All’s well.

The potatoes survived their frosting, as Lorna predicted. The courgettes and the runner beans have come up – and pretty well everything else as well. The slugs have had most of the lettuce, but that often happens; I put in more. There’s even a brave little row of carrots – they usually refuse to perform for me. The weather was grand, tee-shirt and sun-hat weather but not sweltering as I gather London has been recently: and a much-needed rain on Sunday night and Monday morning.

No pics -- what on earth is wrong? Other bloggers have pics.

Ted, we’re far enough north that even courgettes don’t produce an embarrassing glut, most years. I expect about 50% germination and this year I got it – there are little plants under each of those eight sawn-off water bottles. That should produce a useful but not excessive crop from early August forward.

But well-er than all of that: James and his family will be at the Games. I had thought there was no hope for them this year, because of the dates of the new school year in Beijing. Helen has decided to head back to Thessaloniki before the Games, and I had been feeling pretty glum, as most of the fun consists of being together and the remaining family, namely us and Rachel and Alexander, are often together in London so what’s the point. But this changes everything.

And there’s another VKB on eBay: Spring, 1946, no less. So far, no one’s bidding except me.

Knitting

Here’s the gansey -- or rather, there it is. I’m delighted with it. I wasn’t as close to the underarm gussets as I thought I was: I’m within a couple of rounds, now.

I made some design decisions, mostly along the lines of less-is-more. I knit a shawl for grandson James-the-Younger in the months just after Heirloom Knitting was published. I tried to get everything in, and the result is something of a mess.

So I have decided not to make that mistake this time. Even with my limited remaining life-span, there is time for more ganseys if I want to knit them. I’ve got Brown-Reinsel. I know where to get the yarn. Let’s relax.

So, no shoulder strap. I’ll simply bind off the shoulders with a three-needle bind-off and do a rolled collar with an inverted triangle neck gusset. I’ll stop the pattern after six repeats and have some definition-lines and then a substantial-sized yoke of moss-stitch or something similarly simple (eschewing the fancier knit-and-purl patterns in Starmore’s Fisherman’s Sweaters). There’ll have to be more moss stitch at the top of the sleeves.

Comments

Kate, can’t you just order EZ’s books from the Schoolhouse Press, even in Oz? I’d go for Knitting Without Tears, for starters.

Tamar, I, too, learned a lot from Mary Thomas’ Knitting Book, well before I ever heard of EZ. But in a way, she was part of the problem. She seems to sneer at “peasant shapes” and her ideas for designing knitwear are along the lines which the VKB proudly calls “couture”, however inappropriate the word when applied to knitting. With close-fitting, tortured shapes, I mean, knit piece-by-piece and laboriously seamed.