Surgery lasted a long time yesterday, through the afternoon and into the early evening. When I last spoke to my niece, C. was out of theatre and in Recovery at last. Her daughter was about to go to the hospital and try to see her. I am waiting this morning to hear that she is conscious and responding – all we can ask for, for today.

She has been suffering from a totally unrelated series of lung infections for the past two years – finally stabilised with steroids; that has weakened her. And the NHS has been rather slow to pick up on the current symptoms, which has weakened her a lot more.

I’m sure Maggie’s Centre will take a prominent position in the story soon, Fishwife. I’ve even heard of it. Up to now, we haven’t had a moment to think of such things. She was finally – after weeks and weeks and weeks of trying to tell doctors that something was wrong – taken by ambulance to the Western last Thursday. Then after some rehydration they got cracking, at last, with scans and cameras inserted into every available orifice. And here we are.

We all know to treasure the time that’s left; that’s good. And it is better, if she can live with the Knowledge, to die like this, loved and wept for, than to outlive herself and wither away in a care home on the capital she had hoped to leave her daughters.

Everything has changed. One of the three or four times in life. One thinks for a few moments about what-are-we-having-for-lunch or what-would-Thomas-the-Elder-like-for-Christmas, but there is ever the Fact, right there, waiting like a tiger.

Ok, knitting. I finished the Amedro shawl.

I love blocking lace. I hope to have a picture of it in all its glory for you tomorrow. Then on to the Japanese hat – I don’t love braiding and pom-pom-making, but it won’t take long and then I’ll be free to start the Wurm (Ravelry link). I’ve just downloaded the pattern.

Wonderful, grannypurple and Donice, to find the same family relationship to the New Yorker as our own. I struggled mightily with the subscriptions yesterday and in the end, I think, succeeded. The website seemed to offer subscriptions including Gift and International, but no renewals. I tracked it down to Conde Nast in the end.

Last year I didn’t get the annual letter inviting me to renew my gift subscriptions – I think it got swallowed up in some semi-post-office-strike. So I did it on-line, as again yesterday. Apart from not wanting to waste any issues, renewal is essential for James and Alexander who have addresses which are too long for the New Yorker computer. They have to be adroitly shoehorned in. I tried at one point yesterday to enter a new subscription for James, using exactly the wording of his current address label. The computer wouldn’t accept it.

James wants to read the New Yorker on his iPad and is cross (along with a lot of other people) that you have to pay twice, to do that.

We pass our copies on to our admirable neighbours downstairs. Pete is an advocate. He told me recently that the library of the Faculty of Advocates now subscribes to the New Yorker, on his suggestion. I glow with pride. I have made my little mark on Edinburgh life.

Today’s event is a visit to my husband’s sister in the Western Infirmary. She has been suffering from nausea for a couple of months now – we haven’t actually seen her since the Games -- and drs have been slow to do anything about it. She had an out-patient appt three weeks ago at which she was told, in so many words, that she didn’t have cancer, and was then just sent home to get on with the symptoms with a vague promise of further investigations some weeks hence.

By last week she had become so weak and uncomfortable that further delay was impossible.

She and my husband have always been highly important to each other. There are no other sib. Their father died young, their mother in middle age. There are no first cousins. C. is younger than my husband (although not quite as young as I am).

And as for knitting, I have finished the penultimate row of the Amedro shawl. Thank you for your help with lighting, which I shall save, and your admirable suggestion, Anonymous, of “combined” knitting to distinguish knit stitches from purl in a situation like this. I think I’ve got it right – and of course, if I can’t tell, no one else is likely to be able to. I’ve put in several stitch markers as a form of life-line. We’re all right up to here, if the section ends k1.

I don’t see why these final 10 rows couldn’t have been done in garter stitch. Would it have pulled in?

VKB

Thank you for all the good wishes. I mean to bid high enough that failure is very unlikely. I know now that I can trust eBay not to take the whole amount unless there is a determined underbidder pushing it up. The secret, of course, is to put in one’s massive bid in the last few seconds, so that rivals don’t have time to push you up. It takes very steady nerves. That’s where Helen C.K.S. excels.

