Really Stupid Perfume Ads

Perfume ads really suck. You know the drill; supermodels with closed eyes and half open mouths, breathy noises, sexually suggestive imagery and stupid special effects. I’m sure it’s incredibly difficult trying to sell a smell through a medium that doesn’t, but really? This is the best all those moneyed creative heads can come up with?

There seems to be an unwritten rule that when making a perfume ad you must reference Marilyn Monroe in some way. Her infamous quote about only wearing Chanel No. 5 to bed has stuck in the minds of every fashion house’s perfume department right across the globe. They are like a dog with a bone; just won’t let it go. Charlize Theron has done it; Christina Aguilera has done it; Jennifer Lopez has done it; Scarlett Johansson has done it.

I guess ultimately they are trying to sell a concept of a lifestyle or a personality which they think is related to the perfume. Here is a short and uncomprehensive list of some of the more ridiculous perfume ads I’ve seen.

Thierry Mugler Angel: Gorgeous Eva Mendes catches a bullet train, opens her mouth a lot and closes her eyes. Apparently this perfume is somewhat of a hallucinogen; it allows Mendes to fly and imagine she can carry stars in her pocket.

Prada Candy: The promotion for this ad would have you believe that this is a classy perfume. Even when Lea Seydoux keeps flashing her pink granny knickers? There is, of course, the customary reference to the delectable Ms Monroe; the song Seydoux mouths is Running Wild from Marilyn’s 1959 film Some Like It Hot, when she says dripping with innuendo; ‘I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop’. I have a feeling that Prada Candy would smell somewhat like that.

Armani Code: There is nothing particularly offensive about this ad. It is just boring. Lots of people dressed in black wandering around aimlessly in a fancy apartment. It is all fairly pointless and not very captivating. And why is Megan Fox wearing a wig? Sweaty black plastic is not mysterious or enticing.

Britney Spears Fantasy: This one is narrated much like a fairy tale. I find it all corny and sleazy. It also begs the question as to who really wants to smell like Britney Spears? That would entail notes of fried chicken, crack den and dodgy tattoo parlour sweat. No thanks.

J'adore Dior: What is the best and quickest way to associate a perfume with the classics? Special effecting in Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe will do it. Of every cheap and nasty stunt that comes out of the world of Hollywood, this is one of the crassest. I’m sure they couldn’t have made it without the permission of whoever owns the likenesses of those actresses these days, but even so it feels dirty. Resurrecting the dead for a perfume ad? Flagpole the downfall of society there please; I’m sure the Mayan Apocalypse mentioned this kind of thing somewhere.

Truly Up Knit Creek

My computer is up knit creek, my knitting is up knit creek, my sewing machine is up knit creek.

However, I have a series of new red exercise books, a cute curly-haired waiter and poached eggs for breakfast tomorrow. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Will be up and running soon, hopefully.

Unusual Tools of the Knitting Trade

When knitting a small object in the round, one could employ the use of double point needles or the Magic Loop method. Both these methods are tried, tested and true. However, in the interests of lateral thinking, thin flexible wire and wire cutters are perfectly capable substitutes as I have found. With a diminishing number of stitches, the end of your ‘needles’ can be clipped shorter and shorter as the work slowly decreases. Not something one can do to laminated birch wood, bamboo or nickel-plated brass. Hah!

Lazy Mother-Frogger

I have three wips on, but all the lights are out. My delicious yellow hat has four rows to go- just four! But I just can’t bring myself to finish it for some reason. I don’t want to mess it up again. My newly started maroon hat has one row done. And that was started a week or more back. I am a lazy mother frogger.

The third is the one above. It is a lace scarf using the pattern from this beautiful Que Sera lace cardigan by Kirsten Kapur. Lace was never really on my radar. I am much more of a Cable lover. I just love the texture of them. You know that feeling when you see beautiful cables in a hat or a jumper, and you just want to squish them and rub yourself against them. Dirty I know, but tell me it’s not true.

Compared to cables, lace just seemed a little too bland. Okay, bland is the wrong word. Maybe it was just too subtle for me. I like seeing a cabled woollen jumper from across the room and wanting to run and jump on the person wearing it. I couldn’t be arsed most of the time at squinting at the detail in lace.

I think it changed when I saw this Katharine Hepburn cardigan and fell in love with it. The allusion to the 1940s then obviously spread beyond to Kapur’s lace cardigan; then I saw Herbert Niebling’s work, Estonian lace, and the rest was history.

