Tuesday, November 28, 2006

holiday knitting, or the evolution of a hat

My work friend Kevin gave me a present last year for Christmas. I wasn't expecting it, because there are a lot of people at work, and we're lunch buddies, but don't really socialize outside of work or anything. So I promised myself I would make him something for Christmas this year, because he's just so nice. He does things like that all the time. So I settled on the idea of knitting him a hat. But then I ambitiously decided that I couldn't just knit HIM a hat. I had to knit one for Ben and Max, these two editors that I really like. And then what about my assistant? And Matt, the other editor on my team? All of them deserve hats! So I placed a big Cascade 220 order with Webs, in colors I think they would like, and I downloaded and printed out the London Beanie pattern. Unfortunately, the first hat I knit (in Kevin's boring colors, by the way...) turned out a leeetle small. I call this montage--
Idiot in Bathroom with Camera:

tiny hat #1

tiny hat #2 tiny hat #2 side view

London Beanie for Max side view London Beanie for Max

The first hat you see there was following the pattern without making adjustments. Swatch? For a hat? Surely you jest... Ha ha. Well, I've learned my lesson. But it was kind of fun figuring stuff out as I went along. It just meant that I knit TWO EXTRA UNNECESSARY HATS. That first hat (and second, really) will fit a child I know. I'm sure I can find one. Perhaps Spanky's nephew...

For the second hat, I'd increased the number of cast on stitches by nine, to 81 instead of 72, so it fits around my head without squeezing, but then I lost my nerve. The pattern said to knit ten rows and then add the first stripe. After the stripe sequence, you're supposed to knit ten more rows and then do the decreases. I figured I'd add some rows, since the first one didn't fit, so I knit 13 to begin with, and then added the stripes, but then it looked too big, so I quickly started the decreases about five rows after the stripes, which means that not only is the hat still too shallow, but the stripes are skewed toward the top, rather than being in the middle. This second hat is in Ben's colorway. He has a scarf that is grey and red, so I figured I'd make his hat to match. Kevin wanted boring black and grey to match his--wait for it--black coat.

Max is getting the third hat--the first one I did that fit--the brown, orange, and yellow one. He's kind of retro, and I think this hat is the perfect colorway for him! So then I had to go back and knit a black one and a grey/red one that would actually fit. By the time I finished Max's hat, I had figured out that I only had to increase the number of cast-on stitches, and then follow the pattern as written. I'm not particularly enamored of the way there are no knit rows between the decrease rows at the top, which I think gives them a bunchy look rather than a smooth top, but hopefully the boys won't notice. I still have to do my assistant's hat, and just for a change of pace, I think I'm going to make Matt Hothead from Deb Stoller's Stitch and Bitch book. Maybe in blues though. He has pretty blue eyes.

Monday, November 27, 2006

a big fat turkey

Thanksgiving was without incident this year. Spanky had to be with her family, throwing all our plans into disarray. We originally planned to go to her boss Jen's house. Jen is the mother of Neil and Danny (of the chicken hat--below):
Danny in the chicken viking hat

After I made her the chicken hat for Danny, Jen requested a hat for Neil too, to match his winter coat, which is red. She especially wanted one with flaps and ties, because I gather that much of having a toddler means fighting with them over keeping the hat on the head. Anyway, I designed these two hats myself. I think they're the first real garments I've designed, if you don't count a coffee cup sleeve that I made for Spanky a while ago.

hunting cap larger hat

The one on the left is the one I made first. I looked at a bunch of kids patterns online, and took an average of those stitches for the circumference, but it ended up looking very shallow. I also tried both picking up stitches for the ear flaps and knitting them first and leaving the top stitches live, and decided that this latter method was more visually pleasing, so that's what I ended up doing. I have no idea if they're placed anywhere near where a real kid's ears are, because i just eyeballed it with the most rudimentary math necessary to place them near the exact sides of the hat. I crocheted a border around the edge to help stop it from curling except in the front which I kind of like. I-cord ties, with pompoms on the ends. Cute!