Another pre-war issue (from a different seller) is coming up tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what it fetches.

Back in Ought Six, eBay used to tell you bidders’ code names, at least while the auction was going on. I made myself a spreadsheet showing the bidding histories of VKB’s I was interested in, my few failures as well as many successes. Littlepinksparrow was my most frequent underbidder. Leesonia43 was another formidable opponent. Rosemaryknit kept trying small bids – I hope she got some in the end. How they all must have trembled when Tayside00 entered the lists!

However, eBay decided in its wisdom that revealing even that much was undesirable in some way. One still knows, of course, that rival bids have been placed, but not who placed them. Much less fun.

Amedro shawl

I made a dreadful mistake last night. It will be interesting, today, to see if it can be fudged.

The roundels are finished, and I have proceeded to moss stitch. The first thing to do was to pick up 18 stitches from the cast-on edge of the first scallop in the edging, then turn around and knit back along them and moss stitch across 431 stitches, then pick up another 18 from the cast-off edge of the final scallop.

It was while I was performing that last operation, congratulating myself that the moss stitch seemed to have come out all right – beginning and ending with a k1 – that I began to feel uneasy. I looked back, and sure enough – in picking up the initial 18, I had gone past the cast-on stitches and on up the side of the scallop.

Tinking 431 stitches is unthinkable. Untinkable. Ripping out is a possibility – there is a row of plain knitting after the roundels, where I might be able to recover the stitches without loss. For the moment, I am moss-stitching back, wondering if there is something I can do when I get back to that edge.

I think I said earlier on that I could hardly tell which side of the shawl is which, although it is knit in st st. The problem becomes acute with moss stitch. I really can’t see what I’m doing, whether the stitch I am about to knit was k’d or p’d in the previous row, and whether or not, therefore, I have regressed to k1 p1 rib.

Maybe I really do need an Ott light.

New followers keep flowing in!

It is terribly exciting, Kristie, to learn that James is quoted in Wikipedia. Yes, he was there for Tiananmen. He was the BBC Peking correspondent at the time, pretty young and new to the job. Somewhere I have a letter from him -- these were the days before email -- wishing that something would happen in China so that he could prove himself to the BBC.

He won a Sony Radio Award for his reporting. He went to London for a week last year and made two programmes about it for the World Service on the occasion of the 20th anniversary. They put it out in a nice plastic box, but I can’t find it on the BBC website now. Must have sold out.

Jeanne, that’s an amazing clip from Lucy Neatby showing how to knit with three stands of yarn, when what you’ve got is one big cone. On a recent visit to Strathardle, I spent quite a while winding lace-weight yarn into separate balls – that stuff goes in for serious yardage; it took a while. So I am ready to roll, without the Neatby trick, but it is one I will remember.

I don’t think knitting with two or three stands together, from separate balls, is all that difficult. I’m not so sure about a number higher than that. This might be an occasion for facing up to some of the tricks in “Knitting Brioche”.

Jennifer, thanks for your encouraging remarks on the subject of knitting multiple strands of lace yarn. I like the Wurm Hat (Ravelry link) you mention – it might be a wiser choice than the EZ Snail, when I move on to hats. EZ is rather fierce, as she can occasionally be, about not attempting yarn substitutions for that pattern. I’ll download the Wurm – it may inspire me to do something about replacing my printer. I notice you used four strands – maybe I’d better do some more winding.

Meanwhile, Amedro moves forward. I finished the second row of roundels yesterday. I have no memory, as I’ve said, of the difficulties of picking up stitches for this final sprint, but I am beginning to think I do remember feeling a surprise which is stealing over me again, at how wide the upper edging is. There will be another 10 rows of moss stitch when the roundels are finished.

Still, the end is in sight.

