Wooly Notes

I've still got three sweaters on needles, but I've made considerable progress on two of them: the solid-color Stripes! sweater and the stranded Lilias Day.  The colorwork is like magic to me, as I've only previously done one stranded swatch.  I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, but I can't be bothered.  It looks fine enough.  I also got the idea from another Raveler to put my colors on a stick before knitting to avoid another Penelope sweater, which worked a treat.  Random tongue depressors to the rescue!

The solid-color Stripes! is about half way; I'm an inch into the body and then the sleeves. I'm fully aware that making a solid colored sweater on a striped pattern is ridiculous, but I really like the fit of the pattern! Made in Quince and Co.'s Chickadee yarn (in the Cypress colorway), it is a welcome break from the stranded work.  Although I'm thinking about tackling that Mackworth next, so it must not be too bad.   

In truth, my feelings about stranded work go something like this: the first repeat or so, Oh, this is fun!  See the pattern, look at the different colors, I'm getting the hang of two-handed knitting!  Then the next couple of repeats go like this: grumble, grumble, left hand yarn keeps losing tension or dropping off my finger all together, floats are messy, the knitting is all bunched on one side because there's so much sweater hanging off the needles, I hate this, my fingers hurt, why did I ever think I would like stranded work?  And then back to : Oh this is fun! See what I can make with two yarns!  Just work a row of repeats every day and Bob's your uncle!  And on, ad infinitum.  But really, a yoked sweater is a small amount of colorwork relative to the rest of the sweater, and I'm nothing if not doggedly persistent. *snort*

My Yolk! sweater is coming along--just miles of stockinette on the body, although I'm starting to wonder if I made a mistake on the yarn color for the body.  Kate's sample (which I LOVE) is navy blue on the bottom, and when I purchased my yarn, I thought I was going a bit into teal, which works better in my wardrobe, but this dye-lot is quite green with a lot of purple accents in it, and I'm not sure I'm a fan.  I have a hat out of the same colorway in DK weight and it isn't nearly so green or purple in tone.  Palette yarn is pretty inexpensive, however, so if I wanted to redo the body in something more like Shoal, I think it wouldn't be too bad, provided I quit knitting now.  Although, looking at it again in the light of my living room, it looks more teal with earth tones, like my hat, so maybe it just looks green/purple under fluorescent lighting?

Peter Pan: An Homage

 

 

...or something like that.  I got my rear in gear yesterday and pulled out my sewing machine.  I had to fix one of my husband's cassocks (the top stitching had come loose on the pockets), and figured I might as well get on with the green version of the cord skirt I mentioned in my previous post.

 

 

Did I mention that one of my kids was up for the day at 4:00 a.m. yesterday?  *cough*Boo*cough*  Which meant I was awake at 4:00 a.m.  Needless to say, I wasn't firing on all pistons yesterday.  

The topstitching repair was very straightforward, and the skirt cutting was quick because I didn't have to mark darts, but I made a small fitting error on the back piece that was only evident after I'd finished the thing.  Namely, that when I made the gold cord skirt last month, I forgot that I took another 1/2" out of the back piece.  For whatever reason, that was fine in the heavy weight cord (maybe the zipper+fixed waistband made a difference?) but it pulled uncomfortably across the hips in this lightweight version. 

 

This make was full of mistakes, from start to finish.

The first was applying the waistband to the hem, and finishing the whole thing (elastic insertion and hand sewing the gap) before realizing the mistake.  And since it is corduroy, all the seams are finished with zig-zag, and the seam allowances are sometimes finished as one...you see where I'm going with this.  

 

I grumbled and gracelessly unpicked the waistband from the last seam sewn, but quickly realized that it wasn't worth the effort to unpick where it attached to the hem, so I decided to make it a hem facing and call it good.  (I was going to use bias tape anyway, so it saved me some trouble--call it a happy accident?  I've been watching Bob Ross lately 😊)

 

I recut the waistband and attached it to the top and finished it, albeit about two hours later than I had anticipated.  Tried it on...too tight in the hips.  What the...?  

Then I remembered the additional bit I took out of the back and decided to narrow the seam allowances on the sides from 5/8" to almost nothing, tapering in to the waistband and again about 4" from the bottom.  (Like making a big arc over where my hips are, if that makes sense).

 That gave me enough room across the hips, but the thing was too long, so I turned up the hem facing once (for another 2") and stitched across and called it good.  I'm hoping the slightly thicker hem will help the skirt to fall nicely, as that is one problem with this lighter weight cord--it wants to ride up.  So far so good.