Anyway, after I finished that one, I thought it looked too small for a two year old (too shallow), so I whipped up the other, more traditional cap with the same yarn. The tan was left over from the cargo pants I made for one of the baby showers, and the red is random acrylic left over from my unfortunate ebay experience, which I'll save for another post. For this second hat, I picked up the stitches for the earflaps and knit them down. Again, I only guessed on the placement for the flaps, but Spanky tells me that Jen reports success, so I'm happy.

They were supposed to be 'thank you' gifts for hosting us for Thanksgiving, but then Spanky ended up going home to her parents', and I couldn't go to Jen's (Spanky's boss) by myslf. Luckily, some friends of ours were planning on making Thanksgiving dinner in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, so I went over there. First, though, I made some macaroni & cheese from this cookbook. Yes, I know it isn't traditional Thanksgiving food, but that's what they asked me to bring. I also baked a pumpkin-ginger loaf cake, the recipe for which I got from Everyday Food, a great magazine that supports a cooking show on PBS of the same name. Anyway, I baked the loaf to make myself feel more like I was going to Thanksgiving, and less like I was attending a cook-out.

Then I spent the weekend cleaning the house. We just got a new filter for our Shark vac, and lo, it works again! It's amazing how fast the hair of two cats will clog a vacuum. I've had to give up many of them over the years because of cat hair.

In closing, I know I've been a lame updater, but I'm taking a cue from Natalie, and am going to try to update every day from now until the end of the year. It's not that I don't have things to write about. It's just a habit I've gotten out of (pretty damn quick, too, really. I have no excuse), but I'm going to try a bit harder to be a more regular poster.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

baby shower fever

Baby shower #1:

the hat and sweater before wrapping

The Louisa Harding wrap sweater and striped hat. Finished and pre-wrapping. The thing about the striped hat--all the frickin' ends. It's done flat and then you're supposed to seam it up. I am sure there is a better way to do it! If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. See?

oh my god the ends.

Baby shower #1 was in upstate NY. I wish I'd taken some pictures of the train ride up. It was so beautiful. The train goes right along the Hudson, but there were some rowdy rocker kids behind me and i wasn't sitting by the window. On the way up, I finished something I never thought I'd knit:

Gayle's scarf

This was a garter stitch scarf made out of the free ball of Bernat Boa yarn we got at the Knit Out. I recently reorganized my stash and couldn't find a place for it, so I knit it up (about 12 stitches across), and I'm going to send it to Spanky's neice Gayle. She's 7. One ball made a scarf just big enough to wrap around the neck once and tie. The colors are really cool--sort of a burnt orange and yellow--very autumnal, but this stuff feels so slick as to be almost slimy. I can see why people don't like it.

baby shower number 1

My gift was promptly upstaged by the grandma's two cross-stitched peter rabbit baby blankets, bibs, and crocheted baby blanket. Can't win them all, I guess... :)

Baby Shower #2:

This was at work.

baby shower number 2

I think she likes it!

And a codicil to the cargo pants/Last Min Knitted Gifts hat baby:

Harper with Daddy

Isn't that the cutest baby ever???

Sunday, November 05, 2006

queer film round up--long post

I've been thinking about this post for a while, since I've watched now three different gay (or supposedly gay) movies, one of which has proven to be contentious, and all show the range of gay movie-making over the last ten years or so.

Like I mentioned before, I think, I've been on kind of a tear with the gay films. Part of this is that these movies have been in my queue for a couple of years now. I just recently watched the Aileen Wuornos documentaries that were popular after 'Monster' came out, and 'Party Monster: The Shockumentary' that was made about the club kids in NYC, and I know I put those in the queue when the movies came out, so around 2001? Anyway, I'm not going to talk about those now, but that is sort of a time-stamp for me for when these other films got added to the queue. So I wasn't necessarily clamoring to see most of them anymore, they were just there, so got sent. I don't mix the line-up around too much. Mostly because i'm lazy.

Anyway, here are the three latest reviews, and then some commentary afterward.

1. Lost and Delirious:

Mischa Barton, who I have seen in a couple of older, pre-'OC' teen movies now, is really annoying in general, and in this movie as a passive, shy teen who inadvertently ends up rooming as the third girl in a lesbian couple's room at an all-girl's boarding school, with disasterous results. This movie got some great reviews on Netflix, which is puzzling. It's a font of cliche--the extravagant, 'out' girl, the peer pressure, the closeted teen who boasts really loudly about how she's screwing a boy just to prove she's straight, the older teacher, who of course is a dyke, who never-the-less doesn't do ANYTHING to stop events when they get bad. Because of course the couple breaks up, and all hell breaks loose. But you would think that at least the dyke teacher would have known enough to move one of fighting couple out of the dorm room. DUH.

