Ever Onward

I think I'll post this as a separate entry, too, hoping to preserve the image.

The picture is in the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow. It's beautiful and deeply peaceful and I got out the postcard yesterday and started choosing colours for the Stillwater-replacement, using it as a guide. (Kaffe Fassett's idea, and a good one. I've done it before.) With the severe restriction that I'm NOT going to buy any yarn.

I've got nine or ten colours, and I like the way they look. The main lack is a red to represent the cupboard-in-shadow in the lower right, and perhaps not enough charcoal grey to do the shawl. I started looking through pattern collections and making calculations, too, so far without success -- if it fits vertically, it doesn't fit horizontally. But I've got lots more to look at, including a book of Starmore's entirely devoted to charts for colour knitting. I find myself -- and it's totally unreasonable -- rather anti-Starmore after the Stillwater experience, and I am concentrating so far on my beloved Sheila Macgregor's Fair Isle book. We shall see.

For actual knitting, I cast on a sweater for grandson Fergus, as mentioned yesterday. The yarn is Rowan's 4-ply Soft, and there's no doubt, it's orange. I love the feel of it. For gauge I used the figures on the ballband -- quicker than swatching -- and for size, the "small child" schematic in Vicky Square's book, "Knitting Great Classics". Except that she gave 24" for the circumferance and I threw in an extra inch. It's a very useful book. It's currently at Kirkmichael, where I used it for Theo's Koigu sweater (Adult extra large) and now for Mungo's. The book gives stich-counts for a variety of gauges, as well as schematics.