It is considerably more fitted than the blue version, but I like it--it strikes a nice balance between my very fitted cold weather skirts and my less fitted summer skirts.  The wider waistband is more finished looking, but the ban-rol keeps it comfortable (I think I could wear something tucked in and it would look okay, whereas the blue skirt doesn't look that great with a tucked in shirt).  

I almost wore the skirt with a newly thrifted green top, but I wanted to wear this set of jewelry and the greens clashed.  I've been kind of obsessed with this color palette since I saw a bouquet of flowers with a similar palette at church a few weeks ago.  The bouquet also had a pale lavender, which was pretty in the floral arrangement, but didn't look right with the beads.  This past week there was another arrangement that was similar but added a light blue hydrangea to the mix.  Anyway, I made this set from a bunch of odd beads in the right colors and I like the eclecticism of it, but also the unifying color palette.  I've been craving some brighter jewelry in silver tone, and this was just the thing.

Mending: That Corduroy Skirt

Recently, Kate Davies reposted a chapter from her last book, Wheesht, entitled Mend.  I read the chapter about a year ago and found it quite resonant then.  I have been darning my tights for a number of years now, and mending my own clothing, but I had started to darn my kids' and husband's socks by then as well.  I've always repaired mine and my kids' clothing (holes in knees, or those irritating places in tshirts that get little pin holes over time and wearing, holes in sweaters), but I liked the intentionality of Kate's chapter.  

 

 

That said, last month, the kids all needed bigger socks, plus the darned socks were to the point of more darning than socks, so it was time to replace for all of them. 

 

 I confess I heaved a sigh of relief. 

It's one thing to romanticize mending as a slow fashion way to keep your footprint light on the earth, but it is quite another to keep up with the darning for six people and everything else that needs doing for four kids, special needs not withstanding.  It had got to the point where I had to spend about a day every week or so doing the darning or else it piled up beyond doing.  This on top of the increased load of cooking and baking, and everything else that became harder last year with the extended lock down.  It seemed like every laundry cycle added to the never ending pile of mending.

 

 

 (I still think it is worth it to mend most things if possible, buy used, and pass things down within the family, but the cost of this approach is labor- and time-intensive for me, a cost that I think is largely ignored in these sorts of conversations).

 

So with that in mind, remember the dark blue corduroy skirt I made in the series two years ago?  I wore it twice before realizing the fit was really off and the fabric and pattern were a poor match, so I dumped the whole thing in my fabric bin, hoping to salvage the fabric for something else.  Sometime last year, I thought to put ban-roll elastic into the waist band to see if that fixed the fit.  I unpicked all the darts (all six!) and threaded the elastic and whomp, whomp, whomp.  Still really poor fit.  Back into the bin it went.

 

 

Fast forward to January and I thought maybe tightening the elastic would help.  Lo and behold, that worked!  The slightly less structured body of the garment works better with the light weight cord.  I won't say it is the most flattering thing I own, and it isn't warm at all, but it is light and comfortable for these days of chilly mornings and pleasant afternoons.  I have some dark green baby cord that may become another skirt like this.  Just as soon as I can muster some sew-jo, which has been in serious short supply round these parts.

 

My thoughts are slowly turning to warm weather garments (even as I have three sweaters on needles.  Three!  I make no apologies...)  I have two dress lengths of rayon challis from past birthday presents that have been waiting for the right pattern.  I thrifted a maxi dress last fall (that you can just see the top of in the pic above) that I love the fit of, and can replicate by doing a bit of frankenpatterning, so I intend to get to that at some point in the next couple of months. 

Talking Tuesday: Hamlet's Just Deserts

 

 

Recently, I rewatched Kenneth Brannagh's masterful production of Hamlet.  It is possibly his best work on screen.  The film came out when I was in college, and I remember eagerly awaiting its arrival in the video stores (remember those?)  I went to a small college in the middle of nowhere, and had to wait on the small local video store to get it before renting, but I promptly declared I had a hot date with Shakespeare and settled in on a Friday night to watch it.  All four hours.  

 

Most productions of Hamlet cut some of the subplots to bring it to a more standard 2 hours, but Brannagh chose to make an uncut version, weaving together all the complex story lines.  (I took several days to watch it, since these days I rarely have four hours to sit in front of a screen uninterrupted).

