Showing posts with label Christmas knitting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas knitting. Show all posts

Thursday, December 31, 2009

A movie day

I’m still trying to finish my Christmas knitting projects. Can you believe it? If you know me at all, I imagine that you can easily believe it. Ana and I decided to have a day of mindless movie watching and knitting. The movies had to be mindless, because if they aren’t, I tend to get engrossed in them and then can’t knit. We rejected On the Waterfront on several grounds – not mindless, and probably not fun. First we watched Rosemary’s Baby” which is one of my favorites and certainly not mindless. But since I have seen it so many times, I didn’t need to attend quite as carefully as I might otherwise have done. We watched an episode of Lewis, a post-cursor of Inspector Morse. These also are not mindless, and in fact, they can be so convoluted that one has to really attend to follow the plot at all, but one doesn’t have to watch as carefully as to listen. Then we watched several Bulldog Drummond movies which Ana has in a set of Classic Mysteries. Bulldog Drummond was a familiar name to me, but I had neither read a story about him, nor listened to his adventures on the radio. Dakki listened to him in her youth. The first Bulldog movie was starring a very youthful Ray Milland. I always think of Ray Milland as a somewhat suavely sinister type, a definitely non-sexy sleezeball, who does things like plot to kill Grace Kelly (Dial M for Murder), look through people and then pluck his eyes out (X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes.) We saw him recently in Three Smart Girls, a Deanna Durbin movie, and he was surprisingly attractive and debonair. In Bulldog Drummond, he was super adorable – charming, delightfully handsome, witty, and dashing. What a surprise!

Pictured is some of the flower tea in the special flower teapot Ana gave me. Tea is an essential part of any movie day.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Happy day for the arch-procrastinator

Hurrah! I finally finished knitting my Christmas presents. Can you believe it? January isn’t even over yet, so I am ahead of my usual schedule. A few months ago, Ana gave me some sock yarn to knit a pair of socks for her sweetie Ken, and I had enough left over to knit her a pair too. So here they are – a gigantic pair and a dainty pair. The yarn is a bamboo/wool mix. Actually, I didn't realize it was bamboo when I was knitting them because I don’t think I got the label with the yarn. But I did realize how soft and nice the yarn was to work with. Ana and Ken came to dinner this evening and I presented their socks to them. Ana knew all about the pair for Ken, but I think she was surprised that she got a pair too. My really final Christmas knitting is this pair of mitts which I made using my Plum Blossom Gloves pattern. These were inspired by the Rainey Sisters improvisation on my design. I am having lunch tomorrow with my friend Eileen (who doesn’t read blogs, or I wouldn’t be telling you this), and I will present them then. I finished them this morning at about two A.M. and blocked them a few hours later when I got up. Talk about the eleventh hour. Actually, I guess it is about the fourteenth hour.