Knitting

We were in the studio, getting ready to shoot the beret layout you're looking at on the opposite page. We had a stack of sophisticated designer caps, all lint-rolled, brushed and fluffed to perfection. Then in walked the makeup artist -- in a hat that stole the shoot. Garen Tolkin was wearing a charmingly floppy beret she had just finished knitting the night before. She spotted it at A Mano Yarn Center in Mar Vista -- "I saw it and I just had to make it," she said. And we felt the same way.

Ever the proud father, Chris MacAskill screens 20-year-old home movies of his sons -- Ben singing about a stegosaurus, Mark getting a mohawk -- on his laptop. "This is the negative of working with family members," a red-faced Mark, now 26, says before retreating to his cubicle. Meet the MacAskills, Silicon Valley's version of the Waltons: seven members of a close-knit clan, ranging in age from 23 to 63, who run SmugMug Inc., which helps families share their own Kodak moments online.

The Rev. Hamilton Coe Throckmorton shivered with anticipation as he gazed at the loot -- wads of $50 bills piled high beside boxes of crayons in a Sunday school classroom. Cautiously, he locked the door. Then he started counting. It was a balmy Friday evening in September. From several floors below, faint melodies drifted up -- the choir practicing for Sunday service. Throckmorton was oblivious.

If scarves have a downside, it's their trailing ends. Short scarves unhook and need rearranging; longer scarves want to drag behind, drop suddenly into a mug of cocoa, get caught in the ordinary machinery of your day. Think Isadora Duncan. But sew the ends of a knit scarf together and you have the problem solved -- and the scarf pretty much perfected. It's one of those ideas that seems so obvious you'd think someone surely discovered it a long, long time ago.

MINGY twin sets, skimpy pashminas, stupidly skinny scarves, tissue-thin turtlenecks -- can we be rid of them soon enough? As soon as Giles Deacon sent that scarf -- that insanely thick beast of an orange scarf -- down the runway, we were dying for something substantial. A thick-ribbed sweater dress. An Aran knit cardigan coat. Anything made of the kind of fat, soft yarn you could really sink into. The kind of piece that has the power to update whatever it is you're wearing with it.

Skydivers in the Pacific Northwest mourned their friends Tuesday as search crews located the remains of a group killed in a plane crash southeast of Mt. Rainier. Authorities withheld the identities of the nine skydivers and pilot, but family and friends came forward as workers began removing the bodies from the crash site. "The people on the plane were all my friends, my family," said an emotional Kelly Craig, a skydiver whose brother Casey was on the plane.

THERE was the chic -- knit pencil skirts and Jackie O. shifts in subdued colors. And there was the surreal -- many matching knit pants and tops in Miami-bright blues and corals. But together, the audience for the St. John Spring/Resort 2008 runway show in Orange County created an impromptu retrospective of a 45-year-old company that has weathered some mixed fortunes of its own in middle age.

The next time you're in search of a knitting project, ask not what Grandma would have done, but what Sid would have knit. Sid Vicious, that is. "Pretty in Punk: 25 Punk, Rock and Goth Knitting Projects" is the first book from Alyce Benevides and Jaqueline Milles, New York designers and founders of Knit-Head, a "punk rock knitwear company."

"Death at a Funeral" is lethal farce, combining hints of "The Lavender Hill Mob," doses of Joe Orton and a smidgen of the Farrelly brothers' scatology in its mix. It's sillier but funnier than "Knocked Up," the summer's other notable comedy.

Today's protest music ain't pretty. Talk about "If I Had a Hammer." Hammers and bells abound, bro, but not too many songs to sing. From the first blast, even if the words weren't clear, the danger and warning were right in your face as two bands from San Diego's thriving extreme music/metal scene -- the Locust and Cattle Decapitation -- machined Hollywood's Knitting Factory on Wednesday night along with Rhode Island's Daughters.