TWO more followers! Welcome! Now we must press forward to 200.

Non-knit

Hat sent me some Babbington leeks. She tried last year, but I failed. I’m very keen to have them, as part of my perennial-vegetable project, the old-age answer to vegetable growing (if not necessarily to deer). We’re planning to go to Strathardle on Monday, where planting them will be my first project, inside the vegetable cage. Potatoes second.

You probably already know, because he’s world-wide news, that Cardinal O’Brien has been ordered by the Vatican to spend a penitential period abroad, outwith Scotland. The implication is that he will be allowed to retire to Dunbar within the foreseeable future. The parish priest there is cross, and threatens to sue to Vatican – how do you do that? – if the Cardinal isn’t allowed to come. O’Brien has always enjoyed travelling  Six months in a monastery on the outskirts of Rome shouldn’t be too onerous.

My husband just came in to say that there is a heron in our downstairs neighbours’ ornamental pool. A fine sight. How can we have downstairs neighbours with a garden if we live at street level? Because we live on a steep hill – in the back, we are two stories up.

Knitting-related Miscellany

I’ve had emails – we probably all have – from Interweave about their new subscription service. Far too expensive even for my extravagant self. But I am puzzled as to why the sample video produces no sound on my iPad.

Lou sent me this link of CCTV footage taken on a ferry crossing to Shetland. When I was young and crossed the sea by ship, all furniture was unostentatiously fastened to the floor. Why not so on the Shetland ferry? I would love to have gone that way, with Kristie and Knitsofacto and Kate in September, but getting to Aberdeen to join the boat would have taken an extra day from our precious few.

I have been paying mild attention to the Fiber Factory knitting competition, especially because Franklin is one of the judges. The first challenge was to Knit Your Life, and I think the Mason-Dixon knitter’s contribution was brilliant. It didn’t win. Maybe she didn’t send it in.

And finally, knitting

I started a swatch of Faded Blue Raincoat and the lace pattern in The Knitter. I haven’t knitted lace for a while, and perhaps for that reason it felt strange and clumsy. I’ve bought the Bay Laurel pattern (as I said, extravagant) and will swatch that as well. I suspect I could have found something pretty close in one of the books which clutter up the place.

I think I have figured out -- three-dimensional thinking is not my forte, as I am sure I have mentioned before -- that a capelet could be knitted in the round. 

And I knit Onwards on Relax2. Should reach the next eyelets today.