Murder, She Knit

I’ve been watching a lot of streaming stuff this week while trying to plow through the knitted-on edging of the lace stole. Some of it good, some of it not so much. But I did run across a neat little documentary that I found fascinating, and which included a bit of knitting.

Of Dolls & Murder covers the contributions of Frances Glessner Lee to the field of forensic medicine and the development of crime investigation. Lee, who was from a wealthy family connected to International Harvester, was not allowed to seek higher education. However, through her brother and and one of his college classmates, she became interested in the science of crime investigation and endowed the department of legal medicine at Harvard. But her unique contribution to the field was her creation of 18 incredibly detailed miniature dioramas of crime scenes that are known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

They’re amazing. At first glance, they look like regular little dollhouses. But then you see the bodies, and the blood splatters, and the signs of a struggle, and the open windows. Supposedly, only a select few know the “answers” to the mysteries outlined. And though they were created in the middle of last century, they’re still used to train forensic investigators today. Lee created these herself, by hand, even knitting the victims’ stockings on what must have been very fine-gauge pins. Despite their grim nature, they are quite beautiful.

On the personal knitting front, I continue to plug away at the Print O’ The Wave Stole. I’ve completed three sides of the knitted-on edging, and “only” have one more long one to go. I really want to be able to stretch this thing out so I can see the pattern better. For right now, it just looks lumpy. One of the nerve-wracking things about lace knitting is having to wait so long for the payoff. But the end is in sight. I suppose it’s time to put some serious thought into what I might tackle next.

KnitFlix: State Fair

I caught State Fair (1945) on Turner Classic Movies recently, and noticed that Fay Bainter’s character, Melissa Frake, was knitting in one scene. I’ve seen this movie plenty of times, but I suppose not since I’ve started knitting. Otherwise, I might have noticed earlier.

In this scene, Ma and Pa Frake are relaxing, high on their recent awards for their prizewinning mincemeat (Ma) and boar (Pa). Ma uses that dainty overhand pencil-holding technique that seems to have been how women learned to knit back in the day, and which I’ve seen in other films before.

 

Cultural note: I don’t think many women refer to their husbands as “gay dogs” in this day and age any more.

According to the IMDB, Fay Bainter had been on the stage since the age of 3, but she must have found the time to pick up knitting somewhere. She clearly knows what she is doing and is able to act at the same time. But I can’t figure out why she would want to knit a mile-long garter stitch scarf on such tiny needles!

If you’ve never seen this film, it’s kind of interesting. The Technicolor will make your eyes bleed, although it’s fun to see mid 1940s fashions in  color rather than black & white. The palette is pretty darn jazzy! And notably, this the only musical that Rogers and Hammerstein wrote for the movies. A newer version came out in the early 60s with Pat Boone and Ann-Margret, but that version was set in Texas, and although, as a Texan, I must say that our state fair is a great state fair, if the film isn’t set in Iowa, you don’t get to hear the film’s best song: All I Owe Ioway!

 

KnitFlix: The Red Tent (1969)

We’d had this disc sitting on our shelf for a couple of months and only got around to watching it Saturday night. I’d put it in the queue because of my obsession with the exploration of the polar regions. It’s a dramatization of Umberto Nobile’s tragic 1928 airship voyage to the North Pole.

The Red Tent is not a bad film, although they really wanted to get their money’s worth with all the B-roll they must have bought of icebreakers, polar bears and calving glaciers The movie is a joint Soviet/Italian production, and it’s kind of cool to see strangely inserted Russian scenes, one of which was filmed in Leningrad.

It’s set up as a dream tribunal with the aged Nobile being confronted by and reliving the events with some of the expedition’s participants, both airship crew and would-be rescuers. Sean Connery plays Roald Amundsen (who actually died trying to find Nobile), although he’s pretty much there because he’s Sean Connery.

The main reason to watch this film, though, from a knitter’s point of view, is to see all the large-gauge chunky knits that the cast wears throughout the film. Scarves, gloves, hats, balaclavas, and of course, sweaters, are everywhere – most knitted with ultra-maxi-super-chunky-mondo yarn on needles in their upper teens. It probably only took one employee in a Tromsø sweatshop two hours to make any one of these garments.

Above, Valeria, a nurse played by Claudia Cardinale, hugs a soiled scarf that used to belong to her love interest, the expedition’s Swedish meteorologist, Finn Malmgren. Malmgren, played by Russian actor Eduard Martsevich and shown in the lower picture, sports a herd’s worth of wool and a roll collar that just won’t stop while doing shots with Nurse Valeria in a Spitsbergen honkeytonk.

Is it wrong to want to live somewhere where you can wear this stuff?

KnitFlix

Bette Davis could knit. Who knew? And she actually knew what she was doing. This scene of Bette Davis knitting on the deck of a cruise ship is from Now, Voyager (1942).





Granted, she's knitting what appears to be a garter-stitch swatch for what I can only hope is a much more fabulous garment, but I suppose that's doing pretty well when one has taken to the high seas to get away from an overbearing Boston Brahmin mother and is putting the finishing post-breakdown touches on what we refer to today as doing one's "work." Here she learns about a rather dashing man she's been cavorting with from one of his friends, played by Lee Patrick. Love Bette's glasses. And it looks like Lee loves her glass. That's one tall drink!

Give this movie a chance. Not much action, but plenty of drama. And some excellent acting by Davis. Her creepy Baby Jane voice is just starting to develop. It also stars the always awesome Claude Rains, my favorite character actress of all time, Mary Wickes, and Gladys Cooper as the too-controlling mother. Apparently, she was good at this sort of thing. A few decades later she showed her domineering chops as Henry Higgins' mother in My Fair Lady.

