a great little film, but god did i have a hard time watching it. brutal. but i will watch Robert Downey Jr.
in anything...
(****)
a brilliant remake of the fiendish "Fingers". i love it! (*****)
beautiful, but juvenile.
if i were 14, i would have thought it was the best film ever! (***)
buying a (which donates money to deliver Dulaan goodies to Mongolia), knitting it up, and spreading good will! here's lovely Bejeweled-in-progress.
Thank you for making it so easy and enjoyable to do a little bit of good. I may make the scarf and donate it to another cause, to continue the efforts.
even if you're not going to knit this scarf right now, you should buy the pattern because your $2.
25 is a $3.50 donation to the what's $2.25?
i'm pretty sure it won't even buy you a double tall skinny mocha latte!
if you have a blog, please post about this and help to raise money to keep sending all the goodies to Mongolia! thus far 33 sold, 267 to go!
!
| this has been an amazing year for me, including the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. the absolute low point was this past spring when i had to have a very expensive surgery.
as i was recovering and completely drowning in medical bills my dog, ashby, had to have emergency knee surgery. it was a disaster. i was completely broke.
my mom was helping me with my medical bills, but i had no idea how i would pay for ashby's $1200 surgery. i had absolutely no place else to turn to, so i asked the knitting community to buy patterns and to donate money to ashby's surgery fund. thanks to the amazingly generous donations and sales that we received ashby was able to have his surgery and he has had a full recovery!
i cannot thank you enough for supporting us through a really difficult time.
since then, i've been wanting to do something to say thanks. i can think of no better time than Thanksgiving to begin to .
i'm sure that by now every knitter reading this post knows about or has knitted lovely and warm scarves, hats, sweaters, and mittens to be sent to Mongolia to keep kids warm. i've been wanting to knit for Dulaan too, but with all the book knitting i just haven't had time. so, in lieu of knitting, i present the Bejeweled Scarf pattern.
this is a pattern for the scarf that i am wearing in my Yarnplay author photo. through December 31st i will donate a major chunk of the profits ($1.75 per pattern) to the at .
, the non-profit organization that delivers all of the Dulaan goodies to Mongolia. it costs them $40,000 a year to ship to Mongolia, so they need lots of help! this super easy scarf is a fun project.
buy it and knit it for yourself or gift it to a friend or relative. buy the pattern and send it to a secret pal or stash it away for later.
** update ** , the world's foremost luxury linens and textiles company, will match my donation to F.
I.R.E.
that means that for each pattern sold The Mongolia Project gets $3.50! **
.
.. is that you shouldn't hoard yarn while waiting for a magical pattern to appear.
you want to know why? i'll tell you why. because that very special (mythical even!
) yarn will langour in your stash for years while you create this imaginary perfect sweater in your head that no yarn or pattern can ever measure up to. it's sort of like carrying a torch for someone for years and then, suddenly, you find yourself on a date with the guy or girl of your dreams and you discover that they're not so special after all. bah.
anyway. as you can see i've started to knit a sweater with my perfect, mythical, 100% cashmere. and as many of you know, for years i've struggled with finding a pattern worthy of her highness.
sigh. i'm not sure how i feel about this thus far. i didn't want the fabric to be too dense, so i went down a needle size.
to me, reverse stockinette is always a bit more interesting than stockinette, so i went with that. don't really know if i'm in love with the look of this cable. so many questions.
on top of all of this, i'm feeling under the weather today and i'm pissed off about it because i have a lot of work to do. my mind's telling me to 'get to it', while my body is telling me to put on a dvd, curl up on the sofa, and relax. what's a girl to do?
| to receive the numbers for the larger Poppy sizes please send an with the subject header poppy extra sizes. the replies will be sent out automatically, so in order for this to work the subject must say poppy extra sizes, no more, no less. i will not be reading nor responding to these emails.
this request will only be replied to through the address in this post. please do not use the mylifeinstitches addy.
happy knitting!
| yes. that's right! i went to the Boerne Kid Ewe festival and i didn't buy a single skein of yarn.