Judith, thanks very much for the info on dehydrators. Where can I read the not-so-good reviews of the Lakeland one? I love the idea of rose-petal confetti

Here, in a nutshell, is the lace knitter’s difficulty when it comes to stash busting:


You’ve seen that box before. It’s the Chinese cashmere – more correctly, I think, “cashmere” – James and Cathy gave me for Christmas, ’08. It is now clear that the Amedro shawl is going to use just about exactly one 100 gr ball. Maybe a few yards left over, maybe a few taken from the next ball. I cast on that shawl on the 2nd of September. I’ve got about a week to go. At 2 ½ months per 100 grams, you’re looking at 10 months knitting in the photograph above.

Hopeless, at my age, given the amount of Koigu and sock yarn and Shetland jumper-weight I’ve also got to get through...

I haven’t given up on the idea of knitting three or four strands of lace-weight yarn together. It’s just that the first experiment was unsuccessful colour-wise. I have a big fisherman’s-knit scarf vaguely in mind.

(The weight of the Chinese yarn is not uninteresting. Amedro specifies “7 hanks” of J&S cobweb. 20 grams? 25 grams? In either case, the Chinese yarn is appreciably lighter. Eyeballing it, the shawl appears to be roughly the same size as the earlier exemplars. It’s delicious to handle, no knots, reliably strong. It has even survived a couple of those episodes where I start across the room and find it is wound around one of my shoes. I’ll measure it precisely when blocked, to compare with Amedro’s measurements.)

The knitting continues well. In fact, I’m enjoying this upper edge enormously. No more picking-up-stitches, no more peering at charts, no more counting. Just easy-peasy lace knitting. The first (of three) row of roundels is finished, the second set. Photography is difficult, because 14 stitches at each end were left behind on safety pins after the initial pick-up from the straight edge of the scalloped border. They are now being incorporated into the text a stitch at a time – but it means that the residue are hanging about at the end of each row. I can’t stretch and smooth the thing out to be photographed until this process is done.

Comments & non-knit

Bless you for the sudden influx of followers.

Expense is rather a limiting factor, but I'd love to get Alexander a dehydrator like yours, Kristie. He makes fruit leathers. He has built himself a smoker. It would fit right in.

I can’t think of anything of the slightest interest to say about the American elections. I’m glad Harry Reid held Nevada. These are strange times.

Christmas

Mel, “cool” tee-shirts is/are a brilliant idea, which I shall make use of. Especially as it can be employed for those most difficult members of my list, young teen-aged boys whose interests and expertise lie entirely in the field of computer gaming.

And, Angel, my husband has those very slippers, and is equally devoted to them. Alexander and Ketki wanted to give him slippers one Christmas, and I said – how did I know? – order those, from LLBean. It was obvious that they wouldn’t come in time; Alexander and Ketki would have given up and gone for British slippers. I said no, persevere. So on Christmas day all my husband had was the description cut out from the Bean catalogue but later he got the slippers.

Christmas has always been a big thing in my husband’s family. It’s hard work, but it’s the price that has to be paid for returning light and the coming of spring. One of my few efficiencies in life is to keep a spreadsheet of what I give whom. Most of the columns are now suppressed, to make room on the screen for the last three years. And some of the rows are hidden, too, as people drop off the perch. I’ve started the 2010 column. Just contemplating it helps.

Yesterday I remembered EZ’s hats in Knitting Without Tears: they are practically instantaneous, and there are some people on the list who haven’t had too much knitting lately. I’ve got a brioche watchcap of my own, and am fond of it. One has to fiddle with stitch numbers, if one’s stash contains nothing as huge as Sheepsdown. I knit the snail hat once and the result was about big enough to fit a snail.

Amedro shawl

Here is a progress report:


The odd thing is how I don’t seem to accomplish any more rows-per-evening, now that individual rows are so short. Never mind; I am progressing nicely. Now there is only one column of patterning left in the wings, and I am half-way through the penultimate repeat of it. The centre pattern remains demanding, but I’ve got hold of it.

Non-knit

I do not at all understand poor Annie's struggles with health insurance (just as I have never understood much about American health). I thought Obama's much-maligned reform meant that everybody had to buy insurance, and that insurance companies couldn't turn you down for pre-existing conditions. Clearly not so, on either count.

You’ve cracked it, Beverly. Of course, the Sayers character – it might have been Lord Peter himself – was coming out of the church when he turned right to avoid walking around it widdershins. Many thanks.

