Sheep-ish

I finished my sheep mittens the other day.

Note how the piece that was the UFO is the bottom of the mitten on the left, which is from way back when, when I wasn’t very good at two-colour knitting. The mitten on the right has a much nicer cuff. So my dilemma of course is do I knit a new cuff and cut off the old one and graft it on? On the one side, the cuff should be under the sleeve of my coat, but on the other hand, it does look a little weird. I guess sometimes when you have an old UFO like that, you should just rip it out and start over. It would have been faster for me to do that.

Details: the yarn is Creskeld Jacob yarn, in natural colours from one of my favourite sheep breeds. This is some really great yarn.

I am in the process of trying to fix at least one computer. Ingi’s laptop died, and we thought it was a hard drive, but after an hours-long process of copying files onto a new hard drive (with a really cool tool), it appears to be something else. My Windows desktop also needed a new hard drive, so I put in the new hard drive, but it looks like I need to change out the ribbon cable because it’s not seeing the full size of the hard drive.

Now it’s safe to post

I am not sure if the recipient of these mittens reads my blog, so I wasn’t sure about really blogging about them before her birthday. But I am fairly sure she will check the mail when she comes home from holiday before looking at people’s blogs, so now I can show the finished mittens:

The pattern is from Selbustrikk and the yarn is KnitPicks Palette.

We watched a few excellent French movies this weekend:
Ma femme est une actrice, a comedy with Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge Gainsbourg) playing an actress named Charlotte with a neurotic husband (played by her real-life husband).

Tous les matins du monde, a historical movie starring Gerard Depardieu, about actual masters of the viola da gamba (they are referenced in the Wikipedia article) from the 17th century and how their lives intertwined. It’s an amazingly poignant movie with some amazing viola da gamba music; the music is done by an expert in ancient music (Jordi Savall) and it’s just brilliantly performed. (This is a really interesting instrument. A friend of mine growing up played it when I was studying violin. I found it so strange compared to what I was doing at the time, but still really fascinating.)