ina_jean

I went to Eastercon thinking about picking up the special Eastercon dyed yarn from Third Vault Yarns (http://thirdvaultyarns.com/) to crochet up some seat cushion for the patio chairs. As they had sold out I browsed home a skein of Gamora from the Companion 4ply range and went looking for patterns.

The Travelling Companion Shawl seemed the perfect fit! The pattern was well illustrated, but the instructions were incredibly confusing. So after frogging an attempted start three times I went looking for another pattern and found Crystal Cascade in a Simply Knitting magazine collection. This explained and charted a lace pattern for a shawl of the same type, three triangles joined at the tips and knitted as one.

Having got terribly muddled by the lacework I wrote out the chart (as the original was too small to see each square - even with a magnifying glass) and tried just knitting a single triangle in a spare yarn just to see how it worked. Doing this sorted all my problems. But it also reminded me that knitting lace in a variegated yarn is over egging the pudding (the pattern of the lace gets lost in the colours of the yarn).

Since the first 11 rows of both patterns were the same, a pain stocking stitch with increases at the beginning and end of every row of each triangle) I went back to the Travelling Companion pattern, ignored the written 'make one left' and 'make one right' intructions, which are fiddly and mostly designed to eliminate the hole left by a yarn over increase - and who minds holes in a lace pattern? - and sat down and charted the stitches myself.

By including a knit stitch at the start of each pattern section, and ending with a yo I only needed two stitch markers intead of the six in the pattern (which were placed each side of the knit stitch and frankly life is too short to 'remove marker, knit one, slip stitch, replace marker, slip stitch back, remove marker, knit one, replace marker, knit to next marker...' every row.

Once I had figured this out it turns out that the Travelling Companion shawl is as simple at the designer intended. My only problem is that I may not have quite enough yarn, and the pattern would look better with a section knitted with a whole colour - ideally pink. Will have to contact Third Vault about a special dye lot!

It's been a hot day, so a trip to an air-conditioned cinema seemed like a good idea. And as we wanted to see Hellboy II...

( Reviews and thorts under here )

In conclusion? The problem with modern cinema is that whenever anyone does something big (usually Peter Jackson) everybody else tries to trump it. Whatever happened to KISS? Not to be spoken of in the same breath as Dark Knight or Iron Man. somewhere about Hulk II level - 3 stars.

So sabethea came up with this meme

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

And naturally, having lots of other things to do, I submitted to temptation and asked for a letter.

I got H

H What sort of letter is that?! She wants me to say Harry, Hermione or (Bast forbid) Hagrid doesn't she?

Won't.

So there.

( Three snarky bastards and a couple of tough bitches )

Of course, as soon as I've posted this I'll think of dozens of others. Hamlet, f'instance...

Goes and cross-posts to IJ (I'm not sure whether this is fandom or squee.)

I am not a fan of The Incredible Hulk in comics - like most Marvel superhero titles it does tend to descend into 8 pages of knock-down drag-out speechbaloonless fight which is, after 2 (or 202) issues relentlessly boring. (It was when X-Men descended to this level that I gave up on it completely.) nevertheless, having nothing better to do (um) on a damp Solstice Saturday, and given a choice between tIH or The Happening the decision was inevitable.
( Cut for spoilers and non-PG12 stuff )
Two and a half stars out of five. (Maybe we should have gone to see Teeth instead?)

In other news, I don't see why andreth_47 and I should be the only ones drooling over this Steampunk flashdrive... sadly bespoke. *sob*

And I see that RTD has finally taken leave of his senses and made NuWho an unwatchable muddle.

Why does LJ have a pre-set mood theme for 'impressed' but not for 'unimpressed'?

Cut for length - visit to vet, lunch in Covent Garden, the Actors' Church, Forbiddden Planet shopping:
( Cats and Covent Garden )

The doyen of the DC Thomson newspaper publishers (and publishers of the Beano etc) has just died. The obituary is rather sweet - to distinguish between all the Thomsons they were called by Mr. then the Christian name.

There's even a Mr. Derek. (Boom boom)



Scotsman Obit