It has been suggested before, Ann, that I figure in Alexander McCall Smith’s pages. The long, windowless wall in the room in which I sit is part of Scotland Street. I will observe my dog-walking neighbours with more interest in the future. Any one of them might be fictional, too. A bit like Through the Looking-Glass.

I didn’t walk yesterday. As soon as I powered up, going clock-wise, the leg muscles protested, although I am comfortable enough tottering about during the day. I let myself out of the top gate and went on to the newsagent. Going clock-wise is going to be an Entirely Different Experience.

Knitting

More Amedro progress. The 7th pattern repeat is finished, a new page of text started. There are 11 repeats in all, not 10 as I have said here before. The decreases have started nibbling away at columns of the diamond motif, leaving only three columns intact in the centres of the wings.

I applied myself mentally to the Japanese instructions for that hat yesterday, and made much more progress than I might have expected. The Fair Isle part should be easy enough. I don’t quite get the beginning. The garter-stitch edging is knit downwards (from a provisional cast-on?) and appears to go around the ear-flaps, which is rather neat.

I was pretty slow to figure out that help may be available. All it needs is one English-speaking knitter, somewhere in the world, who understands this hat, and the chances are not bad at all that I can find her/him. I have posted the question to the Ravelry group, and have also joined a Japanese knitting group on Yahoo.

That reminds me of a final footnote to the jabot-knitting story. That problem was eventually solved exactly as above, by finding Joanie Newsome and the jabot pattern she offers free on Ravelry. The answer was, knit it in tiers. An alternative is to knit a single rectangle of lace and fold it in a way I had explained to me but never understood. Well, the footnote consists of the fact that an answer to that question is on page 47 of Starmore’s “Celtic Knitting”. The jabot there is crisp linen, not knitting, but the fold is illustrated clearly enough.

I think. But I’m not going back there. I found the illustration when I was revving up for my class with Starmore at the I Knit weekend.

This morning’s excitement is getting my husband to an early, for him, appointment with our practice nurse to find out how his thyroid and blood pressure and such-like are getting on. I’ll take Matt’s socks along.

So it turns out that Annie M. hasn’t been paid for Knit Camp. As I’ve said here before, I haven’t been paying much attention since my own failure to turn up, but I feel sure that I read somewhere that matters had been somehow taken out of the organizer’s hands, and tutors had been paid. Clearly not so.

Annie’s blog post has a link to Lucy Neatby’s, which we knew about, and Deb Robson’s, which is new to me.

This is a very sad affair for British knitting in general. Several Ravellers said that during the height of the crisis. How right they were. How fortunate that Franklin pulled out in time. I don’t suppose there are many knitting experts who are so rich that they can afford to swan over to Stirling and do a week’s work for nothing.

I’m sorry I didn’t go, so that I could say that I Was There, like Dunkirk. Except that, comparatively speaking, Dunkirk was pretty well organized.

Knitting

I am bounding ahead with the Amedro shawl, now starting the third pattern repeat of the main section. There are ten repeats in all, plus a few rows – but by the end, there will only be five stitches in each of the wing sections, not enough for a complete pattern width-wise.

The wings consist of columns of two alternating patterns – roundels, easy even for me; and “diamond chain stitch” – the one Helen somehow thinks represents both Scotland and Greece. I’m struggling a bit with that one, although it’s very simple, because not all of its rows are symmetrical as lace usually is.

This is my fourth time through this pattern, as far as the shape and the edgings are concerned. But for Nos 2 and 3, I substituted other lace patterns for the main parts. So I haven’t done Diamond Chain Stitch since the first time, Rachel’s 40th birthday shawl which can be precisely dated to 1998. I don’t remember having trouble with it then.

I’ve now charted it, which helps.

On the other hand, I’m beginning to get a mental grip of the central pattern. It’s a most inappropriate choice for this shawl, being completely lace-y while in the wings those two columns of patterns float in quite a lot of st st, as you see, which speeds things along no end.

