Loveliness

It's been quite a lovely week over here Chez Sway.

I started the Roped Shell in Vintage Cotton:

It's super easy to knit and I'm excited that there will be no sleeves to knit. Maybe tanks are the way to go. The slipped stitches are popping out of the fabric right now, which explains why the gauge instructions demand that you block. I'm not completely sold on the color combo. I think it's a bit too bright still and a bit too...orange. But I decided to knit it up and see how I feel at the end and if I still need different colors, one of my friends will be lucky.

I also have swatched for Flicca (Rav link), Oblique, and Annikki. I've promised myself that as soon as I finish knitting either the Gathered Pullover or the Cabled Coat, I'll be able to cast on at least one of these lovelies.

Also, I got some minor good news. I wrote up a very short treatment for my screenplay, which I really want one of my good friends to direct. She works part-time for an Oscar-nominated director and one of her jobs is to pitch him potential screenplays. She chose to pitch mine to him last week and he gave so many wonderful comments and encouragement! He was excited about it and asked to read it when I finish. I'm flabbergasted. Truly, truly flabbergasted. I've been out of school for almost six years and it's been a long time since I've gotten any kind of academic/professional comments on my fiction work. I'd forgotten how it felt to be proud of my personal creative writing and I am on cloud nine.

To celebrate, we went out to dinner and got quite happily drunk on some fantabulous red wine. The next day, still aglow with excitement, I treated myself to a bouquet of peonies and lilacs.

Alas, the peonies had a very short vase-life. The lilacs, however, are hardy as hell.

There are now real flowers in my window instead of socks and I get to enjoy them despite the dreary weather.

Yarn and Daisy Pr0n

Ooh, my first skein of Socks that Rock just arrived...

At first, I was a little taken aback. The color on my monitor made the yellow portion of the skein look much, MUCH more like beige. And then I just took it in stride, because the whole skein does look the way I imagine a Scottish hillside would look. A dusty grey sky hanging over a grassy expanse peppered with purple-blue thistle and sunny cowslip.

The grass and the cowslip...

The sky and the thistle. It's all so Braveheart. Despite Mel Gibson's lunacy, I still think the Scottish accent is the most attractive accent ever. Some of the hottest people in the world are Scottish. Ewan McGregor, Shirley Manson, Sean Connery, Deborah Kerr, Travis, Gerard Butler...I think I could go on. But I won't.

Speaking of Scottish...W.B. Yeats wasn't Scottish, but he was Irish. And that's pretty much the same thing. You know, like Asian people alllooksame. Anyway, I was flipping through some old notes and came across this poem I hadn't read in years. And I was thinking how beautiful it is.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

They used it in this sci-fi action movie, Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson and Taye Diggs. Bad movie, folks. However, if all you're looking for is some eye candy, it'll definitely tide you over. Sean Bean has a small part and he's the one who reads out the poem. I am a huge fan of Sean Bean as a character actor and he imbued such a sense of beauty into those lines. Later, when I walked by a deli, I caught sight of some vibrant Gerber daisies (my favorite flowers, ever) and purchased a few to brighten up my dreamy but poor life.

I'm not a flash-user with my photos on a normal basis. Mostly I think they distort colors. But these came out by accident and I really appreciated how the flash highlighted the velvety texture of the petals.


This last one was taken in daylight, without flash. This face has no makeup and it's still so gorgeous. I hope I marry a man who will come home bearing gigantic bushels of Gerber daisies for me. And then I will knit him socks.