However, I soon realised upon starting my lace Peacock scarf (so called because of the colours in that beautiful wool and silk blend, sent to me from Toronto) that LACE TAKES FOREVER TO KNIT. I have a short attention span, which is probably why I like knitting hats. I need something relatively quick. Some colour, some movement. Not hours and hours and hours of knitting holes. By this stage in my endless lace scarf, this is what I now think lace knitting is; spending all your time purposefully knitting holes in wool. And knitting holes will clearly only be finished at Forever O’Clock.

I am despairing of it. One day I’m sure I will restart it. I’m also sure that once it is finished and blocked, my knees will go weak for lace again. Not right now though, because not only am I lazy, I’m also a vengeful mother frogger. No Lace For You.

Gauge Rage

Oh knitting incompetence! How I loathe thee! Looking up patterns on Ravelry requires more skill than I have. I thought if I just clicked that little search button that said ‘4 ply’ I would be sorted. But using 4mm needles for 4 ply wool? What madness is this?!

Gauge is a thing I struggle with. Mostly I assume it will turn out roughly alright, so I never do it. In my defence, thus far I’ve only ever knitted hats, scarves or cowls, none of which really need to be strict with gauge. The hats have all turned out well though. This must be dumb luck, because it’s certainly not by design. We shall not mention the miscounted stitches of the Star Crossed Beret. It fit though, despite the star on top looking like a dead spider. Ahem.

So this time, for some wacky reason, I decided to try out this funny ‘gauge’ thingy. The needles are clearly the wrong size for the wool. It looks terribly overstretched. So either the ply quoted is wrong or the needle size is wrong. 4 ply is a standard, right? It can’t get thinner or thicker surely.

Notice how slickly I slime out of blaming myself though. This reminds me of a story my grandmother told. When she was a girl, she hated piano lessons with a passion. One day her mother was trying to get her to practice, but she burst out, ‘I can’t practice, the music is written wrong!’ Her mother decided then that if classical composers couldn’t write music properly, then maybe she should stop playing the piano.

Similarly, if accomplished knitting designers can’t write patterns properly, maybe I should give up knitting! (Stubbornness is clearly a family trait.)

Cat picture included for illustration of rage only. He was pissed off. So am I. Grrrrr! Gauge rage!

Knotting

This picture was my second attempt at making Natalie Larson's Star Crossed Slouchy Beret on Ravelry.

The first time I counted the stitches completely wrong and ended up with a Crossed Star Slouchy Beret. But this second one was yummy, and correctly made!

Which is why I name this post 'Knotting'. I'm borrowing it from Elizabeth Honey's book Fiddle-back in the hope that she is as sweet as her name and won't really mind. The kids in the book try to knit something but end up messing it up so badly that they call it 'knotting' instead. My knitting is largely knotting, and I will explain this through two anecdotes, one relating to the hat above.

First, when my mother was teaching me how to knit back in 2007. She taught me how to hold the needles correctly, and how to hold the thread properly for the right tension. By the time I came to the end of that ugly terracotta coloured rib scarf I thought I'd conquered the world! Alas, I moved away for a year to a different country, away from my mother's patient knitting coaching and thus developed bad habits. Once not long after I got home, we were sitting in the living room with our respective knitting. Mum stopped after some time and looked at me. She then said; 'It gives me pain to watch you knit.' My technique, it seems, was not unorthodox as I had hoped; it was just plain wrong. And continues to be so! Bad habits are tricky to shake.

My second example of knotting, as I mentioned, relates to that glorious squishy blue hat. I am proud of it, despite the labour pains it brought. See, I know there is a Magic Loop method out there when using circular knitting needles. When I youtube it, it looks fantastically easy and straightforward. I would love to be able to knit socks with ML method! (As it is, I can barely knit competently with two needles; four would be far beyond my skill level.) But the Magic Loop method, when competing with my unorthodox/wrong knitting technique has failed me at every turn. If you can help, please tell me how!

I must here confess that when the stitches became fewer and fewer towards the crown of my Star Crossed Beret, there was much swearing and sweating over stretched and strained plastic circular needles. My solution (when I couldn't figure out the ML method) involved raiding my Dad's shed for wire which I fashioned into circular needles. The beauty of those makeshift wire circulars was that when the stitches grew fewer and fewer, I could simply snip off the end of the needles with wire cutters and continue on my merry knotted way.

Terrible, no? But it worked. See that crown? It's a squashy little star. And the recipient of that hat (admittedly a non-knitter) was none the wiser. Viva la Knotting!