Monday, November 30, 2009

How??

See these light up trees? I put them out yesterday. You know what I found in the box? 2 dpns. A 3 1/4 mm (no big deal, I have a million) and ---- wait for it! ---- my missing 5mm!! I can finally finish my Yellow Harvest Mittens! Which, of course, made my inner knitting rebel come out and had me knit them in dark red. Whaddaya gonna do? We all know that the items we're knitting speak to us and have minds of their own.
But seriously, how did 2 different needles find their way into the box? It's a conundrum.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Oooo, Romni!!!

Mecca for knitters. Romni Wools. I went for the first time today. It's overwhelming, like I was warned. Hundreds of wools - socks, worsted, sport, chunky, laceweight, hand dyed, variegated, tweed, it just went on and on and on. I did manage to stick to my budget - actually went under! First I bought some Jo Sharp Silk Road Aran - a wool/silk/cashmere blend, in a beautiful rust colour curiously named 'Casket'. I'll be using it to make the Manchester Jacket in the winter '08 issue of Interweave Knits.

And it was 20% off - happy days! On my way down that aisle I made the mistake of touching something (I should have known better!). It was a skein of unbelievable superwash wool, hand dyed, from Indigo Moon in BC, in a colourway called Milk Chocolate. The photo doesn't really do it justice. It's darker than it shows here. It's just gorgeous. It's soft and has a nice twist and the colours are gorgeous. It's a fingering weight, so will make great socks, but I don't know what I'll do with it yet. It was pricey, but worth it just to touch and smell and support a small Canadian wool company!

Monday, November 23, 2009

My new favourite shirt


It's a little bit blurry, but it says 'I knit so I don't kill people'. I think this is a very appropriate shirt for me.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Just a Rant

Has to be done. Completely unrelated to knitting.

What is up with these twihardiots??? Chicks of all ages obsessed with these stupid books and movies. The term 'twihard' is a play on 'diehard', for those of you who have been living on Mars, and I added the 'iot' part to do my own little play on IDIOT!!! Which is what they are. And here are my reasons:

1. They cannot separate reality from fiction. They believe that the characters are real. They talk about them like they are real people. They believe that the actors playing the characters are the characters, and are therefore destined to be together for eternity.

2. They believe that the books are incredible literature. Uh huh. I knew from many reputable sources that they are crap, but since I didn't want to lower myself, I never bothered reading them. We had a book fair at school this week, so I picked up one of them at lunch one day and opened to a random page. I swear I was laughing so hard it was like a combination of M*A*S*H, Monty Python and Eddie Izzard all at once. It was worse than I thought.

3. A girl at my school on Thursday had taken the hood off another girl's coat and was wearing it at recess. When I asked her why, she, in all seriousness, told me that she was going to the preview of the movie that night and her hair had to be perfect. This is an otherwise intelligent girl. After school on Friday I drove past the theatre and there were some girls from my school sitting outside the theatre - at 4pm in the cold and drizzle - so they could be first in line for the 7pm show.

I don't get it! I was never obsessed with anything like this when I was a teenager. Sure, my walls were plastered with Duran Duran posters, but I never once thought that John Taylor was my soul mate and we would somehow meet, he would fall madly in love with me and we'd live happily ever after. I never lined up to be the first to buy a new album, hell, I never even saw them in concert until a few years ago!

Then I graduated to old movie posters on my walls, mainly Gone With the Wind. But I understood that Rhett Butler was a character created by an author, and was being portrayed in the movie by an actor named Clark Gable. The lines never blurred for me.

Not to mention the fact that the main female character in these books is so unbelievably pathetic. She swoons and mopes over a guy, completely surrendering herself to him, ignoring her own welfare. Is Twilight the final nail in the coffin for feminism?

Gods, there's a doctoral thesis in there!

Okay, rant done. Thanks for reading.