Details in my previous post, as well as on Ravelry. Getting the colors true when photographed is turning out to be much tricker than I’d thought (I should probably ask Dorothy but whenever I see her at an Aloha Knitters meeting I forget to).

I’m knitting the heel flap on the first sock now, and it’s going slowly. Since I got done renewing my drivers license way faster than I’d thought (Fort St. Mall Satellite City Hall, in the door and back out with my new license in 10 minutes!), I was able to walk over to Isle Knit and pick up a pair of Hiya Hiya stainless steel 9″ circular needles. On one hand, I like that the metal needles are short. On the other hand, they are really short, and I have big hands. Not worrying about stabbing anyone (especially myself) and/or losing a dpn on the bus is a big plus, though. Sue did say that the Hiya Hiya needles aren’t good for long stretches of knitting time because you have to pinch your hands up to use them. My bus commute is 15 – 30 minutes in either direction, so I think that will work out. If I can squeeze even 20 minutes more per day into knitting these socks, who knows, maybe I’ll have them done by the end of the year!

I am having one of those days where I am looking at this hat in progress and I can’t tell if I’ve seen it before elsewhere or I just got it pictured so strongly in my head that it might as well already exist. I’ve been searching Ravelry and using my Google-fu and so far nothing. Doing a purled stripe is definitely not ground-breaking territory so there’s got to be at least one hat pattern with that out there, yes?

If you haven’t watched this yet, just bear with me, about a minute in you’ll hear what I shout at my sisters (one of them made me watch it and then expressed amazement that I didn’t know who Taylor Swift is. What? What?).

The British naturalist Gerald Durrell wrote a series of memoirs; My Family and Other Animals is one of those memoirs that has been done as a film. I watched the 2005 version recently and was quite taken with the story…and the knitting.

As you know, movie directors and editors generally fail to understand that it is highly desirable to get tight still shots of all-over cabled vests knit at a fine gauge.

…or that a shot of knitting while in a boat is charming, but I’d really like to know what she’s working on.

They probably weren’t thinking that I’d be trying to get a clear view of the vests during a funeral scene.

Overall, the sort of film meant to be charming and funny – and it was for me, except that I kept seeing the looming shadow of WWII, knowing that Corfu would be bombarded, among other things.

I’m a big fan of the TECHknitting blog already, and this latest tip (Casting on additional stitches at the end of a row by the loop cast-on method: a trick for beautiful edges) is especially timely as I recently used a loop cast-on for the underarms of Liesl, and was complaining about the loop cast-on while I was doing it at an Aloha Knitters meeting. The general agreement there was that the loop cast-on can be quite unpleasant but there are circumstances where it seems like the best option. If you’ve had the same complaints, do take a look at the TECHknitting blog post, and if you’re new to the TECHknitting blog, do take a few minutes to check out additional posts. The tips are excellent and very nicely illustrated.