It has become a tradition in our family to have a Lord of the Rings marathon filmfest after Christmas — usually the first day after Christmas (sprawled exhausted in the living room with plenty of left-overs and platters of cookies to sustain us).  This year, for a variety of reasons, it did not happen then.  So, George and I — alone now in the evenings since everyone has returned home — are doing The Lord of the Rings on our own.  We started with The Hobbit (the first one which is on dvd) and are progressing through the trilogy a few hours a night (we watch it until one of us starts to fall asleep and then we hit pause and go to bed).  These are the extended versions — maybe 9 hours of epic entertainment!

And it is terrific knitting time for me.  I love TLotR and have seen it enough times so that I know when to look up from my knitting and when I can just knit away without watching.  Perfect!  We finished The Two Towers last night.  So far, Bilbo has been recruited for adventure and there have been a lot of dwarves and wizards, Froddo has met up with elves (of both the celestial spires and woodland variety), orcs and super-orcs and a lot of other nasty minions of evil, Merry & Pippin have befriended a giant talking tree-herding Ent, Gandolf has been lost and found, men have rallied and won the Battle of Helms Deep…Meanwhile, I have cast on a cotton dishcloth and a wool slipper — of which I have knit about an inch of the first and the heel of the latter — finished the left hand and knit the right hand of my Fir Tree mitts, and begun correcting the wrong pattern row (three rows down!) on Evelyn's "Yzma" Blanket. 

Put down in print like that, it looks like the Hobbits are making more progress than I am — but then knitting always sounds like less work than it is.  And fixing the baby blanket is pretty epic all on its own!  Working my way around the entire perimeter of the blanket (some 660 or so stitches) dropping every other stitch for three rows and using a crochet hook to catch up the dropped stitches (one purl-wise, two knit-wise).  I think the first side (of four) took me an hour.  Maybe longer? Hard to tell when a battle is raging.

Anyhow, tonight we launch The Return of the King and I will continue on with dishcloth, slipper, mitts (which need their ends woven in), blanket — and whatever else I find in my knitting bag!