Blockage, plus inane ramblings

I finally got some stuff blocked - my friend Trixie asked me to block a shawl for her, so while I was in blocking mode I did a couple of other things:

Finally, the Hemlock Ring blanket completed in January 2009:

And I blocked  December Wind by Renee Leverington (purple confuses my camera - I don't know why - so the photos are extra crappy):

 

 

My mother liked this one even before it was blocked, so I gave it to her for her birthday. The yarn was from Susan at the Spinning Bunny, and was lovely to work with. Note that this is the first time my mother has ever liked anything I've knitted.
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And then I blocked Dover Castle, which I'd knitted up in the lightweight version of Berroco's Ultra Alpace - that stuff is also really sweet to work with:

Meh. I have no idea what was confusing my camera. They've been tearing down the building just outside my kitchen window; when I take pix of the Leviathan that's eating the building, they turn out just fucking fine:

So perhaps I should just stick with photos of heavy equipment. Or perhaps I need to display my FOs on heavy equipment. I was going to make some snide remark about "forget those tastefully displayed items in beautiful settings", but since I don't put fuck-all effort into photographing my work such sarcasm would simply make folks spit out their coffee. And I don't want that.

I got an email yesterday, along with my other classmates, offering us temporary positions again with the CIA - since I can't live on the $800/month I'm currently getting on UI, I will be working again starting the 16th of this month. So I need to get a few things posted in the next few days. I mean, I've only had 5-1/2 months to do anything.

No surprise, I spent my last Friday night of freedom in a knitting workshop with Franklin Habit. Honestly, I'd recommend taking anything from him, even if it's a workshop on making mud pies. Smart, funny, and passionate about teh knitting. The class I took was Knitting from Antique Patterns, or some such title (you really expect me to move from my seat and look up the exact title? Really? Well, I'm practicing immobility in preparation of returning to work, so there). There was a woman who brought her grandmother's notebook of knitting patterns - I wish we'd had an hour to look through those babies, although perhaps my drooling on them wouldn't have been the best thing. Oh well, I'll satisfy myself with the 1884 Sampler Books (see link on left side bar) and Nancie Wiseman's "Lace in the Attic". In fact, I've a couple of wrister experiments in the wings using several of the 1884 Sampler Book edgings. Someday they'll be completed and posted... someday....

A Call for Artists

From one of my favorite sites, Morbid Anatomy, this was posted:

* EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT & CALL TO ARTISTS *

Please note: This is not a typical art show. Not all participants are artists. Inventors, mechanics, and people who ordinarily have nothing to do with the art world are involved in this exhibition. That said, I encourage artists to make use of their whimsy. This show is about wonder, as well as craft, science, mathematics, and experimentation.

"Kinetica" is an exhibition of kinetic, automatic, mechanic, robotic, &etc. sculpture.

It will be held at the Candle Factory in New Orleans. The two main events are the opening on Saturday, April 24, and the closing on Saturday, May 8. The events are scheduled to begin at 6pm.

Proposals-only deadline: March 20th. Send idea, space required, special requirements, etc. to Myrtle von Damitz lll at myrtlered@gmail.com

I will consider late proposals but must begin to map out the installation as early as possible.

INSTALLATION will begin on Saturday, April 17. Artists are responsible for installation. Work that has to be shipped must include detailed installation instructions, and arrive by April 17.

Also important: whether your piece can only be run by you, its creator, or whether I or anyone else running the exhibition can turn it on when needed.

Participants are responsible for display arrangements, ie: tables, pedestals, etc.

The Candle Factory is a warehouse situated on the west side of the Industrial Canal, and is a known events destination & a good crowd is expected. There is a great electrical set-up and room both inside and outside for a wide variety of work. The owner, Charles Handler, lives inside the warehouse and security is good. However, please take note that this IS a warehouse space and not a pristine gallery.

The show will not run on regular gallery hours, but will be on in full force for both opening and closing events, leaving room for multiple event-specific possibilities. I would like very much to find anyone or any group working on Rube Goldberg Machines!

I'm working towards arranging school field trips to view the work and for the artists to speak to the kids about their ideas and how they work. If you are part of the show, I'd like to know if I can schedule you to be present on any of these days (TBA!).

I will be able to work out showings by appointment, as well, for however many pieces can be operable during the run of the show.

Questions: myrtlered@gmail.com or 504 908 4741

I'm not nearly the artist, designer, mechanic or engineer for this show, but it sounds great, and I know a few folks who very much create work along these lines. Consider this my public service announcement for the millennium.

