Post-Christmas Greetings

On Boxing Day evening, I hope this finds all of you slowly emerging from your gluttonous turkey-induced slumbers, dragging your way out of piles of wrapping paper, and wondering what the hell to do in this slightly boring bit of the year between Christmas and New Year. It's not quite time to be doing anything useful or indeed anything that would require resolutions, like tidying the house or hitting the gym; those are what January is for. No, what this period seems to be for is watching the telly.

As I don't do the evil television, instead I will make you a present of some knitting-related videos. Can you tell I just worked out how to embed YouTube videos in my post the other day?

Firstly, and this is the one I would really recommend watching, a knitted music video by French-Canadian pop duo Tricot Machine. Yes, the name of their band is "knitting machine" in French. Apart from that, the song, "Les Peaux de Lièvres" is ethereal and lovely. I am a complete sucker for French pop, and piano-driven songs, and this is both, and gorgeous.

Isn't that wonderful? Effectively a knitted flick book. You can see as the camera is zoomed out at the start and end there are numbers on the knitted sheets which are presumably frames, just over 700 of them. Amazing. Their other songs are pretty good and I may be using my Christmas Amazon voucher from the future in-laws for their album.

Much less pretty, but fun nevertheless, another music video made of knitting. "Walkie Talkie Man" by Steriogram. It's probably a good thing that sound recording doesn't really involve that much yarn - the music would be all muffled.

Not music, this one's an art installation. Forget holding yarn double, here Extreme Knitter Rachel John knits a mattress using 1,000 strands held together. The only points to this, presumably, being the ones at the ends of her needles.

More of a point here - hideously annoying background music, but this does use knitting (or rather unknitting) to make illustrate the potential effects of climate change rather well.

You've probably already seen this a million times, but here are the Mason-Dixon Knitters with "Pardon Me (I Didn't Knit That For You)", which is pretty funny though I wouldn't expect a non-knitter to find that much amusement in it, or at least, not more than once.

To wrap up, news of something I'm very excited about: there's a film coming out in February of Neil Gaiman's "Coraline"! That in itself would be great (but scary), but even better, it's a 3D stop-motion animation (inherently cool) and has plenty of craft content. I mean, buttons for eyes and all... The trailer is here on the film's website and certainly worth a look, but I shall embed here for you a short film about the person who made the incredible minature knitwear for the puppets.

Enjoy!