My winter mitts? A fairly quick, uncomplicated knit. I used a pattern I found in The Knitting Book and yarn given to me by my mother. I have tiny hands, so went down a few needle sizes and I also added thumbs. The yarn matches a cowl and a hat I made earlier, so I’m all set for winter now. Bring it on.

I am spending today swatching for a future project/design. I played around with charts in Excel earlier and now I’m trying to figure out which texture I like best. It is always fun trying to strike a balance between my personal aesthetics, an imagined level of difficulty, and the actual purpose of the pattern.

I had a quick Twitter exchange with a few people after I came up with a true lace chart (i.e. lace knitted on both sides). I loved the idea of the pattern, but when I started to work it up in 4ply I knew it did not work in such a relatively heavy yarn. Twitterati consensus was that true lace is scary. I don’t think this is necessarily true, but I know that this is what many people feel. Honestly, this project is not one for ‘scary’ lace so that chart was shelved alongside many other charts. Hopefully I will find the right project for it at some point.

Meanwhile I have come up with another chart – or, rather, four different versions of the same chart. I am busy swatching trying to figure out which version works best. I’m using some leftover Old Maiden Aunt merino/silk for the swatches. I need more of this yarn, I really do. It’s beautiful to work with on my new Addi bamboo needles.

Finally, the soundtrack for work: I rediscovered this album this morning. The light is pale and thin. Like you. Has it really been 19 years?

so much depends
upon

a scarred young
jedi

stitched with cyber
netics

beneath the black
helmet

Or how about

For I have ordered them, ordered them all—
Have crewed the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have crewed my life with storm-troop goons;
I know clones dying with a dying fall,
And Alderaan, beneath the Death Star’s doom
The soundless, vacuum-muted boom.

Or indeed

There died Hunter Fugitive.
And the best of them, among them
For old Boba gone in the teeth
For a botched storyline.

There is just a smattering of Shakespeare in the linked post, which is fine by me, but I do think this cries out for some rock’n'roll 17th C poetry. A bit of Andrew Marvell – but sadly filking is beyond my abilities. I can but dream.

It’s now April and I am still not sure what I am going to do.

It’s complicated.

I chose the pattern because I knew it would flatter my body type: a deep-V neckline and an emphasis on shoulders and waist are textbook examples of what someone with an hourglass figure should wear. I also liked the vintage feel to the design and knew if I lengthened the sleeves a smidgen, I’d live in this cardigan.

I hedged my bets and substituted the suggested Felted Tweed with Baby Alpaca DK (so if anything went wrong, I could knit up another design from Kim’s book). The Baby Alpaca turned out to be a very, very good idea. It knits up beautifully but I had no idea just how magical it would become post-blocking. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but keep this in mind: the yarn substitution plays no part in why I am writing this post.

I began knitting the cardigan having swatched like a good girl. The back knitted up in no time. I was pretty happy. I began the front. Things fell apart (the center could not hold; mere anarchy was loosened upon the world – hello Yeats). I wrote up a spread-sheet to keep track of the pattern. The fronts looked pretty and also pretty small. I had also reached mid-November at this stage and my mojo was gone. Forcing myself onwards, I finished the sleeves in early January and did a quick crocheting-together of the body so I could see what it all looked like and maybe regenerate some of my mojo.

Mere anarchy was indeed loosened upon the world. Textbook examples for the hourglass body had combined into possibly the least flattering garment in the world. The fronts did not swooped gracefully down my bust: they flapped around the outer realms of my general bust area. The back looked absolutely brilliant and the shoulder area looked great. But those fronts..

.. so I put Lumley back into my knitting basket. I pulled it out again last week, undid the crocheted seams and blocked the easter bunny out of the pieces. As previously stated, the Baby Alpaca just turned into the most amazing fabric. Wow. Seriously, WOW. So I adjusted my hopes and fears for Lumley. I sewed it all up like a proper knitter. And finished sewing in the last sleeve at my knitting group.

The response could not have been clearer. “Uhm,” said Paula, “I can see why you were .. ambivalent.” Meanwhile Lilith tried to channel a Middle Eastern diplomat: “.. maybe if you wore it open..?”

