Helen’s here. And James is back in Beijing. A new chapter opens. We’ll all go to Strathardle today, where her husband and sons will join us today or tomorrow. I’ve got the Linda Dick organic chicken which will be the centrepiece of the meal ending in summer pudding, if the gods smile on us. Who knows? – maybe the garden will provide potatoes and a vegetable.

We’ll be back in the middle of next week, if all goes according to plan. I’ll tell you all about my onions.

Franklin

Anita has left a new comment (on Wednesday’s post) about Ysolda’s decision to pull out of KnitCamp, and I’ve had a message from Maureen – who has spoken to Franklin – which confirms her (Anita’s) guess, namely that there was a contractual problem. It must have been sad for him, given, as you say, Mel, what an Anglophile he is. That’s what I started out as, and then I met Scotland. We might have done the same for him, had things turned out differently.

Clearly, Franklin is not at all to blame. Nor is Dolores, even.

I’m now a member of the Knit Camp 2010 Social Group group on Ravelry (Tricia’s comment yesterday). The effect is reassuring. Did the Camp organisers but know it, the sense of being able to speak freely is much to be preferred to a forum devoted to midges and cheerfulness in which one knows that dissenting voices are being silenced.

So at the moment I am sadly hopeful, so to speak, of an interesting day with Donna Druchunas on the subject of Japanese knitting.

Knitting

I finished those socks. What a relief. And knit a few more rows of the Green Granite Blocks. Now Helen and I must find some time in a busy morning to look at lace yarns and patterns.

I am tempted to start a pair of KF socks in Perthshire instead of forging ahead as I ought with that eternal sweater.