Books

Thank you, Cat. I’ll give “Brave New Knits” a miss, at least for now. There isn’t much space left on the knitting shelves, anyway. Our home-library system is much like yours: sections for categories, and on the whole we can find what we want. Yesterday’s poster is hanging in my husband’s study, where all the books are either Art or Reference, and where they’re probably tidier than in the rest of the house.

And there’s a mystery. We cannot find Geoffrey Dutton’s book “Some Branch Against the Sky”, his account of “marginal gardening” very near us in Strathardle. We bought it earlier this year, attentive readers will remember, and took it north, I am sure. That is the appropriate place, and that is where the gardening books are. Now that children and grandchildren have temporarily withdrawn, it’s time to read it. Where is it? That house is small, and I searched it fairly comprehensively on a rainy day last week without result.

Connectivity a bit skittish this morning.

A good knitting day yesterday, with every second that could be sequestered for the purpose devoted to the Amedro shawl. I am now – since starting on the main patterns – decreasing each side of each side panel on every pattern row. The centre 71 stitches stay the same until the end. That’s four decreases every other row, and, like the years of one’s life, one doesn’t notice at first and eventually one does.

A bad moment yesterday when the stitch count was out for the centre panel, the “complex” spider pattern from the Love Darg book. This is the one I’m doing sight unseen, no swatch, no photograph in the book even. But I think all’s well. Everything seems to line up. Maybe I missed a decrease or added a YO at the end of a row.

It’s clearly going to be very open and spidery, and would of course be even more so if I were patterning on every row, as the pattern is written. I’ll photograph it as soon as feasible.

I’ve made up a package of yarn for the charity knitters in Alyth – the stash-buster’s equivalent of leaving courgettes on the neighbours’ porch under cover of darkness. I don’t think I could sell yarn. I would worry too much about disappointed customers, and the trudge to the post office. I could, however, find out if local branches of Oxfam would take any.

It was sobering to reflect as I compiled this bag-full, how long it would take to knit it even as a wide garter-stitch scarf. A substantial number of weeks. I’m in serious SABLE territory. (Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy)

I scored points for tidiness yesterday, though. I have six plastic bins for yarn at the back of the stash cupboard. Three are full of Shetland jumper-weight. One is now chock-a-block with the lace yarn collection you saw here recently. But the fifth was only about 1/3rd full with Shetland odd-balls, and the 6th, devoted to heavier yarn, was nearly empty after the Alyth donation above was compiled. So I amalgamated those two, and created a Koigu bin, and that reduced by two the number of plastic bags of yarn on the stash cupboard floor.

Oh, dear.

Anyway, Strathardle. Off we go. Back sometime next week. The weather is fine, but cold. Mary Lou, I don’t grow horseradish, although I have thought about it. And it would fit in with my scheme of putting in more permanent things, to reduce labour. What about a wild garlic patch? Alexander is no help on horseradish; he and Ketki don’t eat beef because of Hinduism.

I am going to try globe artichokes next year. One of my hopes for the next few days is to get a patch ready for them and cover it. The Jerusalem artichokes the Fishwife gave me have done splendidly, above ground. It’s too soon to peek at the product.

I do agree, Jean, that one’s seed-buying is a way of supporting small firms, and a bit of extra postage is worth the expense. I couldn’t operate without Real Seeds, for instance, but they don’t even have a complete list – no broad beans, to begin with.

I’m in one of those frenzies about the Amedro shawl, impossible to keep my hands off it. I finished the preliminary row of roundels. Then came a frustrating number of long, plain rows before I could start the real excitement. I pressed on through them with determination.


I am slightly concerned about the way those edging scallops curl. I trust Chinese yarn understands what's expected of it, when it comes to blocking. I like the feel of the fabric a lot. It's spring-y, almost crunchy.

I set the roundels without any trouble. But the main patterns – which I now have reached – don’t relate to them, so the setting had to be done all over again. This time, I got it wrong – found myself three stitches short at the end of the row.

I got up early this morning to have some quiet time with it while the mind was fresh. I found the mistake and have, I think, corrected it. I added the three missing stitches at the end with some M1's. When I found the spot where I had done too much plain knitting between motifs, I K2tog’d until the count was right. It’ll pass the galloping horse test with flying colours.