I love finding knitting in movies.

All Over But the Zippin'

I've finished all the knitting on the Cobra Sweater. I just need to order the zipper and sew it in. I ain't scared.

Yesterday I sewed up the shoulder seams and attached the sleeves. Attaching sleeves always spooks me a little. The seaming is not one-to-one like the shoulders are, and instructions like "pick up on or two bars on the selvage side" are a bit too squishy for my taste. I don't like instructions with the word "or" in them. As someone who teaches people about the difference between "and" and "or" for a living, the word "or" conjures frightening visions that end with opening cans of Pandora's worms. Or something like that.

All in all, I'm pleased. Using the XL size for all lengths (measured in inches) and the Medium size for width (measured in stiches) worked better than I thought it would. I'm not actually a medium by any stretch of either the imagination or of knit fabric, but my gauge was a little on the outside of what as called for, so all came out well in the end. The sleeves roll a bit where they're seamed to the body, but I'm hoping steam blocking wll alleviate that to some extent. I'm not doing a full-on Baptist immersion to block this sweater like I usually do with garments that have more sins to atone for. I'm planning on puffing the iron over it.

Knitflix alert:

Last night, Jeff and I watched "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" (1967), despite our Uncle Cliffy's dismal assessment of it. I have to say it wasn't all that bad. Interesting in that the movie was cast almost entirely by the actors in the original Broadway production (with the notable absence of Charles Nelson Reilly)-- a rather uncommon practice. The songs are kind of there, and the producer sure didn't get his money's worth out of Bob Fosse for the choreography, but the sets were very 60's stylish and the things they did with color were amazing.

Anyway, the boss of the company (Rudy Vallee) featured in the movie is a closeted knitter. J. Pierpont Finch, (Robert Morse), being a cunning up-and-comer in the organization, pretends to knit, too, in order to have an "in" with the boss. Here's a still I took with my camera from the TV. The boss is very proud of the magenta and gold chenille sweater he's sporting. Too bad you can't see the yellow be-pom-pommed golf club covers he's made!

Garterdom

It's been a while. What have I been doing? Knitting garter stitch.

Taking a lesson from our soon-to-be former president, I can't quite say "mission accomplished," but I suppose, since all the pieces have been knitted, I can say that, as of today, major combat operations have ended. Only now, as I look at the close-to-finished product, do I see a big swastika in the middle of the blanket. Yikes! Let's ignore that, shall we?

I still have to block the two larger pieces (that'll be fun), crochet up the seams and do an applied I-cord. I've done theoretical I-cord, but not applied. I'm going to knit up a swatch with leftover yarn to practice on while the pieces dry and while I wait for a darker color of Eco-wool to come in at my LYS. I'm looking at a chocolatey-brown color.

The weather has been lovely for knitting. We actually got close to freezing last night, although today is one of those perfect Texas autumn days. A bit warm if you stand in the sun, a bit chilly if you stay in the shade. Some of our flowers have gotten a second wind despite the draught. The fall asters were wonderful a few weeks ago and our lantana has filled a corner of our yard with renewed bright redness that had disappeared in August. These yellow bells were blooming a few weeks ago and were siphoning off some of the love that the lantana was getting from the monarch butterflies that were passing through. Couldn't get any to hold still for a picture, though.

Knitflix moment: Jeff and I were watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford last night when I saw this brief bit of yarnishness. That's Brad Pitt seen through the distorted glass. If this movie is to be believed, Zee James, Jesse's wife, liked to knit with dark colors. My kind of outlaw's wife. Zee was played by Mary-Louise Parker. She got awfully high billing in this movie for muttering a few times and then screaming when her husband was killed. Seriously, I think I heard her ask someone what she wanted for dinner, and that was it. I guess the rest of the time she was rolling joints or frying green tomatoes or something.

Holding Needles

Sometimes I record strange little films on Turner Classic Films to have on while knitting. A description calls to me and I give it a shot. Such was the case with "The Ghost Train," a British film from 1941.

Imagine my glee when I saw that one of the characters was knitting! She seemed to be working on an amorphous blob. She was knitting rather rapidly, I might add -- although something seemed strange. It was the way she held her right needle like a pen rather than like a knife. I knew people knitted this way, but I'd never seen it.

I dug through my copy of A History of Hand Knitting by Richard Rutt and found this on page 17:

By the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign (and perhaps for a while before) English ladies, as distinct from working knitters, had abandoned the older way of holding knitting needles. Instead of holding the right-hand needle under the palm of the right hand they began to hold it like a pen, grasping the point between the thumb and index finger and allowing the shaft to lie over the thumb joint. Before long, working class knitters, especially in southern England, began to emulate the new fashion, which is inefficient and limits the speed of knitting, but is to this day the commonest way of knitting in England.

Do you or anyone you know knit this way? I thought it looked quite elegant, but on reflection realized I would be terrible at it. The character in the clip, Miss Bourne, was played by Kathleen Harrison. I don't know if there is any correlation between longevity and the way one holds knitting needles, but Kathleen Harrison lived to the ripe old age of 103.

On my own personal knitting front, I'm kind of in project limbo right now. I'm still plugging away on the piano bench. I recently purchased some books that should show up soon, and I've also got some yarn together for a blanket project for the in-laws. But nothing to show right now. Hence the detour into film and knitting history.