busy

oh, i've been bad, i tend to be terrible with blog updates. my excuse is work & the lingering effects of pneumonia... by the time i get home all i want to do is sleep. so that's what i do.

but being busy with work is still on topic here anyway. we're doing a big launch at MIPTV next week, and screenings in los angeles and at the san francisco film festival later in the month. and of course there are more film festivals looming on the horizon. busy bees we are in movie world.

other than that, uh, we watched the constant gardener the other day, and since then i've done some gardening. does that count?

jackety

i'm done the back of the "in the mood for love" sweater, but that's pretty boring, so instead i've got pictures of a re-con jacket inspired by woody allen's film anything else.

here are a couple of pics from the film - i couldn't find one that shows the jacket very well, but you can see that it's tweed, fitted, with slightly puffed sleeves (just typing the words "puffed sleeves" gives me hives):







so that's the original. here's my version:



i started with a man's tweed jacket in size huge - i think it was a 46 or something - which i bought for $5 at a thrift shop. here's a before and after shot:



big change, huh? what i did was remove the sleeves, shift the shoulder seams, re-cut the armscyes, re-cut the princess seams front and back, add another seam to the back on each side, re-cut the front lapels, take in the sleeves, gather the sleeve caps, and re-attach them.

you follow? i did a few sketches to illustrate what i'm talking about, but we're having scanner issues at the moment, so they'll have to wait.

here's a close-up of the back showing the seaming detail:



here's a shot of the front, so you can see how much more pronounced the princess seams are around the bust:



i think the smartest thing i did was to farm out the button holes. there's a shop on queen at spadina called simply "buttons" i think, and they will do your button holes for you with their lovely industrial machine. it used to be a dollar each, but i think it's gone up to $1.50 (that may be my fault - when i brought this jacket in, the guy said, "wow, that's thick fabric, tough to work with." i said, "that's why i bring it to you!")

eta: tutorial here

boredom

well, predictably i got bored with knitting the back of the "in the mood for love" sweater - it's no fun if you have nothing to figure out! - so i decided to take a break from it to try knitting some flowers:



the idea is to decorate the sweater with flowers if when i finish it.

it's more fun to knit flowers than the boring back of a sweater anyway!

p.s. it's official - i have pneumonia!

i just figured out something about myself

i was lying in bed knitting and reading the paper (and feeling better until i got up to come downstairs, at which point i started wheezing again, grr). i finished the picot edge for the back of the green in the mood for love sweater, and decided to give my fingers a break and go back to a bulkier on-the-go project, a toy totoro for a knitalong. i knit for a while (using the classic "don't have a plan or pattern, just start knitting" method) and frogged for a while, and then i thought, maybe i'll dig out tg's camera and take some pics of a completed sewing/recon project i did a while ago - a jacket based on on christina ricci wears in anything else.

and then it occurred to me: all of this stuff is film-related. not surprising; i've been a film buff since i was a kid watching "magic shadows" on tv every night.

so: i decided to rename this blog filmcraft. it will be exclusively about film-related craft projects. maybe i will try to knit king kong eventually.

the upside of sickness

well, i've been sick all week, meaning if i do anything other than sit quietly (as in not speaking to anyone) next to the humidifier, i have a huge coughing fit. not fun. but it does mean i've got a lot of knitting done.

here's the completed front of "i'm in the mood for love":



here's a detail shot:



woo hoo! i thought this would take a lot longer since it's such fine yarn. actually, the back will probably take a lot longer because it will be more boring. c'est la vie...

i'm so excited, and i just can't hide it

i'm working on a cheongsam-style sweater, just making it up as i go along. i've gotten to the part where i want it to look like two separate pieces, without actually being two separate pieces - the diagonal closure that goes from the neckline to under the arm. i'm using knitpicks palette which is fingering weight, so it's so small it's hard to tell what i'm doing. but it seems to be working! check this out:



whee!! here's a close up, where you can see that some stitches look doubled-up on the needle - that's because i'm knitting two pieces at the same time:



just in case you have no idea what it's supposed to end up looking like, here are a couple of pics of cheongsams from in the mood for love, which is an awesome film that you should run out and see. and it was the inspiration for this sweater - all of maggie cheung's dresses are gorgeous: