Fairy Tale Knits: 32 Projects to Knit Happily Ever After

I'm not a knitter. For some reason, I've never had a family member or friend who knitted. I am adept with other crafty type skills, especially beading and cross-stitch. I've got some fairy tale theme cross stitch patterns I will share someday. But knitting has never captured my immediate interest until the last few years after reading other blogs like that of Jane Brockett and others. Then there's the majority of free time spent on SurLaLune that keeps me from taking up new hobbies. My priorities always head back to this passion first. Still, there are times when the idea of picking up yarn and needles, playing with color and texture and having something to do with my hands while watching a tv or movie, well, that appeals to me. Then I see books and patterns like these and I'm tempted even more.

Fairy Tale Knits: 32 Projects to Knit Happily Ever After by A. Stewart-Guinee was released in August this year.

The book is available on Amazon where two of the patterns for the designs pictured below are currently available for free. I think they are two of the best designs in the book, but all of them are great. There are also patterns for boys' items, like pirates. And the crown is unisex despite being labeled as a princess crown.

Here's the publisher's description:

32 whimsical patterns for children twelve months to eight years.

Two timeless traditions-fairy tales and knitting-come together magically in the season's most original knitting book. You'll get patterns to knit pieces that are reminiscent of the world's most beloved fabled characters, including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Robin Hood, Hansel and Gretel, knights, pirates, and many more. From a fanciful capelet and muff to a playful baby jumper and hat, these are the children's knitting patterns dreams are made of.

Richly wrapped in the look and feel of a real storybook, Fairy Tale Knits is saturated with lush photography and a beautiful full-color design. Whether you're a beginner or experienced knitter, these 32 imaginative projects truly make for knitting happily ever after. You'll get

32 patterns for innovative projects kids will love to wear
Designs that are wearable for everyday school and play
A full-color design featuring lush photography
Fairy Tale Knits is a sophisticated and enchanting knitting book you and your children will turn to again and again.

The author, Alison, has a blog and a Flickr album picturing several more completed projects. There is a Little Red Riding Hood cape and a Cinderella dress, for example. I love the chain mail sweater. Be sure too see the Ladybug jacket, not in the book, but a new design for fall by the author. I love the Ladybug jacket for which the pattern is also provided for free.

All of these wonderful gifts of patterns. Do buy the book if you have someone in your life to coax into making and someone else to wear these fun things. Folks who generously share their talents have to make a little money, too.


Snowflake Queen Sweater Coat Pattern


Princess Crown

And maybe someday I will learn how to knit. I won't have the time to develop this level of exquisite skill, but I am rather determined to have a fun pair of hand-knit striped socks made by me or someone else...

Spend Your Holidays with Hans Christian Andersen

A few weeks ago I found this lovely article about traveling in Odense and Denmark with an emphasis on seeing Hans Christian Andersen related sites: Follow Hans Christian Andersen in Odense.

It's really a great article to save if you plan to ever visit Denmark and see some of the Andersen related sites. The recommended sites aren't limited to Odense despite the article title. I've seen many articles of a similar vein, but this is one of the most comprehensive I've seen. I learned a thing or two!

And traveling to Denmark is one of the trips I plan to make one day. The Fairy Tale Road in Germany will come first, but this is on the list.

On the Slant: Jacob Grimm

Most of us know Jacob Grimm as one half of the Grimms, collectors of fairy tales, the editors of arguably the most famous collection of fairy tales ever, the ones that brought fairy tales to the masses, or at least returned them to the masses in print.

We often forget just how profound Jacob's work was, despite controversies over the brothers' collection methods and the creative license his brother Wilhelm later took when editing the tales.

I found this short homage to him in this week's Watered Down Etymologies by Anatoly Liberman, a column on language and etymology published online by Oxford University Press.

I will take the liberty to finish this post with a personal remark about Jacob Grimm. Linguistics, literature, and history are unlike mathematics, physics, or music. One should beware of calling a language historian a genius. Yet at least three language students deserve this appellation. One of them is Jacob Grimm. The public knows him only because of the fairytales, but he was the founder of comparative Germanic philology and of several other areas of study. More important is the fact how often, though armed only with his prodigious memory and unerring intuition, rather than our dictionaries, manuals, and computers, he offered correct solutions. Every time I have a bright idea about the origin of a word, an old custom, or belief, I look up the relevant passage in the volumes of Jacob Grimm’s works. In most cases, it turns out that he anticipated my guess by at least 150 years. So I think his view of the derivation of the word soul (saiwala) is right, and I find some confirmation of it in the Greeks’ treatment of the Ocean. No doubt, Grimm knew all of it long before I was born.

