PunkconformityLife, history, and the pursuit of knitting.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

On the needles

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What I'm doing: I am half a week away from a two-week vacation.  Why is it that the week leading up to the vacation is so hard to get through? You'd think it would be easy, since you know the respite is coming, but in fact it's harder, because you have to work the whole week to get there.  While I will be playing with fiber and we have a beach trip planned (during which we're probably getting married), the thing that I'm most looking forward to is the fact that I will have two whole weeks in which I can catch up on this ridiculous sleep deficit I'm currently experiencing.

What I'm reading: This weekend I started and finished both Maise Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman.  They were both excellent, although I found the narrator of Ocean more compelling than Ms. Dobbs, whose new-age self-reflection and unlikely rags-to-riches story I found rather unbelievable, despite the otherwise convincing depiction of WWI-era Britain.

What I'm watchingBomb Girls.  A Canadian period-piece about a group of women working at a munitions factory during WWII.  It is on-par with Land Girls or Island at War for soap-opera quotient, but that's probably why I mainlined the first three episodes in one sitting.  Meg Tilly is fantastic (I know everyone always goes so crazy over Jennifer Tilly, but I think Meg is a much better actress), and the other young ladies have the same semi-wooden, yet somehow compelling, acting style that appears in most Canadian tv.  I doubt it will win any awards, and it's certainly no Foyle's War, but it's entertaining, and worth watching if you're interested at all in homefront life during WWII.

What I'm knitting: Just finished my Debonair Jumper, which turned out to have more positive ease than I was expecting.  I think, much as it pains me to admit this, that I'm going to have to start washing and blocking my swatches before I start on my projects.  I knit more densely than most people seem to do, and so as soon as I wash the FO, it loosens and spreads.  So if I want garments with predictable negative ease, it seems I must swatch and block, rather than just swatch. Yuck.