First was what an excellent cast Brannagh assembled--the top Shakespearean actors of the time (it is a kind of a Who's Who of that set) plus a high quality listing of American actors like Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams.  Simon Russell Beale has a small role as one of the grave diggers (I almost didn't recognize him!) and John Gielgud has a role as Priam--I believe it was one of Gielgud's last screen roles, although his portrayal of the Pope in Elizabeth may have been the very last.  The two films were released close together, so I couldn't say exactly.  Brian Blessed, a long time collaborator of Brannagh's, plays the dead king to perfection, and Derick Jacobi's Claudius is oily and inspired.  

Hamlet is, at its heart, a play about grief.  It is about a son grieving his father, about a wife grieving a husband and making poor choices about her future life from the depths of that grief by marrying her brother-in-law. 

 

 

(The movie Ophelia makes the bold claim that Gertrude's choice to marry Claudius came from a desperate desire to maintain her youth and sexual desirability.  I'm not sure what I think of this, but it certainly could be true.  A perimenopausal woman watching her vigorous son and Ophelia together may well have felt the forgotten woman.  On the other hand, you have to feel for Ophelia, who was madly in love with Hamlet, had given herself to him in anticipation of a marriage to come, but instead is driven to madness by Hamlet's poor treatment of her.  One wonders if he had just let her in on what was going on, perhaps she would have gone along with the deception.  I found myself increasingly frustrated on her behalf, and wanted to yell at Hamlet to just tell her already). 

 

 

I heard someone say once that it was too bad that Gertrude and Hamlet couldn't have just sat down for a heart-to-heart and shared their grief over the king's death, as the whole tragedy of what follows could possibly have been avoided.  But then we wouldn't have a play to discuss and use as a mirror for ourselves.  Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" speech is about a man in deep pain; a pain so deep he contemplates the end of his existence.  By the end of the speech, Hamlet recovers himself, and decides that yes, he does want to live, but his life will be one of revenge for his dead father.

There was a line that struck me between the eyes, so to speak, in Act 2, Scene II.  In it, Hamlet meets his university friends, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, whom Claudius has sent for in the hopes that they will rouse Hamlet from his melancholy madness.  Hamlet's madness is written in such a way that it can be played a deliberate deception or as genuine insanity; Brannagh chooses the former, clearly using the guise of madness as a cover for his real plans to uncover the poisoning of the old king by Claudius.  

Toward the end of the scene, a group of players arrive at the palace to put on a play for the court.  Hamlet is delighted to see them, and sees that he can use them for his own ends.  That is, he will direct them to put on a play that exposes Claudius' perfidy to the entire court in the guise of a story about Troy.  Hamlet is giving his instructions to the lead player, and Lord Polonius (Ophelia's father) is increasingly concerned about Hamlet's state of mind, particularly given Hamlet's previous attachment to his daughter. 

Hamlet and the lead player have been exchanging words about the play, and the lead actor (played by Charlton Heston), assures Hamlet that he is well aware of the classical references Hamlet seeks.  Polonius is unsure of the subtext of the verbal parrying between the two men and keeps interjecting his own commentary.  Hamlet rudely tells Polonius where to put it, but then this exchange caught my ear:

LORD POLONIUS
My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET
God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less
they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
Take them in.

Given Hamlet's underlying desire for vengeance over the old king's untimely death, it is an interesting thing to say: that everyone under the sun is deserving of death and destruction, but that we should not use people thusly.  We should rather treat people as we would be treated, with honor and dignity.  It is, I think, the moment that Hamlet reveals his hand: that his madness is an affect, that he desires justice for his father, and a redress of the wrongs done.  

Unfortunately, Hamlet's machinations take on a life of their own, and in the scandal and intrigue that follow, the Danish court is too distracted by the unfolding drama to notice that their old enemy Fortinbras, at the head of the Norwegian army, has breached their borders and overrun the palace, finding the king, queen, Hamlet, and Laertes dead, Polonius and Ophelia having met their untimely ends earlier in the play.  

It is a tragedy of the highest order, and so very human.

Talking Tuesday: Unorthodox

I had an endoscopy yesterday (routine, nothing new) and so spent the whole of yesterday afternoon parked on my bed with a DVD player and Netflix as my companions (and my knitting, natch).  I watched an older version of Persuasion with Sally Hawkins in the Anne Elliot role, and then turned to the Netflix limited series Unorthodox, based on the memoir of a woman who left a Satmar Hasidic community.  

 

I'm still thinking about the show today, and am now interested to read the book as well.  (A friend read it recently and enjoyed it).

The series follows a married 19-year-old Esther Shapiro (Esty for short) as she flees the confines of the extremely tight-knit and closed Satmar community in Williamsburg, NY for a new life in Berlin.  

