Crafty Manolo

I wonder how many of you remember the short-lived wonder that was Pushing Daisies. I was a huge fan. Every week it felt like this glorious world teetering on the pin-point intersection of the whimsical and the macabre was created just for me. The hero was a pie maker who could revive the dead, with caveats. The heroine was his murdered childhood sweetheart who he revived, with consequences.

I remembered the revived sweetheart and dog, the synchronized swimmer aunts of the dead girl and their cheese fixation, the scheming waitress with a crush on the hero, the private eye who used the hero’s talent to help him solve crimes… so that he could collect all those juicy rewards.

All of that had stuck with me. Funnily enough, until Mr. Twistie gave me the entire series on Blu-ray for Christmas and (just two nights ago) set up the Blu-ray player we bought three months ago (I’d have done it myself, but it turned out to be far more complicated than I ever imagined, between all the things plugged in back there and… well… I married a sound guy. It’s always more complex where anything involving sound is involved), and I could sit down and watch the show again… I’d forgotten how many crafts were involved in this show.

I’ve watched six episodes, so far, and here are the crafts I’ve seen displayed: knitting, taxidermy, blacksmithing, Beadazzling, creative baking. Emerson Cod, the detective, knits compulsively. He’s knitted sweater vests, gun cozies, money cozies… he even escaped from a body bag by using one of his ever-present – though jealously hidden – knitting needles to puncture it. The aunts, Lily and Vivian, stuff and mount each of their pet birds as they die, and Lily’s custom collection of eyepatches are Beadazzled within an inch of… well… they’re Beadazzled, all right! Lily even performs experimental surgery on a one-winged undead carrier pigeon with a parrot wing and the Beadazzler. A farrier is killed while making horseshoes at his anvil. Chuck, the dead girl, bakes special pies with cheese in the crusts and homeopathic anti-depressants in the fillings and sends them surreptitiously to her aunts to help them with their matching personality disorders. Oh! And Chuck keeps bees and makes her own honey.

How had I forgotten this aspect of the show I loved so dearly? I don’t know. All I do know is that I’m delighted to have it back in my life, craftiness and all.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 12:28 pm by Twistie and is filed under Knitting, Media, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.