This pattern was the first fine lace I ever knit, for Rachel’s 40th birthday, which dates it to ’98. At the time, I thought it was the cat’s pyjamas, as difficult as lace could get. It is, in fact, easy peasy, but this time through I am struggling without a chart. I should think the recent second edition of Amedro’s book will suffer from not having them.

When I get to the 71-stitch centre panel, however, into which I am inserting the “Spider pattern for shawls” which Sharon Miller gives on page 29 of the Love Darg book, I cling to the printed text. This is the pattern Sharon calls “one of the most complex”. It’s only a six-stitch repeat, and Sharon reproduces photographically the line-by-line text from the old book, as well as her own modern chart.

I’ve only done two pattern rows so far, and so far the technique has been to learn the pattern verbally – “knit, over, take, knit, take, over”, for the second row – and then just grit my teeth and do it. “Take” means “k2tog”. I came out right at the end, always a good sign. There is no photograph of this pattern, so I don’t know what to expect. And the chart isn’t really much help there. Exciting.

Vegetables

The plan now is to go to Strathardle tomorrow – at last. I expect to find a mess; lots of growing is done in September. There are potatoes still to be dug, and possibly some beans can be rescued, at least for soup. Too soon to dig the rather promising-looking parsnips. If the autumn raspberries are ever going to be of any use, it would be now. And the apple crop should be ready.
Otherwise, it’s a matter of getting ready for winter. The “walking onions” are in temporary accommodation. They’ll need a permanent home.

The 2011 seed catalogues are beginning to rattle through the letter box – more exciting even than knitting magazines. Alexander said over lunch on Tuesday, rather primly I thought, that he orders from only one source so as not to squander money on postage. He has a point, but I consider the money well spent for the pleasure it gives in catalogue-browsing by the fire on Long Winter Evenings.

I have put some skeins of lace yarn in The Box to take along. Much winding will be necessary before I can even swatch my notion of knitting three strands together. It seems just the chore for a Long Winter Evening.

Feeling somewhat restored from the ordeal of Glasgow.

Janet, yes, our picture is in the “Glasgow Boys” show at Kelvingrove. Now I want to see the reduced show at the Royal Academy later in the year, to find out if we made the cut. It would also be nice to look at the pictures in somewhat less of a crowd. And you’re right, my husband had to act as he did, in offering the picture to the H*nterian, but his boss didn’t have to take advantage of his scrupulosity. He – the boss – was the man who eventually dropped dead at a Turner exhibition, as mentioned here some weeks ago.

I said to my husband on Tuesday evening that if Andrew had rejected the offer – “You found it, you must keep it” – we would now, at the end of life, be making arrangements for it to go to the H*nterian. But he said no, he would rather see it somewhere less rich in the Glasgow Boys. And indeed, on some recent visits to the H*nterian, we have not even found it on the walls.

Cat, I think you might email Heirloom Knitting to ask how the Love Darg book was sent. Their service is so very good, that they would want to know you are concerned. I got my copy out yesterday, looking for a pattern for the centre of the Amedro shawl. It really is an important contribution to the history of Shetland lace knitting. It deserves reading and re-reading.

I have chosen “spider pattern for shawls”, p. 29, for my centre. It fits perfectly – “repeats of 6 stitches plus 5 extra” goes into 71. Sharon says, ominously, that it is “one of the most complex of lace patterns”. It is printed as knitted lace – action on every row. But she suggests doing it as lace knitting, with plain rows in between, “to learn”. [I hope I’ve got those terms the right way around.]

I would have done it with plain rows anyway, because that is the way the rest of the Amedro patterns work. It doesn’t look terribly difficult – certainly not to one who has survived the Princess edging. We shall see.

Why don’t any of these endless magazines do an article about Sharon Miller? The answer probably is, because she never advertises and never teaches. That’s not sufficient.

