Fat Charlie

No turtles today - sorry. I've got the head done now, and the little eyes look good; and have come to grief on the long moss-stitch band. Not that there's any problem with it - it's just a 9st strip of moss-stitch which needs to go round the edge of the bottom bit, and it's just the right texture - and moss stitch is sometimes exactly what I need to knit, and sometimes it drives me berserk. (Other things driving me berserk today are Virgin Media and the US Presidential debates, but we won't go there.)

The stealth Christmas Fair-Isle is still on the go. I've had an idea of blogging Christmas projects as I do them and then fiddling with the dates to release the posts after Christmas... It's the major knitting-event of the year and by the time it's over I can barely remember what I made for whom let alone what the yarn was and whether I changed anything...

But there's something else on the needles; so - Fat Charlie.

A couple of weeks ago, just after I Knit Day, Yvonne and I were in I Knit (as we often are), and they had (and unless it's all gone this week, still have) this wonderful array of Malabrigo Sock Yarn. The story of the colour I chose (2 skeins' worth, all they had), along with one version (the pinker one) of the colour, is here. This is as good a picture as I can get of mine, although it's definitely pinker than here. Imagine all the pinks, oranges and terracotta colours you'd get in a Burne-Jones angel, and then imagine it in silky-soft merino...

I'm using the Strangling Vines pattern by Nicole Hindes, but over 81 sts rather than the suggested 45 for a more stole-like scarf.

So, apart from the width, why Fat Charlie? Well, these days, whenever the word Archangel comes into my head, the Paul Simon Song Crazy Love Vol II comes with it. The line "Fat Charlie the archangel slopes into the room" has to be my favourite first line ever; closely followed the Mountain Goats' Oceanographer's Choice "Guy in a skeleton costume/Steps up to the guy in a Superman suit/Runs through him with a broadsword" (unfortunately, in this clip the first line stops him in his tracks so that's just about all you get!)...

Oddly enough, when I googled Fat-Charlie-the-Archangel, I was taken to a Neil Gaiman page where people were wondering whether there was any relation with Fat Charlie in Anansi Boys. And I remembered that this came through on Mr Gaiman's blog today and I thought it was rather cool... And we're back to the US elections. So I'll stop now.