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.

Well.

The Beijing Mileses have gone off to Argyll, hoping to get to play with Alexander’s new boat. They’ll go from there to Strathardle, where we’ll join them on Wednesday. I have a dentist’s appt here tomorrow.

That’s the basic story.

Jabot

No Montrose jacket. We went to Kinloch Anderson bright and early on Saturday morning. You can’t just buy one, it has to be made. And it can’t even be measured for, without the kilt of the gent who is going to wear it. That is because a Montrose jacket is worn on the sort of occasion on which a gentleman from time to time may THROW his arms into the air. The jacket is anchored to the kilt by subtle means to prevent a midseason gap.

So we came away with detailed forms on which a Beijing tailor is to enter the necessary measurements. But whether James will get this done when he gets back, is another question.

Here is a picture of him wearing the jabot without a Montrose jacket. He looks vaguely Swiss Presbyterian. At least the Velcro fastening arrangement seems to work.

Internet access

With the Mileses here, the house was full of laptops and smaller devices which sadly languished without wi-fi. James got to work. Alistair, suddenly a teen-ager, got to work too. Listening to Alistair’s end of a telephone conversation with my ISP, I felt much as I do listening similarly to his father speaking Mandarin. He’s really doing it.

In the end, the ISP told Alistair (rightly or wrongly) that they don’t support wireless connections, and we decided to switch to BT. They provide a satisfactory service in Strathardle, and they will be cheaper.

We've done it. I'm signed up for BT broadband. But they need a “migration code" from the current ISP, and there was no hope of getting one at the weekend. Alistair is going to try from Argyll this morning.

As the day wore on, James succeeded in getting the present system to work at least partially – some laptops could receive the signal, others couldn’t.

When I disappear, it will be because we have got in such a muddle that I have no access at all to the outside world.

Green Granite Blocks

I have finished the fourth rank of blocks. Today’s assignment is the slow row, setting colours for the new rank. As before, a picture will follow when I am far enough along with #5 that #4 can be seen in its entirety.

Food

We had a pleasant lunch of pasta and cheese, but my radish crop wasn’t big or bushy enough to make an interesting contribution. Maybe next year.

“Ducks in a row” – that’s it, of course. Thanks, Moorecat. I love the one your husband heard, too.

Here’s Tier Five, finished.

Here’s the complete jabot, pinned together. I had a while yesterday, after doing the pinning, when I wondered if I hadn’t gone Over the Top with a fifth tier. It looks better this morning.

The only way to go from here, is on. Unpin everything, tidy the loose ends, and start attaching, layer by layer. I could have embarked on the process last night, but I was frazzled by a day which ended up with only one duck in position – Delia Smith’s Luxury Fish Pie is made and refrigerated. I’ll leave it out to get to room temperature while we’re at Mass, and put it in the oven while we drink Prosecco afterwards with our friends, as we did last week.

Last night, I retreated to Ketki's KF socks, and reached the heel flap of the second one. Thank God for socks.

This morning, I must cut up things for a salad, and arrange the dining room. Two more ducks.

Something completely different…

I don’t know how long the BBC will keep this one up, but for the moment here is a clip about the measuring of a tree in Argyll which has been pronounced the tallest in Scotland, or is it GB? We saw the item on the news on Friday evening, with additional material which doesn’t appear here, and lacking the scene for which I include it, namely Alexander and his sons, standing under the tree, peering upwards like the men of Galilee on the first Ascension Day. Their bit lasts less than a second, I would say, but they are perfectly obvious, in the foreground, the boys wearing red. It’s right at the beginning – you don’t have to stay around for the tree-climbing.

(The tree is in the arboretum on the Ardkinglas estate, and that’s where the Loch Fyne Mileses live.)

In the item as shewn on the news, the men came down from the tree and stretched out their rope on the ground and measured it. I will ask Alexander about this when he gets here today. Surely trigonometry – available since the Enlightenment if not since Archimedes -- would provide a quicker, easier and probably more accurate measurement.

