I persevered doggedly with the Surprise last night and covered, as hoped, pretty well half the distance between where I was and the goal. Long rows of garter stitch do not offer the intellectual excitement -- no exaggeration in that phrase -- afforded by a couple of pattern repeats on the Princess Shawl.

Kerry, the yarn is Koigu Premium Merino. I had a vendor friend send me six skeins of an aran-y white and six of colours of her choosing.

Above is a pattern I thought of as a possibility for my dream-cardigan, prompted by Lorna's kind reference to the www.guernseywool.co.uk site. It's from Gladys Thompson's "Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys & Arans". The Arans were an afterthought, I suspect, requested by the publisher because Aran was getting popular at the time (1969). The interest of the book is the fishermen's patterns she collected from the north of England and Scotland. She went to the fishing villages and copied the patterns from men's backs and clothes lines, if need be.

It was, for me anyway, the first book that took "peasant knitting" seriously and researched it properly.

The pattern above is called the Seahouses pattern (Seahouses being the name of a village near Whitby; Yorkshire, I think). It's all done with knits and purls. It needs proper guernsey wool (tightly twisted), as above, and smallish needles, to keep the sea out. I could relax the needle size a bit, and just stay away from the water.

But all this depends on the news from London. If Rachel can't find her daughter Lizzie's First Holy Communion veil, that'll be my winter project -- a veil for the new Rachel Miles, who will be making her First Holy Communion in Beijing next April.

Comments

Thank you, as always for comments. I hope I've said how much I love comments. Donna, I'll try that excercise when I step out this morning (we don't have any stairs internally). I do wear gel pads. I think the heel is somewhat better this morning. It must have been that strenuous walk on Friday.

Anne, I don't remember. Blame senility. I feel bad about it. But, yes, James is still in Beijing -- or, again there, depending on how long ago we corresponded. He's now the China man for the Economist magazine. His younger daughter was born not long before they went out, and he and his wife brought her up with Chinese as her first language for her first three or four years.