Makes you appreciate the Grimms all over again, doesn't it? Especially Jacob this time.


And if suddenly you have a greater interest in these men, I recommend The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World by Jack Zipes. Or for younger students, try The Brothers Grimm: Two Lives, One Legacy by Donald R. Hettinga.

More about La barbe bleu

Following up on today's earlier post...

From: Breillat’s “Bluebeard” Coming to America

The U.S. rights to Catherine Breillat’s “Bluebeard” have been acquired by Strand Releasing for a spring 2010 release.

The film will also be shown at the New York Film Festival this weekend for those in the vicinity.

Bluebeard / La barbe-bleue
Catherine Breillat, 2009, France, 78m

Boudoir philosopher Catherine Breillat’s bloody chamber piece takes an outrageously deadpan approach to Charles Perrault’s grisly bedtime story about the aristocratic ogre who marries and murders a series of wives. Her Bluebeard is a middle-aged behemoth, easily four times the size of his child bride. The fairytale is acted out in a 16th century setting and explicated, often hilariously, by a contemporary pair of young sisters. The more sexually curious of the two is named Catherine and the movie’s double ending, while not exactly Perrault’s, is pure Breillat. The French director’s idiosyncratic follow-up to her sensuously carnal, literary period piece, The Last Mistress (NYFF 2007), is a perversely chaste and highly personal adaptation of Perrault’s classic fairytale.

Playmobil Fairy Tale Sets

Deal alerts included....


Magical Queen Fairy Tale Set

So this is ending up to be a fairy tale toys week for me. I was shopping online at Barnes and Noble for something unrelated and discovered that the Playmobil Fairy Tale sets are on sale, cheaper than I've ever seen them online. So I thought I would share with any of you looking for holiday shopping ideas for little ones, or not so little ones. They are an additional $5 off the lowest listed price on the site through a special toy sale. (The terms are unclear, but each set was reduced an extra $5 in my cart, so buying more than one at the discounted price is possible in one order.)


Fairy Tale Set Lost Boy and Girl

For those of you who don't know, Playmobil has an entire series of fairies and castle toys for children, including three specific Marchen (fairy tale) sets. The sets are named with the German titles--Schneewittchen, Hansel und Gretel and Aschenputtel--which are Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella, of course. They are given more prosaic and rather unhelpful English names, however, so they often don't come up in straight searches for toys.


Princess Fairy Tale Set

Anyway, I once again adore these because they aren't branded with licensed character names. The sets are also more gender neutral, especially Hansel and Gretel. How often do you see Hansel and Gretel toys, anyway?


Magic Castle with Princess Crown

So I thought I'd share while the sale is still on. I don't know the ending date, but I always assume sooner than later on these. [Edit: I believe the sale ends at 11:59 PM on Sunday, Oct. 11th, time zone unknown.)


Royal Carriage

There are more castles and fairy sets, but I'm not going to link to them all. I just chose my favorites to share here, but be sure to explore to see them all if your interest is peaked. Not all are available on BN. Amazon has more sets, but with higher prices right now. You can also explore the Playmobil website. (It's funny that the dwarfs are sold in sets of five, not seven.)

Barnes and Noble also has some coupons right now--these don't work on the toys, but could be applied to other items, such as books or calendars. BN always has one of the best selections of calendars and they have the Rackham 2010 Calendar I'm debating for myself.

Save an additional 10% off one item with coupon code: H8J3U7N.
Dates: Ends 10/18

Attention B&N Members! Save an additional 15% off one item with coupon code: P3W3U8W.
Dates: Ends 10/18


Rackham's Fairy Tales 2010 Calendar

The links in this post are affiliate links so SurLaLune will also receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after using the links, if you are so inclined to shop. Not my primary reason for sharing, but helpful all the same.