"but, why?", you ask. a) because it will be a while before i can really work on a project of my own, b) i already have a significant stash so, with the exception of sock yarn i only buy really special yarn, c) 'really special yarn' translates to really special, very reasonably priced cashmere.
there was only 1 really good vendor there, Brooks Farm. they must have made a killing!
so no yarn, but at that very same booth i did get to meet and i assisted her as she was purchasing yarn to knit Edie.
i, also, met just in the nick of time as she was pondering how she might get in touch with , back in Philadelphia, and purchase the skein of Brooks Farm yarn that she needed to complete a project. luckily, i happened to have Wendy's number in my cell phone. small world, indeed!
i really, really want to cast on for a project of my own! my plan is to cast on for a cable sweater using that grey cashmere that's been langouring in my stash forever. i think it might be the perfect thing to take to l.
a. when i head out there in a few weeks to shoot Knitty Gritty. between the airport, airplane, and down time in my hotel i think i could get a lot done.
i'd like to be able to post a new pattern for sale here before the end of the year. we'll see if i can manage it.
in my quest to find 3 potential outfits for the Knitty Gritty taping (i won't actually be having 2 wardrobe changes.
the producer wants me to have a couple of outfits to choose from) i've been in a frenzy of ordering clothes online and sending them back because i changed my mind. so far, it's looking like i might have 1 outfit. and that's if i'm lucky.
i love clothing, but i hate shopping for them. i would love to share the winning outfit with you, but i don't want to jinx it. it's a bit of a splurge on a favorite designer of mine.
i hope that the producer will like it because otherwise i'll be sporting a t-shirt and jeans!
in the meantime, i am finishing up my first batch of projects for Yarnplay At Home. lots of seaming and blocking and sewing on buttons.
i'm also photographing them and preparing notes for the stylist photographer. this part is not so much fun. however, it does mean that pretty soon i can breathe a sigh of relief at having 1 batch completed and 2 to go!
| in part one of this series, , i covered television programs and films suitable to knit to. in this episode i'm going to write about some of my favorite knitting soundtracks.
either you're not into music or you probably haven't been knitting for very long if you fail to grasp the importance of having the right tunes to knit to.
it can make the difference between getting into a zen-like state and merrily cruising along with your project or getting so distracted by what you're listening to that you spend most of your time unknitting or you simply neglect your project altogether. when it comes to music i can waste a good 30 minutes just trying to decide what to listen to. that's precious time that could be spent knitting.
to combat this i've started compiling monthly playlists containing new songs that i'm listening to and old favorites that suit my overall mood. i haven't compiled a list for november yet, but here's my playlist for october;
the key to a good knitting soundtrack is to keep it light and to jump around between artists and genres. if i listen to a favorite album in its entirety like David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, Sandinista by The Clash, Beth Orton's Daybreaker or Bjork's Vespertine i tend to abandon my knitting in favor of staring off into space and reminiscing about where i was then and what happened when.
the only complete albums that i can listen to while knitting are more recent ones like Sufjan Stevens' Illinoise or Thom Yorke's The Eraser because they haven't been around long enough to accumulate any mesmerizing memories. the key is to pre-select your music and to have enough tunes to cover the time that you plan to sit and knit. that way you don't waste precious time deliberating on what to listen to next.
David Byrne does a fantastic on his website. every month he chooses a different theme. one month it was all Missy Elliot all the time, another month it was latin standards.
this month's playlist is called "Textures, Soundscapes, Melodies Even". he describes it like this;
For much of my musical life I have alternated between songs and other types of music. Here is a selection of the latter, some of it pretty well known, other tracks unreleased and unavailable.Some of it tuneful and some textural. It's a cliché that soundtracks are a refuge for the has-been pop musician — some of these (The Catherine Wheel, done for the Twyla Tharp dance-theater piece) were done while Talking Heads were having their biggest successes, so the argument sort of falls apart there. But in other ways it is indeed a kind of refuge.