Currently, I’m whizzing along with the early rows of the entire Amedro shawl. The edging, now complete, is in garter st., and there are a couple more rows of it once all 509 stitches are settled on the needle – but the main body of the shawl is in st st. This is a splendid opportunity, on those long purl rows returning, to practise the Portuguese method of looping the yarn around the back of one’s neck and flicking the stitches.

Maybe I’ll try it.

Comments

Fishwife, your suggestion of p/hop as a deserving charity for my lace stash, is an interesting one. The charity is certainly worthy – the acronym means “pennies per hours of pleasure”, and the beneficiary is Medecins Sans Frontieres. But the site seems to be offering patterns, for which you pay as you wish. I can’t see anything about wanting yarn.

Comments

Lisa, (comment yesterday), the Games are awfully boring; the Queen is as old as my husband, although apparently in slightly better nick; and all the things that make the day fun for us, are denied to Royals – seeing old friends, and having a drink with them from the back of their car or ours; running a race or joining in Tilt the Bucket or the Pillow Fight, or cheering on a relative who’s doing it; having a look at the Home Industries Tent in the hopes that Neighbour G. hasn’t won anything for baking this year; trying, once more, to come top at Musical Cars.

Braemar comes right after us – they must be down for the First Saturday in September. We saw the Queen arriving there on the news last night. The commentator said that Queen Victoria started the tradition, and the family is now stuck with it.

I don’t know anything about the Queen in 3-D. I don’t think I’ve heard any mention of such a thing. I went to a 3-D movie in NY close to 60 years ago and was sick afterwards and have stayed well clear since.

Maureen and Theresa, I am happy to be corrected on the matter of Meg’s teaching. I remember Amy Detjen from Camp Stitches on Lake George in ’99. I don’t think she was teaching, more like Head Counsellor. A tower of strength and good cheer. Amy is very tall, and strongly built, but that praise is meant without irony, metaphorically.

I think she later parted from the X’s rather acrimoniously – I must have read that on the Internet somewhere – and I am happy that her subsequent history has turned out so well. A tower of strength for Meg.

Life

We’re going to London this week. On Tuesday. I’m not looking forward to it, although it will be grand to be with Rachel and her family. My husband is not really up to it, and my role as facilitator gets progressively harder. The effort is no doubt good for him. Rachel, despite working full time and hosting language students at home, does all she can and much more than could be expected, in the way of driving us about.

We’re going right now in order not to miss the “Fakes” show at the National Gallery, which is about to go off. I’ll enjoy that myself, once we get there. And the Vatican tapestries at the V&A are about to go on, so we’ll see those too.

And I will press on with vigour at Helen’s second sock. I got an inch or so done yesterday, sitting in Waverley Station waiting to buy our tickets. I have even presumed to put the ball of Lang Jawoll I showed you the other day in my knitting bag, in the hopes of starting Matt’s socks.

Knitting

I have passed the half-way point of the 8th scallop on Helen’s Amedro shawl. The 8th is one of the big ones – the full 48 rows. There was a mini-crisis yesterday when a dropped stitch involved frogging, but all is well. I not only got the stitches back on the needle, but seem to have succeeded in figuring out where I was in the pattern, to proceed.

One of the routines of Games Day is the group picture taken at the end of the afternoon, back at the house. Alexander, the photographer, has now sent me this year’s version. It’s a particularly good one, with most of us looking unwontedly cheerful. Alexander himself is in the back row, framed by Rachel and Ed in the row in front, with the tense, anxious look which invariably identifies the person who has just set the delayed shutter action and run around to join the group.

Two of our guests are missing – my husband’s great-niece (his sister’s granddaughter, putting it another way) and her boyfriend. They had sloped off somewhere. I don’t think the group picture has ever been incomplete before, and it distresses me. The great-niece/granddaughter has been with us before, and appears in the appropriate photograph(s). She should have known.

They turned up again much later in the evening. Perhaps it was all just too boring…

(That picture could only have been taken at the Braemar Games, not all that far from us.)

Before I leave the subject of the Games, Helen’s sweater deserves mention. Here it is on the Games field.


I knit each of my daughters and daughters-in-law a Wedding Sweater when they married. Helen’s, here, was far and away the best – but the marriage failed. She decided this summer that 15 years was long enough, and got it out again. Mercifully, it seems to have escaped the attention of the moths.