Anyway, Piper Perabo plays the 'out' teen, which I put in quotes, because she insists she's not a lesbian, just a girl in love with another girl. Which is very annoying, but at least understandable. I mean, it's like saying 'Im not a feminist, but I believe women are equal to men' or whatever. It doesn't help anyone to hide from the label. I know there is a lot of debate surrounding labels and queerness right now, and I'll try to get into that in a bit.

At first, I was all on board with the film--I enjoy coming out stories, and I totally thought they'd work it out--but by the end, I was just so exasperated. The teachers didn't help, Mischa Barton didn't help, and of course it all ends in an overly-dramatic, tragic way, because god forbid queers end up happy and together. And this movie was only from 2001, like I said.

2. Bent:

This 1997 movie was amazing. It is also very very hard to watch. It's a Nazi movie, which would not be something I'd normally pick, and it actually sat near my DVD player for three weeks or so, but once I read somewhere that 'Bent' was actually one of the best queer plays of the 20th century, I figured I should at least watch it.

I'm glad I did. Surprisingly, Clive Owen was the lead. I guess I hadn't paid attention to who was in the film, except to note that Mick Jagger also has a small cameo as a drag queen (and is awesome, by the way. I wish people would use him more...). Clive plays a gay man in Berlin during the Nazi rise to power. I think Germany had already been fighting for a while, but the war wasn't close to being done, so people still didn't know how bad things really were. The film is very stagy, as filmed plays are, but that wasn't overly distracting. Anyway, after eluding the Gestapo for a while, Clive and his lover are picked up for being gay and are sent to a concentration camp. A lot of bad things happen, but I think the film/play is ultimately about the redemption of a wheeler/dealer guy into a man who could truly love someone else. Clive Owen is an amazing actor, and I have much more respect for him than I did after 'Closer', which was horrible.

3. Imagine Me & You:

Piper Perabo again, as another confused lesbian. When this movie came out, I was very interested in seeing it, and I do think I moved it up in the queue. It looked like a genuine romantic-comedy for lesbians, which would be great! Sort of a gay 'Four Weddings and a Funeral.' Instead, the movie is a poorly thought out love triangle, with lesbians thrown in for extra zest. It is supposed to be a movie about love at first sight, at least according to the director's statement that accompanies the extra features. Instead, it is about the dissolution of a perfectly good marriage, as the woman doesn't realize she's gay until directly after the wedding, when she makes fumbling attempts to be a lesbian by watching porn and by asking her straight co-workers if they'd ever considered switching teams because she's fallen in love with a woman, for some reason.

Anyway, the settings are beautiful, Matthew Goode makes a wonderful groom, and is the only believable character in this whole mess. His new wife who he has JUST married, acts like a bitch for months and then he has to be the one to tell her she's really in love with someone else. Anthony Head, on the other hand, plays the father of the bride as a dottering fool, and was just embarrassing.

This is the straightest gay movie in the bunch, and was really disappointing for that.

Anyway, the comments I wanted to make really were about what makes a movie gay, and how to preserve gay cinema without selling out. I think 'Bent' is probably the way to go for the intelligentsia--you can't go too wrong working with such great material, but for when you just want a fluffy romantic comedy, there has to be a way to do it in a sensitive fashion. Couples don't have to be ripped apart. People shouldn't have to prove they can be lesbians by shouting "I can do this" from the top of a car. Can do what? Leave your husband? Lick pussy? Love a girl? 'Imagine Me & You' had all the window dressing, but none of the heart. It's like the straight man who wrote it thought that he didn't have to do anything besides changing the gender of the third party to make a queer movie, but I think gays deserve more respect than that. We're not all home-wreckers out to convert straight women. These points were never really made in the movie. No stereotypes were really addressed or dealt with, and we're left with the feeling that the director/writer was trying to sort of gloss over the fact that these were two women and just focus on the fact that it was love at first sight, but that doesn't lead to anyone really identifying with the characters. In fact, the gay couple in 'Four Weddings & a Funeral' is really a much more sensitive depiction of a gay relationship. I know it's possible for this to happen. I want the flashiness of 'Imagine Me & You'--the beautiful sets, the gorgeous actors, paired with a much more realistic story.