Granny O’Grimm

Okay, this one made me laugh. And then I wanted more and started trying to figure out how to get more...

The best place to learn about Granny O'Grimm is on her newly launched website at Granny O'Grimm. Here are some explanations of what all of this is about, namely a short film that's winning prizes at film festivals and is now being made into a series.

Inspired by a character in Irish writer Kathleen O'Rourke's stand-up comedy show, Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty first came to the screen in a 5min short film directed by Nicky Phelan and produced by Brown Bag Films in 2008. Currently zimmer-framing her way around the international film festival circuit, 'Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty' has already collected a number of audience awards at film festivals in Ireland, America and Australia. The short film will have an Irish theatrical release through Paramount Pictures this year and will receive its television debut on Ireland's public service broadcaster, RTE.

You can watch the beginning of the film on the website at The Film.
Alas, it's not the entire film, so be prepared to be tortured as you wish for more..

Here's more about the series, too.

We all know the Grimm fairytales. Granny's are grimmer...
Once upon a time there was a granny who dreamed of being the best granny in the whole world. Unfortunately, this granny was tormented by a lifetime of rage against the world and everyone in it. Luckily, nobody noticed what an angry old woman she had become because they took no notice of her one way or another. But there's only so much anger one old woman can repress before it BURSTS OUT FROM THE DEPTHS OF HER SOUL IN A SCREAMING FIREBALL OF BITTERNESS AND RESENTMENT!

...or a bedtime story, as Granny herself likes to call it.

Granny O'Grimm is a 26 x 11 min animated series. Each episode features Granny O'Grimm's desperate attempts to be the perfect granny to her three grandchildren, before the fairytales unleash her demons. Produced by Brown Bag Films and directed by Nicky Phelan, the series will be created in 3D & 2D computer animation.

And here are some of Granny's thoughts on a few fairy tales:

She doesn’t think much of them as it turns out: “That Little Mermaid fancied herself too much by half. Turning her nose up at the local merboys to chase a human Prince. It was far from princes she was reared let me tell you. And where did the Gingerbread Man’s notions of escaping to a better life get him? Dead inside in a fox, that’s where”.

These are produced by Brown Bag Films which is celebrating a great year and a fifteen year anniversary. You can read more about that at Brown Bag’s Darragh O’Connell Talks 15 Years of Animation. They also have an informative article to announce the launching of the site at Granny O'Grimm launches her very own website and a little bit of history behind the development.

I can't wait for DVDs of this one. I will preorder them as soon as I learn about them. Oh, please oh please oh please put them on DVD sooner rather than later...

Here's a slightly different clip:

La barbe bleu [Bluebeard] directed by Catherine Breillat (2009)

Earlier this week, I saw this small item listed on the New Statesman website for the London Film Festival.

Bluebeard (dir: Catherine Breillat)

Famously retold by Angela Carter in her story collection The Bloody Chamber, this fairy-tale gets a low-budget treatment from the provocative Breillat.

I saved it and decided to research further when I had more time. Then a great review showed up in the news for today at Bluebeard: 'A Minor Masterpiece' by Howard Schumann. He explains the plot and gives a glowing review. Here's part of his plot summary:

The film operates on parallel levels, both involving two sisters. In the first story, two young sisters play in the attic of their home in France in the present. Catherine, who according to Breillat's autobiographical material, represents the director, plays power games with her older but more withdrawn sister Marie-Anne by tormenting her with readings of the classic horror story "Bluebeard."

The review is much longer, so click on through to read more. I am impressed with the photography considering this was classed as low budget.



You can of course read more about it at IMDB, too. The viewer ratings aren't as glowing, but they are pretty high for IMDB ratings. (It's all relative with this stuff.)


It's refreshing to see this tale get a new treatment. It's so often avoided in film these days and not well-recognized by the general public. The average person on the street always confuses him with Blackbeard and wants to talk about pirates with me. :) Not that this is a high profile film, but anything is a boon. Older literature implies everyone used to understand Bluebeard as a stereotype, but not so anymore.

Hopefully this one will make it to DVD stateside someday...

And if you want to refresh your memory and read the original again, try The Annotated Bluebeard (the one that started SurLaLune).

Edit: I added more about U.S. screenings and releases in another post.