brainylady

Retro Rip

All that stripey goodness is gone, for now. I started a sleeve last night, but didn't have much time to work on it. Hopefully this weekend I can make up for some lost (wasted) time on this sweater. Part of the reason I was willing to rip out all that knitting was that I wasn't happy with the cast-on edge anyway. Because of the extreme variation in thickness of the Kureyon, the cast-on edge looked lumpy and sloppy to me. I'd done a long-tail cast on, which is my default method for everything, but I think I'll try a plain old knitted (two needle) cast on this time to avoid the extra bulk. Does anyone have any cast-on advice for a ribbed Kureyon edge? (I did a long-tail cast on for the sleeve I started last night, because the length of yarn I needed was uniformly thin, and it was only forty stitches.)

Every now and then a gem appears on TV here, amidst endless reruns of Nicolas Cage action movies. On Tuesday night I watched Hysterical Blindness (directed by Mira Nair). The plot was pretty thin, but the performances were compelling. Compelling like a train wreck, in a way; I squirmed at the resemblance of the main characters to many girls I remember from high school. There was humour, but the film didn't belittle the characters. ("Belittle? Oh, big word, Deb!" shouts Juliette Lewis's character, Beth.) Much of it was grim, and parts were tough to watch. Your response to the film would probably depend at least a bit on how well you remember the gigantic aerosol hairspray cans and skintight acid-wash jeans of the 1980s, and whether you have an emotional reaction to the names Pat Benatar and Patrick Swayze. (This HBO movie might be old news to you; I see it was released in 2002.)

I bought a particular kind of juice at lunchtime yesterday just because it seemed to me that the Chinese characters on the box were "lady juice." I was right! Three characters: woman, vegetable, fruit juice. The same company already makes a vegetable-fruit juice, and no doubt the contents of the regular juice and the lady juice are the same. Anyway, I didn't like the lady juice. Today I bought kumquat-lime juice -- yum.