I am not doing very well, these days, at thinking of the obvious.

It should have occurred to me that Lord Peter started from inside the church. As I struggled with my Japanese hat pattern, and grasped that the edging and the hat must involve a provisional cast-on, since they are knit in different directions, I should have thought that maybe you knit the hat first and then attached an edging.

I was struggling with the mental concept of knitting the edging first, with the ear-flaps somehow contained in it, until I read Jeanfromcornwall’s comment yesterday. The alternative hypothesis (knitting the hat first) was soon confirmed by Mary Lou’s comment and re-confirmed, later in the day, by my finding the Japanese characters for “pick up stitches”.

I thought of seeking help from Ravelry, although not immediately, but even then it didn’t occur to me for quite a while that someone else might have knit this very hat. In fact, five Ravellers have posted it. Two of them, the two best, seem to contribute only in Japanese. A third is French. I have sent a Ravelry message to one of the others, so far without result.

I think maybe I should try writing to the Japanese.

So the case must be – unless I am overlooking something else obvious – that you knit the hat and then pick up stitches and then knit the ear-flaps – might be a chance to try some knitting-back-backwards here – and then edge the whole thing. I can’t think of any other way to do it. A drawing of the ear-flap shows a kind of chain around it. I feel sure that I read somewhere yesterday that Japanese designers often do such a chain from which stitches are then picked up. If so, I can’t find it now.

That leaves the four-row chart for the edging itself. It contains many opacities. At that point I could just wing it, but I’d like to get it right.

Marsha at the Needle Arts Book Shop – can’t recommend highly enough – has prepared a free hand-out on Japanese knitting, downloadable from the website. I’ve got it and have printed it, back in the days when I had a functioning printer. It’s very basic, and very helpful.

She recommends this wonderful Japanese website. It’s got a good Japanese-English knitting dictionary. If you go there, be sure to look at the knitting haiku’s – lower left-hand corner of opening page.

And I love this bit. Incomprehension is a two-way street:

"'Knitting Pattern' is the biggest obstacle for Japanese. Usual English-Japanese translator tend to translate knitting pattern to Japanese text which we don't make sense. We try to make a descripton of it."

I very much like the idea of Jeanfromcornwall’s cast-on producing a “messy loopy edge” as an alternative to a provisional cast-on which is a bit of a nuisance.

All well with Amedro. A new landmark looms – soon there will be fewer stitches in each of the two wings than there are in the unchanging centre portion.

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.

Games Week dawns.

Here’s the current state of the entry – half-way through the second sleeve, and the body suddenly looking too long. No turning back now. Helen will be here this afternoon, with two boys. She’s going Festival’ing with a friend in the early evening -- not conducive to knitting, at this end.


I have been ticking my way pretty industriously through the list of things I wanted to get done this week, and should polish off a couple more today. I hope we’re going to Strathardle on Wednesday where my targets will be to cut the grass around the specimen trees down the commonty, preparing them for their annual photographs with grandchildren, and to shop and shop and shop for food for our picnic lunch on the Games field.

And to cultivate a Zen – or at least bovine – calm in the intervals.

We are to have a rice salad of Jamie Oliver’s, from “Ministry of Food”, and a French bean salad with feta of Gino d’Acampo’s, forget which book, plus sausages and barbequed chicken and crisps and beer and cider. Lots of people drift off and get themselves fish and chips from somewhere anyway.

Oriental knitting

Melanie, I ordered something from YesAsia once, perhaps a Nihon Vogue, and they wrote to say they needed me to fax them pictures of my credit card. I didn’t fancy the idea, and cancelled the order. Perhaps I should try again. But I think I have reached the stage where book-buying has to result in a serious attempt to knit Japanese, before I do much more of it.

Lisa – I’ve said this before, I think – when we were in Beijing, James drove us out into the countryside one day to see sections of the Wall. We wound up at the famous place where kings and presidents are photographed, but before that had seen some interesting and less-known fragments. In one village, where the Wall was marked with a plaque saying it was a national monument, a youth told James that we were the first westerners to have visited.

