Movie Review

Since not much was going on here this weekend, I watched a couple of movies.


Freedom Writers with Hillary Swank gets a huge thumbs up. I really liked it. A true story about an awesome teacher and the inspirational methods she used to give hope to her class.

Pan's Labyrinth was . . . interesting. My 19-year-old Amanda - who is more into fantasy stuff like anime and manga - put it on our Blockbuster cue. The whole thing was in Spanish with subtitles (and I went thru the first hour of it waiting for them to change to English, but it didn't happen!) which was different, but no big deal. I enjoyed watching the creatures, like the fairies and the mandrake root, and the three tasks the girl was given were fun to watch. It is a dark movie and not for little kids, but it does have a pretty good story line and plot. I would have liked a slightly cheerier ending, but that probably wouldn't have matched the movie. Overall, it was a good movie.

On the creative front, I've been working on mittens this weekend, of all things to do in July! I had bought the yarn last winter for some snow mittens which I had pictured in my head. I wanted to make the tops, bottom of the cuff, and the entire thumb in dark gray and the rest in red. The gusset is being a pain in my butt!! I have ripped it back three times. I'm knitting this in the round, so on the first try I would bring the new color up from underneath each time it changed, making a nice little twist. It looked nice on the inside, but it sort of had the effect of closing up the inside part of the gusset. Rip, rip, rip. Next I tried absolutely not twisting anything, which, as I had kinda thought would happen, HOLES and weird strings in the back. So after much marathon froggin', I dug out some knitting books, and after studying on the matter, I think that to do this right I would need to either carry the yarn all the way around the mitten (which would waste too much, in my thrifty opinion) or cut the gray yarn on each round and work in the thosuand ends later, which also doesn't seem like a great way of doing it. Anyway, at about 10 pm I fought the urge to throw the stupid thing out into the yard and I just decided to do the gusset in red and the part of the thumb that actually sticks out in gray. Creative compromise, I guess. It should look okay, just not exactly like I had it pictured. I want to make four pairs of these things, so if anyone could enlighten me on a better way to make the whole gusset a different color without all the hassel, please do so!

I have some cool ideas I'm dying to try out for necklaces, so I'm hoping to have some time to work on these this afternoon.