Not much, today.

Off we go. A Strathardle session (at last) will be a useful tonic for both if we survive it. The weather is bad.

I found that IK subscription service, easily enough, this morning. I must have been in Stupid Mode yesterday. It costs $20 per month – it would soon add up. Maybe I heard about it because of my Craftsy classes, rather than my subscription to Knitting Daily.

Little to report, as usual on Monday. I am within a yard or two of finishing the first madelinetosh skein employed on Relax2. Relax1 used less than four skeins all told, so I must be making progress. (“Less” rather than “fewer” there, I think – thinking more about the quantity of yarn than the counting of skeins.) And, sure enough, it is nice to find the next skein ready-wound, as a result of using two for the long-tail cast-on.

No swatching yesterday, but I’m trying to print the Bay Laurel pattern to take along for swatching in Perthshire. And I’ll take Relax2 – there’s no dedicated Strathardle knitting these days.

See you at the weekend, insh’Allah.

Followers flooding in. Welcome, all!

Southern Gal, Interweave has got a new subscription scheme where for a monthly fee you can access all their on-line videos and TV programs, including new ones as they get added. I must have heard about it because I subscribe to Knitting Daily (which is free). The monthly fee was much too high for my taste – but now that I want to direct you to a webpage with more substantial information, I can’t find it.

I like your alpacas.

I must get back to Craftsy. I still haven't done my mattress stitch homework for Franklin.

Donice, thank you for the pointers to EZ’s pelerine (love that word) and Barbara Walker’s top-down cape. Both are open down the front, like an old-fashioned nurse’s cape; not that one would have to stick to that. The pelerine is in Knitting Around.

I’ve swatched the pattern from The Knitter once through. It looks rather nice. I haven’t “got it” yet, although it is very simple: six stitches, eight rows of which the returns are plain purl – and would be even plainer knit, if done in the round. Then the pattern is offset, so there are 16 rows before you get back where you started. I must try Bay Laurel.

And I’ve added the fourth round of eyelets to Relax2.

Gardening news

We had a downpour yesterday such as I have not seen for a long time. I got wet.

Everything grows in May, even for me. The Big Nameless Waitrose chilli fills up most of the kitchen window and has quite a bit of fruit on it, one even turning red. Waitrose suddenly had chilli plants again this week, a third of the present size of mine, heavily laden with chillis both red and green. It was tempting to start again, but I could no more throw away the plant I have nurtured since January than I could throw away the cat.

One of the little Apache chilli plants I bought more recently at Tesco has started to branch!

And those seeds on the front step have come up – huauzontle, sorrel, and finally the tiny green croquet hoops which will be Welsh onions. Everything is still very small in this cold, cold spring. There are no Jersey Royal potatoes in Waitrose yet, and the asparagus still comes from Peru: in mid-May.

Strathardle tomorrow, we hope. Am I strong enough?

TWO more followers! Welcome! Now we must press forward to 200.

Non-knit

Hat sent me some Babbington leeks. She tried last year, but I failed. I’m very keen to have them, as part of my perennial-vegetable project, the old-age answer to vegetable growing (if not necessarily to deer). We’re planning to go to Strathardle on Monday, where planting them will be my first project, inside the vegetable cage. Potatoes second.

You probably already know, because he’s world-wide news, that Cardinal O’Brien has been ordered by the Vatican to spend a penitential period abroad, outwith Scotland. The implication is that he will be allowed to retire to Dunbar within the foreseeable future. The parish priest there is cross, and threatens to sue to Vatican – how do you do that? – if the Cardinal isn’t allowed to come. O’Brien has always enjoyed travelling  Six months in a monastery on the outskirts of Rome shouldn’t be too onerous.

My husband just came in to say that there is a heron in our downstairs neighbours’ ornamental pool. A fine sight. How can we have downstairs neighbours with a garden if we live at street level? Because we live on a steep hill – in the back, we are two stories up.

Knitting-related Miscellany

I’ve had emails – we probably all have – from Interweave about their new subscription service. Far too expensive even for my extravagant self. But I am puzzled as to why the sample video produces no sound on my iPad.

Lou sent me this link of CCTV footage taken on a ferry crossing to Shetland. When I was young and crossed the sea by ship, all furniture was unostentatiously fastened to the floor. Why not so on the Shetland ferry? I would love to have gone that way, with Kristie and Knitsofacto and Kate in September, but getting to Aberdeen to join the boat would have taken an extra day from our precious few.

I have been paying mild attention to the Fiber Factory knitting competition, especially because Franklin is one of the judges. The first challenge was to Knit Your Life, and I think the Mason-Dixon knitter’s contribution was brilliant. It didn’t win. Maybe she didn’t send it in.

And finally, knitting

I started a swatch of Faded Blue Raincoat and the lace pattern in The Knitter. I haven’t knitted lace for a while, and perhaps for that reason it felt strange and clumsy. I’ve bought the Bay Laurel pattern (as I said, extravagant) and will swatch that as well. I suspect I could have found something pretty close in one of the books which clutter up the place.