I still haven’t sewn in the collar nor have I woven in ends.

Pro:

• The shoulder and upper-arm areas fit like a glove. Without doubt the best fitting garment I have ever made as far as those areas are concerned.
• I love the fabric (you weren’t in doubt, were you?). It is soft, drapey, beautiful, silky, smooth.. wow.
• The colour is great as is the vintage feel. Lumley fits right into my wardrobe.
• And I have perfect buttons waiting to be sewn on.

Con:

• Nobody above an A-cup should wear this garment (or B-cup if you are super-willowy). I am very much not an A-cup nor am I willowy.
• The lower part of the sleeves look very odd (presumably because I lengthened the sleeves). In fact, they look like chicken cutlets swaying in the wind.

It’s complicated. It really is.

I am so tempted to just stitch that collar in place, weave in the ends, sew on the buttons and call it a day. Maybe sew & cut the offending chicken cutlets from the sleeves if I’m feeling particularly grumpy. I have spent so much time and gone to such lengths with Lumley that I just want the cardigan finished. FINISHED AND OUT OF MY KNITTING BASKET.

But it’d be a waste of good yarn, wouldn’t it? Oh, I could think of other projects in which it would be so delightful and useful..

Oh, Lumley. “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.”

Recently she wrote a poem about David Beckham’s injury which sees him out of the England World Cup squad.

Achilles (for David Beckham)

Myth’s river- where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boyflowed on, his name on its lips. Without him, it was prophesised,
they would not take Troy.

Women hid him, concealed him in girls’ sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs…
but when Odysseus came,

with an athlete’s build, a sword and a shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd’s roar,
and it was sport, not war,

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his charmed foot on the ball…

but then his heel, his heel, his heel…

The poem was originally published in The Daily Mirror, a tabloid, which employs Duffy as a regular columnist. Meanwhile, The Guardian, my newspaper of choice, looks at the poem approvingly but the comments section is where I found the biggest thrills. I particularly enjoyed FinneyontheWing, IantovonScranto and tw*tbeak but I strongly recommend the entire section. It is filled with limp poetry, bizarre imagery and iambic pentameter.

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem todo—
With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
And four wax candles in the darkened room
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.
“So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends
Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom
That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”
– And so the conversation slips
Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
Through attenuated tones of violins
Mingled with remote cornets
And begins.

(Portrait of A Lady)

Addendum: My friend Iain shot a great photo of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery today.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

- TS Eliot; from “Dry Salvages”; Four Quartets.*

The flood season has begun, in other words. Just south of the Scottish border, a policeman is currently missing as a bridge collapses in the floods. Early this morning I went for a walk along our nearby river, The Kelvin. I have never never seen it this high, although I know one of its bridges was swept away in a flood years back.

On the second photo you can see a bench where I sometimes sit knitting on sunny weekend afternoons. Not much chance of that happening right now! If we get any more rain, I think the pathways around the Kelvin are likely to be closed off. Luckily the river runs in a gorge, so there are no immediate threats to buildings in this area.

As you can imagine it has really been dreich lately so last night I made a warm, delicious soup:

Sweet Potato & Chilli Soup (serves an army of six)

1 red onion, roughly chopped
1 red chilli, de-seeded and roughly chopped
2 large carrots, diced
3 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
2 big sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into walnut-sized chunks
2 cups of veg stock (or more, see instructions)
½ tin of coconut milk
½ tsp of cayenne pepper
1 tsp of ground cumin
salt to taste (amount really depends upon the type of stock you use)
1 tbsp of olive oil
optional extras: handful of shredded cheese and dash of paprika

1. Heat the oil and add onion, garlic, chilli, cayenne pepper and cumin. Cook for about 5 min. at medium heat. Add carrots and cook until onion softened. Add sweet potato chunks. Add as much stock as will cover the veg. Put lid and cook until all veg have softened. This will take about 25-30 minutes.

2. Blend the soup – try to aim for a consistency between super-smooth and chunky. Take care you do not splash any of the hot soup on yourself (she says looking at her left hand). Add coconut milk and stir until well-mixed. Serve in bowls with some good rustic bread on the side. I put some shredded (lacto-free) cheese on top and dressed it with a dash of paprika, but I can be a bit poncy at times.