Thanks for the help with pdf files. Live and learn. I tried the Help section of my daily word processor – Word – and found that I could buy a pdf attachment. (My system is pretty old and creaky.) But then, I thought – I’ve got another word processor, Word Perfect, which I use to get my husband’s Word Perfect files, created on the DOS machine he uses daily, believe it or not, into a format usable by the world.

Word Perfect will load his files and convert them into modern Word Perfect, thence to Word, and Word presents them, when necessary, to the world. When I bought this computer those little square not-floppy floppy disks were just on the cusp, and I was surprised when the machine was delivered without a drive for them. If I’d thought that was a possibility, I’d have asked the nice man at Dell to put one in.

I don’t like to boast – well, I do. I installed one with my own hands.

Anyway, just now I loaded Word Perfect and asked it about pdf’s. It is perfectly happy to produce them without additional payment. So that’s that problem solved.

The discovery of Google Document, thanks to FiberQat, is another plus. I don’t know how I’d ever use it, but I’m very glad to know it’s there.

Knitting

Tier Five of the jabot is nearly finished – a repeat and a half of the Doris edging pattern to go. A busy day looms: Alexander and Ketki and their sons are coming tomorrow for their delayed Easter visit, and Monday is the lunch guest who’ll get Jamie’s tray-baked salmon, and Tuesday, insh’Allah, is designated for Strathardle at last, to get started on the ’10 garden. (Spring is suddenly, definitely here. Only a fortnight ago an Intercity train in the Highlands got stuck overnight in the snow.) Today I need to get the birdies lined up, or whatever the phrase is.

But I’ll try hard to get Five finished and blocked, so that assembly can begin tomorrow.

To change the subject –

I was glad to see that the Twist Collective spring-summer collection is with us at last. There’s nothing there for me, I don’t think. It’s all a bit form-fitting, no swing jackets. But I followed up the ad for Sweetgeorgia yarn. Wow! I found the website a bit hard to navigate – what look like links, don’t seem to link to anything. But click on the changing picture of yarn at the top, and you’re in. Anything you want, I gather, will be custom-dyed.

So that’s a good one for my Dream List. I continue to follow Posh Yarns closely, too.

Tier Five progresses well. The Leaf Lace pattern looks fancier than Razor Shell, and goes particularly well with the Doris edging. That’s what it is, Stacey – Heirloom Knitting p. 74, chosen for narrowness. I agree, it’s doing the job well.

FiberQat, I’d love to put the jabot instructions on Ravelry. I hesitate a) because it wouldn’t quite be a pattern, like Joanie’s. I’d refer to Heirloom Knitting and the criteria for choosing patterns from the book and the rough size each tier should be, and the yarn and stitch numbers and needle size I used, but that’s not quite the same; and b) because I don’t know how to create a .pdf file. Maybe I should find out.

Or would I need one?

When I was cruising around recently looking at Koigu jacket patterns, I found an entrelac one. I don’t really think I want it – the effect is too Michelin Man. But I clicked on download-free-pattern, only to be told that the designer was currently stuck on figuring out how to do a .pdf file.

(As the clumsy among you must know, if you type in “Ravlery” by mistake you arrive at a site at least somewhat knit-related; I’ve been there often but never really explored it. What a good idea! And what a compliment to the original!)

Postal services

The ear-flap hat still hasn’t reached its addressee in Beijing. The Chinese are funny about packages. I’m glad I’ll be able to hand over the jabot in person.

Here in Edinburgh, I’ve been waiting too long for packages from two of my seed suppliers, and for a sweat shirt from CafePress. I’d worry if only one thing were missing, but with that many, they must be somewhere in the system. I’ve got plenty of seeds, anyway.

Viruses

My friend’s viral message turned up on schedule this morning; the deluge related to 13/11/9 seems for the moment to have subsided.

Comments are instructed to turn up in my email in-box, as well as being appended to the blog itself. Most of them come in with your internet identities as Sender, but some are Anonymous. The bad ones are always Anonymous, so I click on that word with a certain sinking of the heart. It is particularly gratifying when, as yesterday, it turns out to be you, Ron.

