Here’s a curious note for you on the vegetable-growing front:

Remember that “seedbed roll” in which I invested and with which I totally failed? Due, I think, to an uncharacteristic spring drought. Well, yesterday I set out to find how other people had fared. Googling produced pages of advertisements, and a few bloggers who posted in the spring that they were going to try it – including one who had my idea that maybe the upper plastic level would offer protection from rabbits.

But no results. I persevered until page five, where the entries seemed to be wandering from the point.

So I went to my AllotmentsUK Yahoo group and posted the question. No replies, in 24 hours.

I don’t know what I conclude. I think maybe it means that results were less than sensationally wonderful, but the argumentum a silentio is notoriously unreliable.

Knitting

It’s done. Now all I must do is remember to take it along when we go back to Strathardle tomorrow. We nearly forgot to send our entries in at all – but recovered in time; the deadline is Monday.

I left the jabot in Strathardle, so I set forward last night on the Scotch Thistle Lace Stole, Cynthia’s and Sue’s gift to me that happy day in CT. Most of the rest of last night's knitting-time was spent winding a skein of beautiful Fiesta Ballerina.

The pattern wants 550 yards of fingering yarn, to be knit on 4mm needles giving a blocked gauge of 5½ stitches per inch. The yarn seems finer than that – lace weight or below. The ball band says there are 925 yards which will give 7 stitches to the inch on size 3.75mm needles (size 5).

We lace knitters don’t worry too much about such details. I started casting on, on 5’s, after winding the 925 yards, with the thought of adding one 10-stitch pattern repeat. The needle feels uncomfortably large. I may go down a size or two, and add two or more pattern repeats.

The other big knitting news that is that Gerri has sent me Jared’s book, from St Paul, MN, out of sheer kindness. It’s on its way. I’ll report fully when it turns up. He has been blogging lately about some of the patterns, in a most enticing fashion.

Non-knit

An unconscionable number of people will be sleeping in this house in our absence the night of August 21st – cricket-lovers, mostly, who have stayed behind in England to watch a day of the final test match at the Oval and are coming to the Games at the last minute. So today I must make some beds.