Half-way through row 137. So today should see the current chart page finished, and we’ll have a picture tomorrow. I dropped a stitch yesterday evening (perhaps because Sunday is cider-drinking day) and am not happy with the result of trying to retrieve it, but it’s certainly not bad enough to justify taking back two or three 865-stitch rows. Maybe I can improve things when I get back to the spot this evening, cold sober.

A post-war VKB sold on eBay yesterday for somewhat more than I had to pay for any of my five on Saturday, and I didn’t recognise the names of any of the bidders. There are clearly a lot of extravagant loonies out there, self included. A brace of VKB’s, spring and autumn ’49, are coming up together as one lot today. No significant bidding yet.

Fair Isles

I went through my archives but can’t find any record of a sweater I knit with the stitch pattern the Famous Designer used (see Blog entries for the last few days). But I only started keeping proper records in 1979, and I clearly remember two Fair Isles that aren’t recorded, so maybe it was one of those. As more and more books got published, I ranged beyond Odham’s Encyclopedia in search of stitch patterns.

Esther, you said a couple of days ago that you find it difficult to put colours together. I can’t do it for beans, but have had some success using Kaffe’s idea of trying to match the colours in a favourite picture. James, here in a photo taken in Strathardle at Christmas, ’89, is wearing what is perhaps my masterpiece in this genre, based on a portrait by Ingres of Count Gouryev – spelling surely wrong. He (Count G.) lives in the Hermitage. I saw him on loan to the National Gallery in London once, and fell in love and knit this sweater. He turned up again at the big Ingres show more recently and it was wonderful to see him again.



He is wearing black, pictured against a stormy sky. It was remarkable how many colours there turned out to be, when I started really peering at the postcard. The pink is in the angry sky.

The other sweater is Alexander’s, photographed when I finished it in 1984 and again on Games Day, 1993. (A firm note on my page of calculations says, “Too short!”) Ketki is wearing her wedding sweater. James and Cathy are also in the picture, and the apparatus for Tilt the Bucket can be seen in the background, like an idle guillotine.




Both of these sweaters use the idea I got from Odham’s, of colours which change both in relation to each other and in relation to the pattern. Background and foreground colours are kept separate. I tried, once, mixing foreground and background, but it didn’t work. I am now pretty determined, when I’ve done Alexander’s sweater and some more Princess, to do a Fair Isle in ’07 on the system mentioned in the last couple of days, where the colour changes are organised over perhaps 12 rows and repeat regularly, but don’t relate to the stitch pattern. And I’ll use the stitch pattern the Famous Designer used.

Comments

I’m sorry I still haven’t got my email address into the sidebar. Its miles dot jean at googlemail dot com. Tamar, of course you are right that there were plenty of knitting books and magazines at the start of the 20th century. It’s just that ideas didn’t spread quite as fast as they do now. I’ve got the Dillmont book and will look today to see if my edition (is dated and) describes grafting.

Ann, thank you (all too briefly) for the invaluable references in the pursuit of “Kitchener stitch”. You haven’t heard the end of the story yet!

And I will return to the subject of the Ryder Cup before we’ve all forgotten about it.