Well, Nertz!

Prior to the advent of Ravelry, my little blog got almost no traffic. However, in the last couple of months, a few daring folks have wandered over here. Which means I need to be less of a slacker these days when it comes to updating the blog.

I recently contracted a stomach plague of some sort, horrible and vile. I've been living off invalid food for over a week. How boring! And over my birthday, too. I was so sick I didn't even get any knitting done while I was home sick. I did read a book about Jack the Ripper; illness makes me feel a bit gothic, which is why I ordered the 1991 series Dark Shadows (derived/inspired by the soap opera of the 1960's/'70's). I actually enjoyed it when it was first aired, thought it had nice production values, decent acting - I liked Ben Cross as Barnabas. No one could be Jonathan Frid, so it was just as well that they went in a different direction. I'm not one of these people who likes their remakes to be just like the original, except newer. If you can't bring something new to the original, then don't expect me to watch it. Having said that, making arbitrary changes to the original doesn't cut it either. That's just jerking the audience around, and I'm not interested in that, either. If you can retell the story with new insights, perspectives, you'll have my interest.

I've drifted from my discussion a bit, which was about things victorian and gothic. The nice thing about Dark Shadows is it has plenty of thunderstorms, roaring fires in fireplaces, fogs, cemeteries, atmospheric music - not to mention vampires. Which reminds me that I need to order some lovely laceweight from the Plucky Knitter in the Wuthering Heights colorway. I want to knit up Sharon Miller's Bronte stole in those colors. Perfectly dark!

Back to Dark Shadows one more time...last time I saw Ben Cross in anything, it was some horrible, low-budget syndicated sci-fi/horror show, and he honestly looked like he'd been drinking non-stop for half a dozen years. I don't know what he was actually doing during those years, I just know he didn't look very good.

Project Updates:

Dracula's Bride - Slow but steady, making regular progress. It's a lot of knitting, an hour to do two rows.

Swan Lake - Dropped a stitch, figured it would take me just as long to fix it as it would to re-knit it, so I chose the latter. However, It left me bummed out - I'm rather mad at it, and I don't want to see it. It will probably be another couple of weeks before I want to look at it again.

Saigon Scarf - Onto second clue (link will take you to the designer's blog).

Dainty Bess - Made some real progress, right up until the plague struck.

I've also begun Nautical Knitter's "Guinevere" stole. I'm using Alpaca Cloud Tide Pool for that one. I'm not using beads, so the going is pretty straightforward. My goal is to finish the first clue this week (NB - the KAL was weeks or months ago; I'm just very, very slow at getting started on these things.)

Shortly before I got sick, I started to write some stuff to post on the blog; I'll post them now, but they're about 10 days older than today's writing.