I never did get the May issue of “Knitting”. Direct Debit trouble? I’ll email them today.
Today or tomorrow I should finish the second pass through the 46-row repeat of the pattern I’m using in the centre of my sister’s shawl. (There are about 200 rows in all, but since we’re decreasing stitches at the rate of two-per-row, I suspect I’m more than half way through.) I’ll photograph it again when I reach that point.
Karin has kindly sent me an oddball of Jade Sapphire lace-weight cashmere-and-silk, to test the experience. It’s pretty wonderful. The yarn is a little bit thicker than you might expect from the description, which is a good thing in this case. I have cast on the edging of the Faux Russian Stole I have my eye on in “Gathering of Lace”, so that what I am doing amounts to a gauge swatch. And although the pattern is written for Jamieson and Smith jumper-weight, I think the Jade Sapphire is going to do fine. The only trouble – with the pattern, not the yarn – is that it is so easy, it is hard not to make mistakes. Now I’ve got to nerve myself for the actual purchase.
Springtime in Strathardle
It’s hard to look a sheep in the face without giggling, now that I’ve met Dolores. Here are a few of the local ones, with their children, in a picture taken from our kitchen garden looking across the stubble field towards the village. The farming subsidy system has changed, so that the amount of the subsidy is now arrived at by a mysterious method which no longer depends on simply counting woolly heads. And the sheep, miraculously, have stopped producing twins, for the most part. Were they on something?
A pair of hooded crows seem to want to nest in our chimney, which has been protected with chicken wire against just such an eventuality. They have been at it since we were there in early April, one or the other or both of them sitting up there all day long, cawing as if they were rehearsing to be the raven in Macbeth. They have very much the air of people who are waiting for something. My husband suggests that perhaps they were reared in the chimney themselves, and are expecting mummy and daddy to come and solve the problem of the chicken wire for them.
Our house is famous for its daffodils. I probably posted a picture rather like this one, last year.
Non-knit, Non-Strathardle
James confirms that he wrote the article on China and the Internet, in the current Economist.
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