Plot Z-twists

The would-be pithy title is my half-assed attempt to make light of my excitement in discovering a film in which knitting is a plot device. Not much of one, admittedly – mostly serves as a red herring - but one that unexpectedly moves the story forward.

As you may have noticed, dear reader, I have a fondness for things vintage. I’ve a modest but well-loved collection of vintage knitting and crochet patterns. For over a decade the only new garments I wore were underwear and socks (put on a bit too much weight to stay vintage, unfortunately). And when I’d switch through the channels on TV, I’d stop anytime I saw something black and white.

So I was delighted to find a small collection of public domain movies available on the Internet Archive. I downloaded one immediately entitled “And Then There Were None”, directed by Rene Clair. The visuals of the film are quite wonderful, and there’s a light touch of humor brought to a grim Agatha Christie tale. (NB – the novel has a much nastier ending than the film.)

If you’ve never seen any versions of this story (most filmed under the title “10 Little Indians”) or read the book, it’s about a group of people who are invited to an isolated locale for a house party that turns out to be an opportunity for one of the characters to kill off all the others. The justification is that everyone in attendance has gotten away with some crime and deserves their fate.

Judith Anderson is one of the actors in this film version. Her character knits. And she sports a knitted stole for a sizable amount of her screen time. And in one sequence she is wearing what looks to be one of those lovely 1940’s hand knit jackets.

So I grabbed some screen shots – sorry they’re not better, but the print was not dvd quality – to share with everyone, along with a few of the more entertaining dialog quotes.

First photo is a seemingly gratuitous kitty photo. But it’s not gratuitous at all.


The next several are of Judith Anderson. She is sitting on a terrace, knitting her hard little heart out. She seems to be knitting a sweater (or jumper, as they would have said in 1940-something Britain) with what looks to be two to three inches of ribbing. Notice also her shawl and the jacket she is wearing.



Check out the knitting bag!


Large enough to hold her knitting and a pair of binoculars, as you'll see in the next two shots. You'll also see closeups of the sleeves of her jacket – I would have loved a clearer picture, but these were the best I could get. I'm pretty sure I've seen that design, or something similar, in one of my vintage books.



These photos show the design of her stole (which she also uses for a scarf). It’s a long rectangle, so shaping isn’t an issue.




Here’s Judith throwing her yarn, knitting English (just as I would expect). Nice to know that she and Dr Zoidberg share knitting techniques.


Next we see Dame Judith at the beach; note that here she’s using the stole as a head scarf.

Dame Anderson's character stops to pick up some seaweed. But why...?



She returns to the house with her find and says, “Such a pretty pattern - I thought I'd like to copy it for a shawl.”

At a knitting retreat, no one would think twice about that remark. However, since she's the only knitter at this house party of doom, they simply look at her as if she's insane.

The notion that her behaviour is irrational is seemingly supported by a brief conversation someone has with her in the kitchen, in which she makes (what I think) is a perfectly rational observation:

“Very stupid to kill the only servant in the house; now we don't even know where to find the marmalade.”

After breakfast (probably one without marmalade), the rest of the house party discusses Judith's oddness, with Walter Huston passing final judgment with this great line:

“No sane person would think of using seaweed as a pattern for a shawl!”

However, before they can get their pitchforks and torches together to go after the heartless, knitting-crazed witch, a ball of yarn drops down into the conversation. Our little kitty friend has chased it over the banister.

And here’s a gratuitous shot which does not do justice to Clair’s visual aesthetic – the light yarn against the dark floor, with an even darker shadow falling across it.

They follow the yarn into Judith’s room, where she’s obviously died like she lived, with her knitting in her hands (and probably on a chenille bedspread).

From Viviana's Mad Howls

I'll look through some of my knitting patterns to see if I can find one which matches her jacket. And I think the design for the stole should be fairly easy to reproduce - in the next few weeks I'll knit up some swatches and post the photos. I won't, however, be designing shawls based on seaweed just yet. Maybe later.

So, in summary, I rate this film "Mmmm...knitting."

Cross Post - Good Summer Reading (circa 1875)

He's dead, Jim!

