I have lost a follower!

And I have used up almost all today's blogging time attending to correspondence.

The jacket progresses well. The next excitement will be dividing at the underarm. That moment is not far off, although perhaps not this evening. Quite soon after that I will have to graft the live stitches I am knitting on, to the lower edge of the top garter-stitch border which is of course not live. The instructions seem to glide over any possible difficulties. Presumably I proceed as if both elements were st st? Do you think I should knit up stitches from the border first, or just try to graft into the ridges as they present themselves?

Having got myself started on the subject, I spent some time with Jimmy Bean yesterday. I think I will go ahead and order Ed’s yarn, although I can’t start the sweater until I myself have measured a favourite sweater of his, and I can’t do that until mid-November in association with Franklin-at-Loop.

Thank you for your suggestion, Lou, that I buy the yarn at Loop that weekend. I had a look at their website just now. Loop doesn’t stock madelinetosh sport yarn, but they have a much bigger selection than I expected of DK. While I was at Jimmy Bean yesterday, I ran my requirements through their yarn calculator. It said I’ll need nine skeins of sport yarn, which seems rather a lot given that Ed is very fit and not very tall. But I can’t bear worrying, and this is going to be expensive anyway.

It might be worth taking a moment to re-do the calculation for DK, though, and then looking again at the selection at Loop. At Jimmy Bean, I’ve narrowed it down to Firewood or Cove or Hickory or Well Water. Susie most kindly wrote yesterday to say that she lives near the factory outlet (no discount, alas, or we would all move to Texas) and would get me anything I wanted.

It was incredibly kind of her, but I think any more choice would simply paralyse.

I will certainly buy something at Loop when I go to Franklin's classes, as a souvenir of a going-to-be-wonderful day.

Vegetable-growing

We found last weekend that the deer had been back, in force. We have never had them anything like as bad as this. There was an item on television last week about some people called “poachers” who will come and take away your deer for free. Alas, there was no mention of how to get in touch.

I had hoped for an end-of-season sorrel soup, but they had had that. And the autumn raspberries. They still hadn’t got into the vegetable cage, and we had a pleasant dish of broccoli from there. I will have to think hard about every square inch of that space for next year. I think the crop I most missed, of those the deer ate, was mange-tout peas. Followed closely by broad beans. Both heavy on space. 

Deer don’t like rhubarb or potatoes or Jerusalem artichokes. Or, needless to say, Good King Henry. That’s a start. They nibbled my bunching onions without doing much damage – that could change as the weather gets colder.