Scattered Knitters, Roald Dahl, and The Vicar of Dibley

here's a name for my condition!

Karen Gowen calls herself a scattered knitter, and that's just what I seem to be turning into: "Some years I don't do anything but the occasional scarf, other times I'll knit up a storm and try new yarns and more complex patterns."

Meanwhile, I reread a wonderful Roald Dahl quote the other day:

"If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely." ― Roald Dahl, The Twits

That has nothing to do with knitting, exactly, but maybe it speaks to our intentions while creating, in a Like Water for Chocolate sort of way (which book I haven't actually read yet). If you're knitting someone a gift, it helps to keep your hands clean, your wool untangled, and your thoughts happy.

That said, I think I'll pick up that kilt hose from where I last left off...

In my ongoing look at knitting in the media, I realised I might not have put up Vicar of Dibley clips before! Here are the characters discussing great storms they've lived through, while Miss Cropley knits.

For you writers out there, Cathy Campbell's discovered a great resource on the history of British winters from 1616 till now. The great storm of 1947...

More Knitting in Literature, Sort Of

ex Parker is a cruciverbalist, an 'enthusiast of crosswords'.

He also has an alter ego as Salmon Gutter/Pop Sensation: "This site is dedicated to my vintage paperback collection. Every couple of days, I pull a book off the shelf and write about its cover. That's it. To understand the spirit of the blog, please read the following: The Great Paperback Project Paperback 88: Suburbia Confidential."

In a recent send-up of an Erle Stanley Gardner novel about Perry Mason, he wrote the following, in reference to an excerpt that featured the phrase 'well-knit':

"'Marilyn Marlow then said, with a predatory coyness, 'You must be Humphrey Bolgard. They said you were well-knit, but—' She ran her eyes down the length of his frame and back up again '—well, there's knit and there's knit, and boy are you knit.'"

I'd like to use that phrase in casual conversation. Boy are you knit!

Other literary knitting posts of mine have featured Patricia Wentworth, Diana Gabaldon, Lilian Jackson Braun, Diana Gabaldon again, Beatrix Potter... and Andy Capp.

Regular posting will resume soon, with photos of two (!) completed projects. Meanwhile, what is this Vogue Knitting Live of which Franklin speaks? Why do we not have such events in Montreal?