On the other hand, though, Spanky is the first and only woman I've ever been with either, and I didn't come out until fairly late, so I did go through the same sorts of questioning stages that the bride in the movie did. But I also knew Spanky for many many years, and if I'd been married, whether directly so, or for years, I wouldn't have explored the 'other option.' In fact, that actually happened to me during the waning stages of my last male relationship, but it wasn't until years later that Spanky and I got together.

I think that anyone who's in a long term relationship, whether gay or straight, faces the temptation of other people once in a while. And everyone has to make the choice whether to follow that or to stay committed to the vows you made, whether they were just in your heart or blessed by the government/priest, etc. You can't help being attracted to other people, but you can make sure that you don't act on those feelings. In my opinion, 'Imagine Me & You' didn't really make the case for the two girls falling in love. Sure, I think it eventually could have happened, if they'd spent enough time together and if her husband was horrible, but I don't know... this was too fake.

What, then, makes a movie a queer movie? It is more than having gay characters. Is it even reasonable to ask that question? Maybe the real goal is to have straight movies with gay characters just written in as if it is just one aspect of their personality. But what if you actually do want to tell a story that is about a specific aspect of the gay experience, like coming out, for example? Shouldn't a movie that is purportedly about a gay experience at least have a gay person's feedback or input in the planning stages, so that it doesn't wind up like Imagine Me & You? That would be like a movie aimed at an African American audience made entirely by white people.

Sadly, most of the gay/lesbian movies that are specifically for gays are really poorly done--usually they're first time scripts, or first time directors, or are made with little money, and thus low production values. I don't know what the answer is, but it's an interesting discussion.

Sorry this didn't really have much to do with knitting, but as you know, I watch a lot of movies while knitting, so this is what I think about. Spanky's friends got into a huge discussion about Imagine Me & You, and I'd like to thank them for really sparking my reactions to the film. I promise the next post will be knitting related. I have baby showers to document,after all.

knitting updates

Just a short post to show that some of the knits are getting worn.

1. First up, a pic from Halloween that didn't get uploaded because it was on Spanky's camera. Me in the Hallowig. It helped make a great doll costume. I don't have a full-length picture of the whole costume, but I wanted to show that the knitting was not in vain. I'll probably keep it and use it again if I ever have to go to a future Halloween party, because i suck at coming up with costumes.

hallowig

2. The chicken viking hat being worn by Spanky's boss's new son, Danny. Spanky asked me to knit that a while ago, and I finished it before he was born. Glad to see he's getting some use out of it! She said it is a little too big for him right now too, so hopefully it will last through the winter.

Danny in chicken hat 2Danny in the chicken viking hat

That's his older brother Neil's arm on the right there. Sadly, I didn't make Neil's sweater.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

knitting dream

I'm at work, and really shouldn't be wasting time with Blogger, but I had the BEST knitting dream this morning! I was at a work conference at a hotel alone, and I was leaving one of the sessions or something, when I saw someone who looked like Stephanie Pearl-McPhee settling a group of people into a cluster of chairs in the lobby (but it wasn't actually the lobby, more like an upper-level breezeway, where all the meeting rooms empty out to). They were all wearing purple and white, and I watched for a while. It seemed like a charity for the disabled, and I think she was volunteering with them (her presence didn't seem to have anything to do with knitting). Anyway, I went over and introduced myself and asked if it was her, and she said it was, and I asked what she was doing there, since I didn't realize she was going to be there from her blog, and she told me that yes, indeed, she was there on other business, but that it was nice to talk with me, since the people she was with weren't knitters. She asked if I wanted to go get a cup of coffee, and we left, and as we were walking, I had the chance to ask her all of those pesky knitting questions I still can't find the answers to (there's one in particular about gauge). It was awesome. There was even a slow fade-out as Spanky came into the room (she leaves for work very early) and I woke up. Unfortunately though, I woke up before I actually heard her answers to any of the questions.

What a good way to start the day!