The edging extends just about exactly half-way around the veil, at the moment.



The yarn that Helen bought for me on eBay has just arrived – before dawn. I think the colours will photograph a bit better if I wait for daylight, so here, to help us along, is a blurry picture of the pattern – which I won’t be using. (I couldn't scan it, because it's stuck to the box.) Twenty balls of Rowan Designer DK and Dk Tweed, in colours much darker and more harmonious than the pattern would suggest. I got a bargain.










The other thing that turned up yesterday was the new Knitting. It inspires, as always, the feeling that they’re trying hard and doing well and it doesn’t quite jell. The problem, I have finally decided, lies in the designs, presumably because the magazine can’t afford to pay like IK and VK and Knitter’s and Rowan, and hasn’t succeeded yet in unearthing an undiscovered talent happy to work for peanuts.

Back in the Good Old Days, Britain was awash in weekly women’s magazines of a homely nature. I can scarcely remember what they contained – mild fashion and milder recipes, fiction, Beverley Nichols – and knitting patterns. Every week. Often rather interesting ones. I think they mostly came from the spinners, rather than directly from the designers, and I assume that they were in-house designs which were deemed, in the end, a little too adventurous (or, in other cases, too dull) to be worth a substantial print-run as a pattern leaflet. Do the spinners still employ designers? They must.

Comment

Lauri, that’s cheering news, that my homepage comes up on top when one Googles on “Gladys Amedro”.

When she died, I heard of it from a cyber-friend in Texas. She – the friend – had been on two knitting tours of Shetland, where she met Amedro and they subsequently kept in touch. After her death, her son went through his mother’s address book and wrote to people, and the woman in Texas emailed me. Could it possibly have been Mary Morrison? I have unfortunately forgotton.

At any rate, I wondered if anyone was going to write an obituary, and in the end, did it myself. I’m glad I did – she certainly deserved one. It’s there on my homepage, as it appeared in the Scotsman. I was out-of-pocket, too. They used that nice photograph from her book, with the knitting in her hands. I got it from the photographer in Lerwick who took it. I had to pay him for it, and the Scotsman didn’t even send me a fiver for the obituary.

Non-knit

File conversion continues well. My husband will venture forth to Morningside this afternoon, to advise and comfort his sister who is having bad Neighbour Problems. They have embarked on massive and tasteless building works and amongst other distresses and anxieties, my sister-in-law fears for the safety of a common wall.

But, like most ill winds, this will have advantages: namely, it will give me a chance to hunker down to the job this afternoon and, especially, to write the covering letter to accompany the CD to the publisher. My husband will then have all day tomorrow to complain about it, and re-write.