The Satmars are unique in that they speak Yiddish as their first language, and emigrated from Hungary around the time of the second World War, fleeing the Nazi persecution.  Many of them lost family members to the Shoah.  The memory of that loss is very present in the community, and they see repopulating the Jewish people as one of their duties to God, hence the big families and intense focus on child-bearing and rearing.  They also view their separateness as their duty to God, since, in their view, assimilation to European society was what led to the Holocaust, which they see as God's punishment for abandoning their traditional ways of life.  The show is subtitled, as much of the dialogue is in Yiddish.

Shira Haas is unbelievably good as Esty.  She's tiny but has a powerful screen presence that keeps you riveted to your seat.  I love how the series wove together the story of her life before and after her marriage to Yacov, her young husband, with the new life she begins to build in Berlin.

The clever storytelling contrasts the two sides while managing to portray the Satmar community in a nuanced and largely sympathetic light.  (So often, these sorts of stories are grossly unbalanced).  I thought one of the great features of Esty's character is that she isn't a square peg in a round hole; she wants to live the life of an ultra-Orthodox wife and mother, but she has some dreams and marital troubles that get in the way of fully settling into it.  The costumes and sets are wonderful--so much detail and care went into it.  (There is a short "making of" show that follows the series that is an interesting look behind the scenes). 

I remember reading a memoir (or perhaps a novel) many years ago about a similar story, of a woman married in her late teens in an ultra-Orthodox community, who later left it for a secular milieu.  It was fascinating to me on a number of levels.  A late '90s arthouse film with Renee Zellweger called A Price Above Rubies explored similar themes to Unorthodox, and while I liked the Zellweger film very much, I liked Unorthodox even better.  

Shira Haas also appears in Shtisel, another Netflix show from Israel about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem.  I will probably give that a whirl at some point.  

Anyway, a bit of a blather for a Tuesday morning, but I recommend the show!

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait...

Or something like that.  I'm not sure I believe that statement, at least not entirely, but I do think it applies in this case.  To wit: a corduroy skirt.  But not just any corduroy skirt, a perfect gold corduroy skirt.  It is no secret that I love my marigold linen skirt to distraction, but it isn't a great weight for winter, and I've long hoped to find a heavy-weight corduroy to make a shoulder-season version.  Kaufman's gold for a long time was what they termed "cider" and was really an odd color somewhere between chartreuse and beige.  Not gold at all. 

 

Recently, Kate Davies came out with a sweater called Yolk that I immediately downloaded and plotted to make.  The whole outfit sang to me--the colors of the sweater, the gold cord skirt (you see where I'm going with this...), the dark tights and heavy boots.  Being the good little lemming I am sometimes, I started looking at my thrift shops for a gold cord skirt and nada.  Then I tried etsy for cord fabric and nothing.  I went back to my old standby fabric.com, which it must be said, has had a really poor selection of fabric for the past year or more.  I get it, everyone was making masks.  But I'm glad to see more things back in stock there again. 

Anyway, Kaufman had added a gold cord to their 14-wale line that I like so much so I decided to see if it would work.  It is the perfect gold, and I'm super pleased with how this skirt came together.  I used my trusty Anne Adams 9481 (heavily modified/redrafted) and took another 1/2" or so out of the center back, which was just right.  Although, I had to take in an least an inch there on the previous corduroy iterations, so who knows what's what...I thought it better to start with 1/2" and make adjustments from there.  (I still wear all three of the heavy-weight ones quite a bit, and recently refitted the lightweight navy blue one for an elastic waist.  I also made a slight change to the lighter blue one to help the pockets lay flatter instead of bubbling up at the top). 

 

 

I did the waist band slightly differently because I only had 1.5" ban-rol, but it worked out, and I like the finish very much.  I got my machine to make two buttonholes on this fabric (finally!) and even sewed the buttons on with the machine, which made this a very fast project indeed.  I put one button on the inside flap of the waist band and the other on the outside and I like that very much.  I put gold bias tape on the hem and turned it in 2", which is a good length for this style.

  

Obviously, I've not had time to make the sweater yet, so stay tuned!  I've got the Lilias Day on needles and am waiting for the yarn to come for the Yolk.  

(I should add that this outfit has been my silhouette all winter: tank top under a slightly boxy sweater over straight skirt with wool tights.  In colder weather I've been wearing a wool skirt and Uggs and maybe adding a scarf).  It is comfortable and I feel good in it, so win-win.  I'm over tucking stuff in right now.