All the colours are natural. It dates from my lichen phase. The pinks and almost-reds derive from ochrolechia tartarea which I found somewhere above the Croft of Cultalonie. When I Google’d just now, to check the spelling, I found a reference to my own blog of January 27 this year – and that blog entry includes a picture of the left-over yarns from stash.

I think the rich brown may have been logwood, bought in. The other variations in colour were contributed by sheep. The motifs refer to various things in both the families involved. Helen’s dear horse Milligan (long dead, even then) appears at the top of the sleeve. All the wedding sweaters have the Crown of Glory on the shoulder, meant to be the reward of a life well lived.

Knitting

Little to report. I’m half-way through the 6th scallop (of 29) of Helen’s Amedro shawl. As you can see from yesterday’s pic, it is lace knitting of the most simple. The problem is to stay awake and remember where you are. The scallops are of different sizes, with a fish-tailed double one in the centre. That helps a bit, I think.

I read Woolgathering through to the end, and discover that Meg is going to teach at Vogue Knitting Live in Manhattan in January. Has she ever done such a thing before? I had already had an email from Vogue about it. Franklin will be there. I can dream.

I am particularly grateful to Mary Lou, Gerri and especially Kristen for addressing seriously my anxiety about knitting socks for Hellie’s boyfriend Matt. (Comments, Sept 1) I am reassured by your arguments, and I think he’s next on the sock list. This is the yarn I have in mind. It's 100 grams: I’ll need either to add wild toes, or to buy another ball.


I bought it at I Knit London, if memory serves. I nipped over for a link just now, and got a most alarming “Account Suspended” page. Their website was up a fortnight ago.

Here is a rather sweet picture of Matt and Hellie at the Games. I asked him his foot size when he asked for the socks, so I’ve got that.



I am also grateful to yesterday’s commenters for filling me in on what Annie Modesitt was upset about. It doesn’t sound good. If people are saying what Sulky Cat says – and obviously, they are – it’s Annie’s job to stop complaining about "lies" and ask herself why. I follow her blog pretty closely, in appalled sympathy for what her family is going through and admiration for her determination to use knitting to pay the mortgage. The class that the Fishwife and I went to here in Edinburgh – Helen CKS had booked it, too, but wasn’t feeling well enough – was well-prepared and interesting enough.

I spent a lot of time over on Ravellry the weekend before Knit Camp, following with interest and horror the unravelling saga of the US teachers’ work permits. I haven’t been back since. I must have a look.

Back at the ranch…

I dispatched the preemie jacket yesterday, and started Helen’s Amedro shawl. She wants me to keep Amedro’s patterns in the wings, but there’s a centre rectangular section 71 stitches wide which I can “improve” with a pattern from Heirloom Knitting, so everybody’s happy. Here’s what I’ve done so far. There's an irritating error in the big second scallop, but I'm not going back.


It's yesterday’s darg, in fact. For Sharon Miller’s book did arrive, and I learn that “darg” is a Scots term for the product of a day’s work. Most useful word.

And a terrific book. Sharon is a scholar who operates on many levels, collecting Shetland shawls and studying their construction; examining museum examples; tracking down printed patterns; reading pretty obscure sources (e.g., Arthur Laurenson & Co., Lerwick, ‘Truck Report’, 1872); and above all, knitting. The point of this book is her belief, well substantiated, that “Aunt Kate’s Home Knitter” of 1910 contains the first patterns ever published for fine Shetland lace and that the patterns actually come from Shetland, probably from Unst.

Sharon reproduces Aunt Kate’s patterns photographically as well as providing modern charts and abundant advice on construction. A “love darg” is a darg done for love.

Yesterday’s post also brought the new Woolgathering. Never rains but it pours. I reflected during the course of the day that I don’t need to grumble about the postponement of the new book. If I want to knit some EZ stash-gobbling garter stitch, I’ve got the Bog Jacket and/or the Round the Bend to look forward to.

I must tell you how my vegetables are getting on. Tomorrow, perhaps.