Substitutions etc: I used coconut milk because I’m lactose intolerant. You could easily use double cream, natural yoghurt or regular milk instead. If using milk/cream, you could also add a tin of chopped tomatoes and use basil and marjoram instead for a slightly more Mediterranean taste. Instead of sweet potato you could use butternut squash or even pumpkin. The sky’s the limit.

(*Or, as someone said earlier this week: “water is patient”.)

Knitting and poetry are more similar than they might first appear, she added, with poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy partial to an occasional knit, and the Society’s president Jo Shapcott, Seamus Heaney and Emily Dickinson all authors of poems featuring knitting. “With poetry and with knitting, you work line by line, and if something goes wrong you have to unravel it,” Palmer said.

In order to celebrate the Poetry Society’s centenary, people around the world are knitting individual letters which will be made into one giant poem. Yes, I am one of them. I have been assigned the letter G and I’m working on my letter in-between other projects as I’m not a huge fan of the intarsia technique. But I love poetry and I celebrate that something as wonderful as The Poetry Society exists in this day and age.

Keep up-to-date with the ongoing project at Knit A Poem – The Poetry Society.

Other Channel4 executive: “Is there anyway we can make poetry really sensationalist and entertaining? I mean, I am not not opposed to clever things but poetry is really stuffy, y’know?”

Channel4 Executive: “Uhm…. how about Lord Byron? He was not stuffy. He slept with his half-sister, was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, wanted to liberate Greece, went a-roving with the Shelleys and wrote really amusing poetry about eating spaniels.”

Other Channel4 Executive: “We need a celeb angle. We need.. we could send Rupert Everett around Europe whilst he settles into his botched facelift – and he could talk about Lord Byron’s sex life. The incest bit  and how he fancied Percy Bysshe Shelley?”

Rupert Everett: “I’ll only do it if I get to say naughty words, show off my naked bum, swim in my underwear with cute semi-naked boys, eat caviar with Donatella Versace, and pretend that Lord Byron is really me, me, me!”

Channel4 Executives: “You’re on!“

Via John (and presumably everybody else on the interwebs): Buffy Summers meets Edward Cullen.

“It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes some of the more patriarchal gender roles and sexist Hollywood tropes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways.”

As John says, “..I have a sneaking feeling that a Spike meets Edward Cullen remix would [also] be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”

* I nearly fainted when I saw Jewel Spears Brooker was speaking on “The Fire and the Rose: Eliot and Julian of Norwich”. Phoawr!

Then I began University and one morning between classes I was catching up with my reading. That is when I encountered The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot and, although I normally try to avoid hyperbolic blanket statements, that poem effing changed my life. It was like language streaming straight in my veins and I felt drunk on poetry for the first, but not the last, time.

Let me confess: I have a special place in my heart (and brain) for High Modernism. Earlier I described High Modernism as

“that vast array of strange and deliberately disconcerting art forms which emerged in the Western part of the world around 1908-ish and which petered out towards the end of the 1930s. Shklovsky’s definition of остранение (ostranenie or ‘defamiliarisation’) describes my favourite art works so splendidly: they unsettle the readers/listeners/spectators by forcing them to acknowledge the artifice of art (and thereby making a clean break with the naturalist tradition of art).”

This is an intellectual sort of enjoyment: I enjoy the game of making meaning; I derive pleasure from understanding patterns emerging from seeming chaos. I really like poets like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein for these reasons. I have to work to get at the ideas behind the poems. TS Eliot fits in with all this, of course, but I also derive a very raw emotional pleasure from his poetry.

For me, Eliot’s poetry is about understanding life. It is about finding your own way between one word and the next, between one moment and the next. It is about being intellectually curious, acknowledging how that is both a gift and a curse, and finding methods of dealing with this. It is about fragments and meta-narratives. It is about hope and loss of hope. It is about being human. It is tough, raw, almost unbearable and yet so .. beautiful.

My favourite Eliot poem is probably Ash Wednesday (from which the title is taken). An odd choice for an agnostic woman, perhaps, but it marks the transition from Eliot the High Modernist to Eliot the Religious Poet. I have always been drawn towards liminality.