What do you do it to?

Last night, I got quite a lot of work done on Kingscot as I watched the undeniably execrable yet oddly compulsive Take Me Out. One of the things I love most about knitting is its compatibility with other activities - chatting to friends, listening to music, or, in this case, watching programmes featuring Paddy McGuinness, thirty single ladies and the catchphrase 'No likey, no lighty'.

I enjoy the symmetry of knitting to podcasts about knitting: Stash and Burn, Never Not Knitting, Doubleknit, and the infrequent but inspired Insubordiknit are my favourites. Recently, however, I have been attempting to aurally submerge myself in the Laahndahn accent for a play, and so have found myself sucked in to Eastenders (Archie's murder! Stacey's pregnancy! Roxy getting the Vic!), as well as listening to this excellent cd. All of this has made me curious what other people make stuff to. Have you discovered an exciting new band? Have you been revisiting the early films of Ingmar Bergman? Do you find a zen-like silence to be a better conduit to craft? Leave a comment, and let me know!

Grumpy and travelsore

I have been, physically and figuratively, all over the place. Over the last twenty days I have cracked open Easter eggs in Edinburgh, visited my boyfriend in Madrid, been to an amazing hybrid Basque/Californian wedding in a town outside Bilbao, eaten a pizza in Pisa, walked on the beach in my grandfather's tiny village in Calabria, delivered a painting to Genoa, and, finally, limped back to Cambridge this evening. 

Apart from contributing to a fearsome carbon footprint and equally fearsome load of dirty washing, this journey gave me a lot of time to think, about this blog among other things. From now on, I intend not just to post about my completed knitted objects. Although I've been knitting A LOT recently (more on that story later), not only does 'Look! I finished something!' make for too infrequent an output for my liking, but I worried that it also could give a false impression of sporadic sterile success, without any of the messy, interesting stuff in between. I've just listened to the awesome Insubordiknit podcast, by a lady who spins blood red yarn with realistic, vein-y eyeballs, so things messy and interesting are on my mind.

I'm a little bit too sleepy to follow through on this at the moment, so I'll leave you with news that I am knitting two cardigans, both of them purple...