In that village, some women were sitting by the road knitting. One of them was doing a very interesting all-in-one baby clo’. Stitches had been left behind, I remember, while she finished off an arm or a leg. It was densely knit for cosiness in a desert winter. I asked, through James, if I could take a picture but she wasn’t keen.

That’s what I want to know more about. All I came home with were some magazines of utterly western designs, whether rip-offs or Chinese designers aping the west, I don’t care. I’ve got Judith Gross’ “Patterns from China”, not without interest but still pretty urban.

Maybe I should ask James or Cathy to do a search on whatever passes for Amazon in China (perhaps it’s Amazon) to see if any Chinese writers have tackled the subject.

Redness

It has a role in nature, too. I have to net the red currant bush if I don’t want the pigeons to take 85% of the crop. There’s no need to protect the white currants which taste so similar that – we discovered this year – they make a perfectly satisfactory if rather pallid Summer pudding.

Thank you for the kind words about the baby jacket, Lisa. I’m happy too, although beginning to reflect that time presses. The Games are a week today, and today is the last of what might be called tranquillity. On the other hand, I can go ahead and block it while knitting i-cord for the ties.

(Do you ever write about Chinese knitting?)

It occurred to me that if I want a swing jacket, here it is. All I would have to do is re-jig the front, doing away with the cross-over chest pieces, and re-size it. Garter stitch is infinitely slow – as I discovered knitting the ASJ, if I hadn’t known it already – but it’s slow because it’s eating up yarn. That’s a plus.



Back view. I should reach the second sleeve today.


The sight of the stash cupboard after nine months’ abstinence is pretty depressing. The only slip was one (1) ball of Heirloom Knitting merino lace for James’s jabot – and I knit it. I’m going to have to be firmer with myself than I had planned, when the year is up in November. Some KF sock yarn, certainly. But perhaps only one sweater-sized lot of a solid or near-solid colour. I'd been thinking two. And perhaps I could buy yarn specifically for Meg’s travelling-stitch hat in whatever magazine it recently appeared.

Then on with the show.

My new Japanese knitting books have arrived from Needle Arts. I bought two more of the Let’s Knit series. Marvellous stuff, but not as bizarrely wonderful as the first one I bought. Maybe I should ask Needle Arts themselves if that designer has done anything else. I don't even know his name, although there's a rather sweet picture of him included. (That's not him, below.)



I also got “Scandinavian Jacquard Caps” in Japanese – there are a couple of good ear-flaps. I ought to be able to manage one of them as a replacement present for Rachel Miles of Beijing, whose first hat never got there, given especially that I have a vague idea how to knit an ear-flap hat.

I wonder how much red there is in the stash? I seem to remember having to dig deep for the missing hat. It was lined in red, and had a Fair Isle pattern in which red figured. It’s funny how the appeal of that colour seems to transcend culture. Hindu brides wear it, and Chinese dragons. When I was a child in Detroit during the war, we occasionally had “coloring” when crayons were spilled out on a table and we helped ourselves. I vividly remember how red was always highly prized, and in extremely short supply. The big self-confident children got it all.

If need be, then, one ball of red something might be added to that November list.

MP3

The new earphones are a great success – they stay in, and the sound and my comprehension of it are transformed. It is as if I had put a BabelFish into my ear. I am less happy with the new shoes.

All this talk of Japanese knitting sent me back to the Needle Arts Book Shop yesterday. I wound up ordering two more in the “Let’s Knit” series – those words being the only ones in the book in English – and the “Clear and Simple Knitting Symbols” book. I think the latter should go a long way towards making Japanese stitch dictionaries accessible.

What I need to do now is apply myself, instead of just oooh-ing and aaah-ing. Thank you very much for the offer of hand-outs, Mary Lou and Maureen. (And, boy! am I impressed that you can teach Japanese knitting, Mary Lou!) I think I’ve got all I need, what with the Knitter’s article and the free pages on “Interpreting Japanese Knitting Patterns” from Needle Arts itself. I downloaded and printed those yesterday.