I think I have figured out -- three-dimensional thinking is not my forte, as I am sure I have mentioned before -- that a capelet could be knitted in the round. 

And I knit Onwards on Relax2. Should reach the next eyelets today.

One of those days when I have too much to say – I’ll write half, and then forget the other half by tomorrow morning.

To start with, though, read Liz Lovick.

Thanks for the help with the capelet question. Beverly, Bay Laurel is gorgeous. It’s written for worsted – but it might well be worth swatching that beautiful stitch pattern to see how it comes out in lace-weight. And Kimberly, the idea of seaming a Half Circle Chapel Veil is also very interesting.

I suspect that if one is really serious about this business, one has to spend a lot of time swatching. Franklin does it. Kate Davies does.

The new IK turned up yesterday, not much of interest at first glance (as often, with the Summer issue of anything) but there is a Classic Elite capelet on the back cover. I am not remotely tempted, per se, -- the Bergere de France pattern in The Knitter has a much more interesting lace pattern, and better shaping, I think. But maybe this means that capelets are in.

The effect of the photograph is of a silliness that wouldn’t suit me – bare shoulders, light-coloured attention-drawing yarn. Slightly off-putting. How much of our judgment of a pattern depends on the photography?

I got most of a skein of Faded Blue Raincoat wound yesterday, not without crises, and may swatch soon. (I think there’s plenty of yarn for both swatches and finished product.) Meanwhile I toiled on with Relax2. I may (or may not) reach the 4^th round of eyelets today. It is a situation where my slow and awkward knitting really tells. The only thing to do is to keep on keeping on.

Thanks for the help, too, on “sock blanks”. I did some googling, once I saw your comments. I get slightly the impression that this is an idea which has had its day and is fading. I was struck with the notion of a sock blank in which two strands of sock yarn were knitted together so that the eventual socks, however wild, would be identical twins. But, Blueloom, I agree with you in preferring fraternal twins for wild socks.

Kimberly, again, thanks for the Easyknits link to Sushi Sock Rolls. Very interesting indeed. I’ve saved it to Evernote. The first thing is to see how I get on with the sock blank I’ve actually got.

Domestic architecture

Stashdragon, although our neighbour lives directly above us, I must go out of my front door and around the corner to visit her. The Edinburgh New Town fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, despite its calm exterior.

We moved here 20 years ago, when we were a good deal spryer than we are now but could see old age coming. We wanted to avoid stairs, and have wound up in what must be one of the largest flat flats in the city. Six steps up from the street, and here we are.

Our neighbour, on the other hand, must negotiate 11 or 12 steps from the street before she even gets to the door. Once inside, there are three long flights of stairs – to accommodate high ceilings – before she reaches her level. She has been there more than 50 years.

New follower, welcome!

Back to Kathy’s Knits.

It is an extremely interesting shop. Had I but world enough and time, I would spend more of them there. She sells British yarn, as local as possible. No Rowan or Patons or Sirdar. The most familiar name you’ll spot is Jamieson and Smith.

I bought one of those things, I had heard of them, no idea what to call them, a strip of machine-knitted yarn which the artist has hand-painted after knitting the strip, and you’re meant to unravel it as you knit your sock, or whatever. It’s from ceaberrys.etsy.com but there are no other examples on the website – just yarn. I’ll have to take a picture of it for tomorrow.  I can’t even think of how to phrase the concept for googling.

The yarn is merino, cashmere and nylon and I could always just keep it as a scarf. But I think I’ll cast it on as a sock pretty soon.

I also bought two balls of Pure Natural Guernsey Yarn: Hebridean/Manx/Romney from Blacker Yarns with a pattern of Kathy’s own for a simple cabled hat. I don’t know when I’ll get around to that.

I’ve been thinking about the Faded Blue Raincoat yarn mentioned yesterday. I think, on close inspection, that the pattern in The Knitter would have to be classified as a poncho. Is that really what I want? Maybe so, as I am not one to twist a scarf artistically around my neck like some.

There’s no schematic. Front and back are identical, with a scooped neck rather like Relax itself. The model is wearing it almost off one shoulder, but it could be narrowed a bit. The final instruction is: To make up – sew edge seams. That’s it. And I think it must mean, sew the shoulder seams, the bottom remaining open.

I think the only reason I hesitate is that Franklin has an anti-poncho cartoon in “It Itches”. This one is rib-length and maybe doesn’t even count as a poncho. The thing to do is to wind the yarn and swatch.

I’m getting on fine with Relax2, if slowly – a third round of eyelets was added last night.

Non-knit

I’m going to have tea this afternoon with a neighbour who lives high above us. She owns the picture I would most like to have in the world. It was painted by an artist of some distinction – he’s in the national collections – who used to live on the south side of Drummond Place. It's quite small. It’s called “Going Round to Monty’s”, Monty being the familiar nickname of the famous man who used to live in our house.

