I made a little trip to Arcadia Knitting in Andersonville over the weekend, since I had a few questions about yarn substitutions in patterns. If you haven’t been to Arcadia, I highly recommend paying them a visit. It’s run by a pair of sisters who are cool and quite helpful. The store is arranged by color, which is great if you tend to gravitate towards certain colors. On this visit, I found a very cool hank of Classic Elite Yarns Commotion in the discount bin. Elite lists two gauges for this yarn, one for a fairly tight fabric and the other for a loose, lacy fabric. I’m making a scarf on 10.5 needles, twenty stitches wide, as instructed by one of the sisters. She also advised me on alternate yarns to use for patterns in the Rowan Big Easy book. The scarf, which is a guilt project, is moving very quickly, as overgauge projects do. I’ve already knitted over two yards! It attracts a lot of compliments when I work on it in public.
I've also undertaken some sewing projects this week, thanks to the generous gift of several funky fat quarters from my mom. She gets a collection of them in the mail every month. Two of them are in the process of becoming bags: one a bag just the right size for carrying a sock project, and the other a small handbag. The handbag has been a bit of a headache, so when the bobbin thread ran out this morning, I decided to call it a day.
Wednesday, I took in the Magnum Cinema exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. It was a lovely way to pass an afternoon. I love the work that the Magnum photographers did in the fifties and sixties: dramatic, noir, well-composed, and grainy. It's the work that I aspire to make, which I guess means that I'm either really retro or forty years behind the times. There were a lot of images from the set of The Misfits, the film that Arthur Miller wrote for Marilyn Monroe. The Magnum group had the sole rights to photograph on the set. It's a great show that I would recommend to anyone who loves classic cinema or fifties photography.