I just finished reading the first half of that classic novel, "The Somnambulist and the Detective" by Allan Pinkerton. Yes, the Allan Pinkerton for whom the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was named. Allan moved here from Scotland with his bride, began as a private detective in Chicago in 1849 or 1850, eventually met up with some muck-a-mucks (click the link if you want details; I'm not going to repeat a Wikipedia article), popularized such detective tricks and shadowing (tailing, following) and what we would now consider undercover work, and eventually put his name on a series of fictionalized accounts of his career (rumor has it they were ghostwritten).

The story begins with a young bank clerk being killed and a bank robbed. This all takes place somewhere down south; most of the evidence is overlooked by the locals, since it leads to the best friend of the deceased because class matters in 1850 Mississippi, and the best friend, Mr Drysdale, is of the best of families. But ol' Pinky, who is called in as a last-chance attempt to catch the killer/robber, is a cranky Scot, he is, and he dinna care fer a man's standing in the community. After examining clews, weighing evidence, and sucking down mint juleps galore, he trots back to Chicago, and formulates a plan so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. A large, inefficient, clunky weasel.

Next we know, a widow (Mrs Potter), a man of means (Mr Andrews), and a young carpenter (Mr Green) descend upon this small town. All are operatives of ol' Pinky - oops, I should have said spoiler alert. Now y'all will know how the story ends.

Their job is to figure out how to get a confession from the murderer Drysdale. Mrs Potter (not her real name) befriends the innocent wife of the alleged murderer...

Hard-boiled female detective schmoozes up innocent housewife

...you can see the evidence for yourself. In fact, this heartless undercover agent fakes an injury to infiltrate their household - a shameful pretense of being dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Indeed!

"She's suffered severe trauma, Jim!"

Mrs P starts smearing blood all over their home in the middle of the night in order to freak out the suspect. Talk about the house guest from hell...

Meanwhile, Messers Andrew and Green (not their real names) plot to drive Drysdale insane, in case Mrs P's imitation of "The Shining" doesn't work. (Okay, okay, this book came before "The Shining".) Mr Green looks like the deceased, so they dress him up to look like, well, a zombie in order to freak out the suspect even more.

"He's undead, Jim!"

And it works - but only some of the time. Our alleged murderer gets up and wanders in the middle of the night to the locations where he has buried the stolen money, and doesn't notice the zombie during his late-night strolls.

"He's the living dead, Jim!"

At this point, I know, you're hoping for a zombie war, or perhaps a face-off between a zombie and, say, a nosferatu. No such luck, dear readers. If the title hasn't already given it away, he's sleepwalking! Yes, sleepwalking. Wow! And FYI, that's a large, flat rock that our sleepwalker is holding. He's not wrestling with an alien life form or anything. Sorry.

By now, Drysdale is in hysterics. No southern belle could out psychosomatic him at this point, and I mean it. For instance, every time he finds the blood smeared in his room, he faints and says that he is weak from loss of blood... but he hasn't really lost any blood. So why is weak and faint - hysteria? Nerves? Guilt? A secret opium habit we're never told about?

No matter. They've succeeded in making him crazy. And yet, he still won't confess.

From what I can tell, the operations of these three detectives has probably taken three to six months. Honestly, if all his cases were this labor-intensive and drawn out, there is no way Allan Pinkerton would have become the rich, worker-hating lawman that he became.

Anyway, Pinkterton returns to the south, and gets together with everyone to plan one last attempt to coerce a confession from this dude without using a waterboard or lynch laws. Mr Green gets into his zombie togs again, and hides in the bank - the scene of the original crime. They arrest Mr Drysdale and take him to the bank. (If you're like me, you feel like you're suddenly in an episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies", but you're not; hillbillies could not afford Pinkerton's fees back in 1856.) I'll let the lovely illustration show you the moment when they break the killer:

"Dammit, Jim, I'm a murderer, not a doctor!"

Ah yes, they just don't confess like this anymore. And look at Mr Sourface McMustache in the background (just to the left of Drysdale) - stern and judgmental. That's a level four glare of disapproval. If it had been a level five, Drysdale would be a heap of ashes or a puddle of goo on the floor.

Eh, I give the story a C, mostly for being brief and having some lovely illustrations. The plot was ridiculous - but not as ridiculous as "The Ghoul", a book which I will review in loving detail someday. If you're not going to be a realistic mystery, you should go all out for crazy, over-the-top thrills, which "The Ghoul" delivers. The second half of the Pinkerton book is a tale entitled, "The Murderer and the Fortune-teller". If it's any good - or if the drawings are the least bit entertaining - I'll let you know.