very soft - softer than I thought it would be, actually. The red shade - Bainbridge - has lovely tiny flecks of orange running through it. I love that about it. However, I'm wondering if the single-row stripes shouldn't be a third colour? Navy? Apple green? Brown? Brown might just work.

We watched Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate which I remember seeing in my favourite Copenhagen art-house cinema back in the late 1990s. I remembered it as a real Euro-trash turkey and I was right. However, I had forgotten its high camp value which went some way towards making it watchable. Look! Depp has grey temples! Now he doesn't! Oooh, the bad stunt double is flying and you totally cannot see the wire-work!

I remember liking the book, The Dumas Club, on which The Ninth Gate was based. I also remember the book having a great of interesting sub-plots which had been completely exercised from the Polanski film - most notably the The Three Musketeers sub-plot which gave Pérez-Reverte's novel its title. Oh, when bad films happen to decent books.

Speaking of books, I am current reading Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. I shall be forever grateful to Lori that she made me pick up a Vonnegut book in the first place. I'm having a slow day, a day off, and I shall now return to my favourite reading space with a cuppa tea, my favourite blanket and Cat's Cradle. August is off to a good start.

PS. thank you for your comments on swatching/not swatching. You are a bad bunch - just as bad as me! - for not always swatching!

Swatching for the Future

Do you swatch? To tell you the truth, I rarely swatch except when I suspect that either my tension will be off-kilter or when I'm unsure about colour combinations. It is a terrible thing to admit to (not) doing and it is definitely a case of do-as-I-tell-you, not do-as-I-do. I'd be a nightmare parent. But I am swatching now, except I am swatching with Rowan Fine Tweed (4ply) rather than Rowan Tweed (DK). I wanted to make sure that my chosen colour combination for Finna will work - and since my local Rowan stockist did not have the full range of the DK weight colours (any day now, though, any day), I took the opportunity to sample the fine gauge instead. The combination is a thing of beauty and I am marvellously excited about getting started.

I'm tentatively starting to think about my autumn wardrobe. Apart from Finna (and another jumper or cardigan I'm yet to decide upon), I want to make a couple of go-to skirts. I have some beautiful green corduroy stashed away which is crying out to be a 1970s-style A-line skirt with pockets (must.have.pockets) but I cannot find the right pattern. Then there is the green-cream-orange apple-print cotton which is just on the right side of 1970s retro kitsch, but which could be ruined by pairing up with the wrong pattern. I've looked at Burda and Simplicity, but pattern suggestions are very welcome.

Even more excitement: the Crocheted Jewellery group on Ravelry is hosting a CAL (a crochet-along) of my Kaldred bracelet all August long! I love seeing what people do with my patterns and I'm having so much fun looking through people's projects.

So jumpers and skirts and a few patterns to write-up .. phew, it is going to be a very busy autumn in Casa Bookish craft-wise. How is your craft basket looking?

Blogging & Mainstream Media

The British newspaper, The Guardian, want bloggers to become part of its Life & Style network. I have a lot of time for the Guardian. It is the only newspaper I buy on a regular basis and I admire its recent editorial stance on the UK phone-hacking scandal. But I'm not so sure about its call for bloggers. The Guardian wants to hear from "[p]rospective partners [who] will need to have traffic figures of at least five figures". This is the really interesting bit:

The first possibility is a non-commercial content-sharing model, where we swap stories. (..)What's the advantage to you, as a blogger, you ask? The Guardian site has a huge reach (..). Your content will appear on our site, which we hope will give it the showcase it deserves, and get you higher up those all-important Google rankings than you might otherwise be.

This wouldn't bring you any money, though. For that, there's a commercial possibility, where the Guardian Select team sell premium advertising across publisher blogs and sites.

So, The Guardian gets a blogger with a proven demographic readership. From a marketing point of view, that is excellent news. The blogger gets to be associated with the Guardian brand. If I read this correctly - and I may not do so, because I do not know anything about detailed textual analysis mixed with cynicism - it does sound very 2004 to me.

I think it was Ewan Spence who pointed out that some bloggers have more of a readership than some regional newspapers. Food for thought: is it worth a blogger's while to associate him/herself with a newspaper?

