La Fete des Morts

Dia de los Muertos, in Spanish. I think the modern celebration of Hallow'een must be a sort of displacement for this day -- the real thing.

Lots of knitting today. In the order it was done:

n      I finished the first rank of rams’ horns on the Rams & Yowes blankie. Assuming I get a couple more rounds done today, so that the first rank is free of the needle and visible, we’ll have a pic tomorrow.

n      I finished off the BSJ and will today, I hope, dispatch it to DC for Ted LeCompte. I’m not enormously enamoured of it, but it’ll do until the blankie is finished.

n      I knit the first little piece of my Silly Christmas Project. My husband thinks I’ll have trouble stuffing it – but I’ve done Sam the Ram, and those Arne&Carlos ornaments. I’m not afraid of stuffing. It’s fiddliness we have to worry about. The first instruction was to cast on 8 stitches and join in a round. I suppose it would have been a good moment to practise Judy’s Magic, but that would have slowed things down even further, and the little hole in the middle doesn’t matter at all, here. The next piece is straightforward. Then fiddliness resumes.

n      And I had time for a couple of peacefulness-restoring rounds of the Milano, increasing for the underarm.

Kate Davies’ latest is another good one. It is about a pattern called Layter, not one of her own but by a friend. Wonderful natural-coloured stripes. It wouldn’t do for me or for any woman I knit for, because those sleeves would be nothing but a nuisance. But I love it, nonetheless. And the discovery of Blacker Yarns for breed-specific wool is one to go straight into Evernote.

 I managed to watch a bit of the Norwegian knitting program on my computer last night. It wasn’t what I expected – I thought they were just going to show us eight hours of people sitting about knitting, as a taste of existential boredom. But the bit I saw, was much more like a program about knitting. We had an interview with a woman who does miniature knitting for tiny dolls, interestingly (there was commentary in English) on super-small needles she had ordered from England.

And we met a man knitting a large Norwegian sweater for his large self. He used a circular needle, and carried two colours over the index finger of his left hand, picking at one or the other as required. He was very fast. I think that is essentially what the Shetland knitter was doing, who demonstrated the use of a knitting belt for us.

And I think I saw Arne&Carlos’ names whizzing past at the bottom of the screen – perhaps people were tweeting messages to the TV station? I wish I could have seen more.