Going back just now to get titles and links, I noticed for the first time the book on “Scandinavian Jacquard Hats”. In Japanese, of course. That could be IT! I knit an ear-flap hat for Rachel-the-Younger in Beijing earlier this year, at her request, using the plug-in-your-gauge self-generating pattern the Fishwife pointed me towards. It never reached its destination. A Japanese-Scandinavian hat might be just what Rachel would like, and just the incentive I need to get to grips with a Japanese pattern.

An ahah! moment.

Needle Arts is a delight to deal with, up there with the Schoolhouse and Heirloom Knitting.

As for actual knitting yesterday, I finished the first front of my tiny jacket, and started the second.


While I was lining up links yesterday, I noticed that K1 Yarns has some nice classes coming up – one on Shetland lace next weekend, when we will be occupied with a visit from old friends from our Birmingham days, and anyway I know how to knit Shetland lace; and one on Freeform Knitting, which I’d really rather like to attend – on Games weekend. So I won’t be there.

Emily Dickinson

Skeindalous, you posted a comment in late July mentioning the new biography of ED by Lyndall Gordon – the book which posits epilepsy as an explanation for her oddity. There is a full page review of it in the current “Economist” – that’s a lot of space for a book review, for them – in which they call it an “astonishing” book which will “revolutionise the way in which Dickinson is read for years to come.”

That’s the one I tossed aside because it didn’t have my mother in the bibliography, but maybe I should take another look.

I looked at my mother’s book again yesterday. It suggests nothing more than clinical depression as an explanation, but does say that the family were worried about Emily's oddities and reclusiveness when she was in her twenties. I didn’t pursue it – what is the evidence for their concern? But if she was epileptic, those closest to her would have known, and closed ranks, rather than trying to get her out into the world, wouldn’t they?

There’s a new bulletin from CT on Mungo’s blog this morning. My job on Games Weekend is to provide the picnic eaten on the field – clearly it will be impossible to come up to the picnic standards of the Connecticut River. (Helen will do Friday evening, Rachel will take Saturday, and on Sunday we usually manage to get by on leftovers.)

Here’s Mungo in CT shucking corn.

Not much knitting yesterday, but I finished the back of the little kimono jacket, did the maths – with what success, we will soon see – and started one of the front pieces. The pattern is curious in the way it leaves edges unfinished. The lower “skirts”, unattached to each other, are just raw st st at the sides -- I have frogged and started again with garter st borders, you will remember – and the back neck is similarly stark.

I felt yesterday that, whether I go to Stirling on Thursday or not, it sort of behoves me to get to grips with Japanese knitting. Helen CKS and I went to a lesson at K1 Yarns once, taught by Mrs Habu, so I’ve got a vague idea of the basics.

I spent some time yesterday, therefore, in the Japanese Knitting and Crochet group in Ravelry – I’ve been a member for nearly a year, but don’t go there much. In a list of resources, I found a reference to an article by Gayle Roehm in the Spring, ’97 issue of Knitter’s, “Understanding Japanese Patterns”.

And there it was, almost at the bottom of my pile. That was in the great days of Nancy Thomas’ editorship. The article is four pages long, and consists of solid, serious information. All I need now – once I’ve finished the Green Granite Blocks and some lace for Helen – is a KAL. (Interestingly, at the end, when she is listing resources, she gives only addresses and telephone numbers, both in the US and Tokyo – there’s not a website to be seen. How the world has changed in 13 years!)

The experience made me wonder, for a moment, if it is a good idea to go ahead with my plan for phasing out knitting magazines. Some of them, anyway. Starting with Knitter’s.

Miscellaneous

Angel, I like your idea a lot, of being able to pay the Twist Collective a flat fee for a particular issue that would let you download all of those patterns. Should you suggest it to them?

Reaching yesterday's milestone in my Yarn Fast has made me reflect again on the enormity of the problem. Effectively, there has been no new yarn for nine months now. The stash is totally unaffected. I've thought of some yarn I could take to the charity knitters in Alyth -- I'll look that out today. Short of actually dying, I can't think of what else to do. Well, I can. I must buy very little in November, and resume the fast at once.