Doing music that is done "to order" and with creative freedom within boundaries is both challenging and stimulating. If the music has to satisfy some need — if it has to work with a particular stage movement or the mood of a movie scene — then whether it's working or not becomes pretty clear-cut. It has a job to do and it either does it or not.Working to order also frees one of personal liabilities; one doesn't have to fear that the music will be viewed as a personal statement. It's liberating to write to help support someone else's statement.
i know a lot of people like to listen to audiobooks while they're knitting.
and i know a lot of people have abandoned reading in favor of knitting. i, however, still read actual books and i cannot stand audiobooks. i get impatient with them.
i get annoyed by the narrator. i miss turning pages and assigning my own inner voices to the characters. so, yeah, in that hour before falling sleep and on what has become the rare occasion that i open my door and walk 10 yards to the gym and sit on the bike, i read books.
oh, but wait! there was one audiobbok that i enjoyed. it was David Sedaris reading his book 'Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim'.
now that was funny!
podcasts are great to listen to while knitting. and while i do, have a couple of favorite knitting podcasts, i rarely listen to them while knitting.
somehow i find it all a bit hokey to sit on my sofa with a project in my lap while listening to people talk about knitting. it's a bit much. i tend to listen to them while i'm cleaning my apartment or walking my dog.
my favorite is produced by the Thelma and Louise of knitting, . you can even find an interview with yours truly there! the very first knitting podcast, , was produced by Marie Irshad who works for the BBC.
Marie's on hiatus now, but i hope she'll be back soon!
i like to listen to on podcast. if you've never heard this NPR show then you are really missing out.
this description of the show comes from their website;
One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance: Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn't sound like something we'd want to listen to on the radio, and it's our show.In the early days of the program, in frustration, we'd sometimes tell public radio program directors that it's basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.
It's easy to say what we're not. We're not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We're not really formatted like other radio shows at all.
Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations where things happen to them... We have the themes because mostly they make it sound like there's a reason to hear a story about, say, a contest where everyone stands around a truck for days until one person is left standing ..
. or a grown man trying to convince his friend that he has heard the greatest phone message ever made ..
. or a man who's obsessed with Niagara Falls, lives minutes from the Falls, writes and thinks about the Falls all the time, but who can't bring himself to actually visit the Falls, because, as he says, "they've ruined the Falls." If you're not doing stories about the news, or celebrities, or things people have ever heard of elsewhere, you have to give people a reason to keep listening.
The themes make it seem like there is a reason.
We think of the show as journalism. One of the people who helped shape the program, Paul Tough, says that what we're doing is applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives.
Which is true. It's also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.
Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it's fiction that describes what it's like to be here, now, in America.What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic at the same time.
Some of the writers whose work has been on the program: David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Russell Banks, Dave Eggers, David Rakoff, Tobias Wolff, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anne Lamott, Michael Lewis, Michael Chabon, Nick Hornby, Alex Kotlowitz, Dan Savage, David Foster Wallace, Spalding Gray, Chris Ware, Gay Talese, Haruki Murakami, Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Bill Buford.
my absolute favorite podcast is the Smithsonian Folkways Collection, available for download on iTunes. this remarkable series of 24 one hour programs chronicles the history of Moses Asch and Folkways Records. from the ;
Folkways Records Service Co.was founded in 1948 in New York City by Moses Asch (1905-1986) and Marian Distler (1919-1964). Under Asch's enthusiastic and dedicated direction, Folkways sought to record and document the entire world of sound. Between 1948 and Asch's death, Folkways' tiny staff released 2,168 albums.
Topics included traditional, ethnic, and contemporary music from around the world; poetry, spoken word, and instructional recordings in numerous languages; and documentary recordings of individuals, communities, current events, and natural sounds. As one of the first record companies to offer albums of "world music," and as an early exponent of the singers and songwriters who formed the core of the American folk music revival (including such giants as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly), Asch's Folkways grew to become one of the most influential record companies in the world.