In other news, the podcaster from A Playful Day has responded to my reluctance to knit in public and Fridica has responded to both me and A Playful Day. I'd be interested in hearing from other people's KIP experiences - both good and bad.

A Mountain of Garterstitch

Summer in Scotland is over after three glorious days of sunshine. Thankfully damp weather makes for excellent knitting weather.

This is my Sea Glass shawl. A mountain of garterstitch. Beautiful, earthy, bouncy garterstitch. Perfect for knitting group and late-night knitting when I just need something brainless to work on. The rows are long although I'm just one-third through the shawl. It is so therapeutic just to knit, though.

July has not been a fun month. It has been a long, hard slog of a month and just when I thought July was improving, things just went downhill again. I shan't be sorry to see the end of this month. Onwards and upwards. Autumn knitting is nigh and that is a cheering thought.

Speaking of which, Levenwick. It ticks my boxes. I even have a lot of Rowan Silky Tweed in a wonderful mustard yellow kicking about. However, I did buy that particular yarn with Acer in mind.. and I want to start knitting Finna as soon as I can get my hands on the book and the yarn. Decisions, decisions..

Thank you all for the thoughtful comments on knitting in public. I am still going to take a break from knitting in public, though. I feel the need to be vaguely invisible in public right now - I am one of those introverted types, you see, and I need solitude more than I need interacting with strangers. So, I'm going to stick to reading and I won't even choose outlandish books. Quiet and unassuming, that'll be me for the foreseeable future..

.. a bit like garterstitch, really. And hopefully I can get all bouncy at some point too (beautiful and earthy will be a stretch).

Knitting In Public No More

As a blogger and a social media type, I think frequently about privacy issues. It matters to me even if my face is plastered across Ravelry and my full name is easily uncovered. Yesterday I joked I was going to sue if my little private gathering of knitters were declared 'the next cool thing' in Scottish newspapers. Well, we just ended up having our photo tweeted by some UK television personalities. I might have thought it a fun little interlude (just like when we appeared on TV) if they had actually asked our permission before taking the photo. They had not and I am not amused. I respected their privacy; it would have been nice if they had afforded me the same courtesy.

(ETA Wednesday lunchtime: They have pulled the photo with an apology. I really appreciate that. Thanks.)

And then tonight I was knitting on the bus home. A rather thuggish group of ladies congregated around me and stared as though I were juggling sharp knives. That was a very long bus ride.

I think it is time to retire my knitting in public, at least for a little while. I'm tired of being a circus performer for other people's blooming amusement.

Living in Interesting Times

Summer has arrived in Glasgow (briefly), so we Sunday in the park. We found raspberry bushes nearby and enjoyed my home-made baked goods. I sat reading 5000 Years of Textiles (edited by Jennifer Harris). The book is both a fabulous visual source-book as well as an engaging non-fiction read. I do try to have a balanced reading diet, though I do gravitate towards light reading in the summer.

The good weather even continued throughout Monday, so I was lucky enough to have an unexpected evening of outdoors knitting with a handful of friends. To our surprise, we had our photo taken by some semi-celebrities who did not even ask our permission. If knitting in public is suddenly declared the 'new cool' in a Scottish newspaper, I'm going to sue..

.. I still cannot watch the news. I was going to write a great deal about why I am so affected by the Norwegian terrorist attacks (yes, it was terrorism) - but I can't. Maybe one day I will be able to write about being Scandinavian and watch everything good about being Scandinavian getting attacked by an inadequate soul. Today I am not that eloquent.

So, some random links instead!

• How to make some very cool buttons from shrink plastic. Finally a way I can utilise my partner's artistic bend!
• GoodReads. I joined a few days ago and promptly added 796 books (686 read). Yes, I was in the library when everybody else was out partying and having fun during their formative years.
• Some very good yarn bombing/knitted graffiti. I always feel it's wrong calling it grafitti, but that's me being pedantic. Nor am I usually a fan of yarn bombing, but I like this.
• 19th C photos of Vaudeville and Burlesque performers. Since my partner fell in with the cabaret crowd here in central Scotland, he has found some rather interesting links.
• Russell Brand's surprisingly excellent tribute to Amy Winehouse. "That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I'd only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound."

I hope August is going to be an improvement on July. I have had enough of this month.