It’s November (surely) in the picture, it’s dark, it's wet. The picture shows the whole tenement, thus including the top layer where our neighbour has lived for very many decades. But Monty lived down here, in our house. Climbing up to see her is hard work – I don’t see how she ever gets out at all. But I will be rewarded by spending an hour with the picture again. 

Yesterday was magic.

Grannypurple is in town. I met her and her husband Joe at Kathy’s Knits. We spent money there for a while, and then went around the corner to Angelina’s for coffee. A simple programme. I’ve never yet met one of you whom I didn’t enjoy spending time with. But yesterday was special.

Here are Grannyp and I in the shop, flanking a Kate Davies design  which many will recognise. Grannyp is actually wearing the Relax! If I had grasped that sooner, I would have had her take her coat off for this picture. She has achieved exactly the fit I am hoping for.

In the evening, Joe also sent this picture of me -- utter magic. If my grieving heirs want something for the funeral leaflet, in the modern fashion, they could do a lot worse than this one. The sweater is that Araucania one which went on for years in Strathardle and which, at the very end, was crowned with success by your suggestion, Ron, of  EZ’s Open-Collared Pullover treatment for the neck. (Knitter’s Almanac, October)

But how was the picture taken? In Angelina’s, I assume. The camera was on the table – the purples were planning to walk on up to John Lewis where Joe hoped to see and handle a piece of recondite camera equipment. But it’s not as if grannypurple and I spent the whole time talking about knitting, leaving Joe to sip his cappuccino and fiddle with the camera. It was a three-way conversation about life and death and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[I remember it as a week of solid terror. They, interestingly, don’t. But they are younger, and Canadian which might make a difference, and I don’t think they had children at the time – I had three very small ones, and was substantially pregnant with Helen; couldn’t run, even if there had been anywhere to go.]

Grannyp gave me some yarn, most magically two skeins of a 50% merino-silk mixture from Sericin Silkworks of West Waterloo, Ontario. The shade is splendidly named: Faded Blue Raincoat. It appears to be laceweight.

I am resolved to attempt the Angel Cape I mentioned yesterday, from The Knitter 58. I suppose a swatch is called for – the pattern wants a 4 ply yarn. Lace being lace, the difference won’t be all that great. Jean S of West Allenhurst, NJ, learning to knit in the late 40’s with Vogue Knitting in hand but only Woolworth’s on Main Street from which to buy yarn, would have plunged straight in.

All I need is an extra pair of hands, and maybe four more hours per day. Just saying.

I have been feeling less than up to the mark for weeks lately, and had begun to suspect terminal decline. But I left Angelina’s with a spring in my step and have felt much better since. Time to go to Strathardle and get the tatties in.

We had a grand weekend, in appalling weather. Snow on high ground, Sunday night, and from Alexander and Ketki’s house, you could see it.

The ducks have made great strides since Easter, and look full-grown, although it will probably be a couple more months before they start laying. They do everything together. Alexander means to put coloured bands on their legs so that he can determine whether one of them is the ringleader: Now we will have a nap. Now we will go to the kitchen window: 

Now we will play in the bath:

Or whether it’s just that a random one decides to do something and the others go along.

They stay very near the house. Ketki thought they would enjoy the trickle of a stream which flows along the edge of the garden at least in wet weather, but they were not to be persuaded.

Putting them to bed isn’t too difficult, when Ketki is at home:

I made a good start on Relax2. My new KnitPro needle was too long – I wouldn’t have thought that possible, with nearly 400 stitches. EZ says somewhere that a 24” circular needle is all you’ll ever need, and I suspect she was right. Mine was 100cm, which is appreciably more than 24".

So there was a lot of awkward tugging of the stitches to get them to move around. And my brand new KnitPro needle came apart. I put it back together and it came apart again. I put it back together and hit it with the handle of the kitchen scissors. It came apart again. I put it back together and got Alexander to hit the hasp – if that’s the word – with a hammer. It held.

A certain amount of time had to be spent rescuing the stitches which had fallen in the three disasters, and I had to proceed with caution and not apply pressure to the join, so progress thereafter was slow. I moved everything to a shorter and sturdier needle last night.

The design incorporates four columns of simple eyelets, two on each side. I’m putting them in every 15 rounds. They make very welcome milestones for the knitter toiling through a desert of round-and-round st st, and they also have a remarkably effective decorative effect in their understated Japanese way. I've done two eyelet rounds and am well on my way to the 3rd. The yarn is wonderful, better knitted than in the skein.

I also had a pleasant time wandering around cyber space, in the absence of meal-planning. I am greatly taken with the yarn of Rhichard Devrieze although what is the point when I have a boxful of Koigu already?

I got caught up reading The Knitter on my iPad. I like “A Twisted Little Raglan” in issue 57, from Ann Budd’s “Knitter’s Handy Book of Top-Down Sweaters” (in madelinetosh DK, no less) and Bergere de France’ “Angel Cape” in 58, for throwing on over a summer shirt. It’s lace, which would be sort of fun to get back to.