Following Asch's death in 1987, the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., acquired Folkways Recordings and the label's business papers and files in order to ensure that the sounds and genius of its artists would continue to be available to future generations.
As a condition of the acquisition, the Smithsonian agreed that virtually all of the firm's 2,168 titles would remain "in print" forever--a condition that Smithsonian Folkways continues to honor through its custom order service.Whether it sells 8,000 copies each year or only one copy every five years, every Folkways title remains available for purchase.
i have a pretty short attention span and a constant need for stimulation and all of this gets me through my daily knitting. if this doesn't satiate you then you might need more help than i can give you!
** update ** btw, my life in stitches is TypePad's today!
| most of the Yarnplay news is happening . however, this is so big that i thought i'd post it here as well.
due to popular request, the Poppy pattern will soon be available in sizes 42", 44", and 46". you will still need to purchase the book in order to have the full pattern and knitting instructions. i will only be providing the additional numbers for the larger sizes.please don't write to me and tell me that you left your book on the subway or that it's saturday and that you left it at the office and can't retrieve it until monday and that you must cast on now or that you only want to knit Poppy so you don't really want to buy the entire book. posting the full pattern would be a violation of my contract. selling the pattern separately would be violation of my contract.
so neither of those things is going to happen. what will happen is that when the numbers become available (hopefully, within the next 1-2 weeks) i will post them to the and if you're knowledgeable enough to knit a sweater you will know how to fill in the blanks. happy knitting!
| at the moment it's all book deadlines and 'what am i going to wear on Knitty Gritty?' (just thought i'd slip that in.) unfortunately, i don't have a single bit of knitting that i can share.so, instead of showing you what i'm knitting i thought i'd write a little about the what i watch and listen to for the gazillions of hours that i spend with needles in my hands. i never really watched much television until i started knitting. now can i enjoy guilt free hours transfixed by the tube safe in the knowledge that i'll have something crafty and beautiful to show for my time.
i rarely knit at night, so i rely upon a cache of tivoed shows to get me through the work day. have i become absolutely addicted or are there really just a lot of good shows this season? i'm tivoing The Amazing Race, Heroes, Studio 60, Gene Simmons Family Jewels, Veronica Mars, 30 Rock, Lost, The Nine, Top Chef, The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Six Degrees, Men in Trees, and Boston Legal.
is that a lot? oh, and there's also Oprah and Letterman. The Daily Show, too.
you would have to know exactly how many hours i spend knitting to understand that not even this is enough. in addition to the countless films (mostly indie and foreign) i watch (i'm on a 5 at a time Netflix subscription), i've watched the first 2 seasons of Veronica Mars (truly the crack of tv on dvd), the first season of Weeds (brilliant!), i've rewatched all the seasons of Homicide and The Wire (2 of my all time favorite television shows), i'm currently watching Big Love and eagerly awaitng the dvd release of the most recent season of The Sopranos.
whew! need a few recommendations of films to knit to? i've seen thousands of films and some of these are my favorites and others are just fun or interesting films that come to mind.
i probably have a few dozen all time faves but i can never seem to recall them all at once. mind you, i'm leaving out foreign films. not exactly fun to knit to if you don't understand the language and have to keep looking up from your knitting to read the subtitles.
...
2. Shampoo (you can't beat Julie Christie Warren Beatty)
3. A Woman Under The Influence (a bit of a downer, but brilliant)
4.Love Actually (my one and only favorite feel good film)
7. Midnight Cowboy (so good i've seen it 3 or 4 times)
9. Harold Maude (if you haven't seen this, you should)
12.Secrets Lies (oh my god! brenda blethyn is hilarious.)
11.Kill Bill 1 2 (need i say more?)
granted, that's a weird little selection, but it's 8:30 in the morning and i've only had one cup of coffee.
wait!don't tell me! so, you haven't yet mastered the art of knitting and watching tv?
coming up next, music to knit to.
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