A Quick Project and Netflix Rant

My Bradway has been keeping me company in the evenings as I make my way through season 4 of Longmire.  I’ve been so pleased, with both the shawl and the first netflix produced season of the show.  

I knew Shannon’s pattern would be great.  The perfect palette cleanser between The Summer Sweater KAL and the Midwestern Knits KAL.  And since I seem to be addicted to everything ending in KAL, it’s part of the Big Cozy KAL in The Fawn Knits‘ Ravelry group.  But ever since my disappointment in Netflix’s season 3 of The Killing, I have been fearing this new season of Longmire.  It’s not only good, I think it’s stronger than season 3, at least as far as I’ve watched.

(more on ravelry, kollabora, instagram, and flickr)

It’s a quietly good tv series.  Nothing splashy and still not edgy, even though it’s on Netflix.  But it’s really good acting for a weekly “mystery” type show.  Only now, it’s not weekly.  It’s a “watch straight through to the end” type of show on Netflix.  I mean, yeah, there’s more language and stronger language, but I can still watch it with my son and not cringe.  I don’t feel like I have to keep the remote handy, just in case.  Is it old fashioned of me that this means something to me?  I’m sure it is, but it has nothing to do with my getting older.  I say this as I finish knitting up another woolen shawl…

The reality is that we have our Netflix profiles, as adults, and let our kids have theirs so that we can separate the sort-of-mature from the too-mature viewing.  Even if our children don’t find a way around parental oversight, it’s just a fact that there will be a slow, trickle-down of mature content.  We all just get more and more used to it.  And if you have high standards for writing and direction style, you’re going to have a hard time finding new things that you can share with the fam that aren’t too simple or too syrupy.

I guess I resent the pandering to the “typical American audience” member.  When I see lots of gratuitous sex and language in a show I feel like its the death knell of the good writing.  When it’s in the first episode, like it was in a recent tv-14 show I tried that was waaaaaaay not for 14 year-olds, it probably means there won’t be any.  I know I’m not alone in this.  And I know that I had the same tastes before I even had kids…even when I was a kid.  So, I’m not just thinking as a mother.  I’m just thinking.

I only tried watching Longmire because we were going to see Katie Sackhoff at comic-con.  I was so surprised to see her tone down her usual Starbuck shtick to portray a different sort of character.  Well, a little different.  I really, really liked the whole show.  Unlike that Riddick movie, which we also saw before comic-con, where I think my brain exploded from lack of intelligible input and leaked out of my ears onto the theatre seats.  Don’t sit on aisle 20.  It was so bad, my husband fell asleep during it and actually got really grumpy because the people’s yelling and hooting around us, at the show’s gags, kept waking him up.  I just sat there dumbfounded.  People were laughing and hooting?  At this show’s gags?  It was so bad it was almost good.  Almost.

Anyway, thank you Netflix for not ruining something that was good enough that you’d want to buy it in the first place.

Now, the shawl.  Doesn’t it look like something you’d throw on next to the campfire?  I can’t believe a shawl knit up so quickly.  It doesn’t take too long knitting with fingering weight to feel like a knitting machine when you go back to worsted.

(inspiration via Pinterest)

I went to Pinterest and looked up pantone color schemes and such to find color combos that were out of my comfortable norm.  Eventually, I decided on blue and pink, but not the blue and pink of my pop-up camper’s original curtains.  It’s more like a faded denim and my worn coral deck shoes.  The tweedy yarn makes me think of a camping shawl.  I’ve seen a couple of Bradways knit in this color scheme and I loved them, so I knew it would work.  Check out Corinne’s!