Hard to get started, this morning, and now time’s nearly up.

Here is Tier Four of the jabot, being blocked:

It looks very like Tier Three.

Here is the jabot with four tiers pinned in place – that’s really enough, but for Chinese superstition.

I am well embarked on Tier Five. It is slightly larger than Three and Four, and uses a different lace for the central rectangle. The rectangle won’t show at all – it’s just to amuse me. And I’ve chosen one, Leaf Lace, HK p. 65, which is chock-a-block with K3tog’s, and slo-o-o-ow. Still, it makes a change.

And when it comes time for sewing, as it will soon, I will repeat your comment as a mantra, Mel, with every breath I draw: slow and steady. If I need gathering threads and/or basting threads, I will put them in. The ball isn’t until November. There’s no hurry.

I have discovered that Blogger allows me ten fixed pages – I mean to write out the procedure for jabot-knitting and have it permanently available. Or as permanently as this transitory medium allows. I think maybe I should do a page for Lizzie’s First Holy Communion veil, which was repeated and improved for Rachel and Kirsty in Beijing. That page already exists, as part of the detritus from my abandoned website. It’s just a matter of bestirring myself.

The point being, of course, that I don’t think there are patterns for either “out there” – except, now, Joannie’s jabot pattern on Ravelry.

Non-knit

What else? – I’m having a nice time with Steig Larssen. Never mind the danger that I might let slip a spoiler – he completely gives away Volume 1 in Volume 2, and even more so, 2 in 3. You’ve got to read them in order, or you might as well not bother. And it’s not entirely easy, now that all three are in paperback and the titles absolutely indistinguishable. I don’t remember any other thriller author doing that – little teasers to induce you read the earlier books, yes. This is different.

I didn’t hear from my friend’s virus yesterday, and rather missed it – but one has turned up this morning, so that’s OK. Comments continue to pile in for Friday the 13th of November last year. I’ve never had a deluge quite like this. I remind myself – slow and steady – that I don’t need to rush off and delete them in Blogger every time one pops up in my inbox. They haven’t been published. They can wait until I get around to zapping them.

And – it’s spring. It really is, this week at last. Next week, we hope for Strathardle. Maybe I can get started on this year’s garden at last.

My husband fully appreciates the resources of the internet, but I am the one who is sent to draw from the well. I have just spent the better part of an hour trying to find out what Lady Salisbury meant when she said, of an artist I won’t name, that he had the manners of Brancas. I think I’ve got it – not only who Brancas was and what his manners were (that was fairly easy), but how Lady Salisbury might have known about him.

It took time that might better have been spent blogging.

Tier Four of the jabot is finished. I hope to block it this morning. It will dry quickly, and I ought to be able to pin it in place in time for this evening’s Knitting Session, so that I can make a final decision about the dimensions of Tier Five. I’ve already made a good start on its lower edging.

The day is rapidly approaching – this week may even contain it – when I’ve got to take needle and thread in hand and sew this puppy together. I’m nervous of that moment. I am no seamstress.

This and That

Moorecat, thank you for the kind remark about our green room. It was scary, I remember. The painter himself thought we’d gone a bit too far, and we weren’t sure until the work was pretty far advanced that we’d got it right. And, yes, a squirrel swift.

I hate shopping except in LYS’s and bookstores – well, food-shopping isn’t too bad as long as my husband stays home. But he likes antiques and hardware and, in general, the pursuit of anything he has determined to find. Currently, an umbrella stand for Strathardle.

We saw the swift in an antique shop and it was only after we got home that I realised I wanted it, and phoned them. This must have been in my Knitlist days: I didn’t even know that it was a “squirrel swift” until people there told me.

It’s been very useful, not least because a job can be suspended in mid-operation. The current one has been in that state far too long. It was, I think, part of the original plan for Ketki’s Calcutta Cup sweater of 2008, discarded after swatching. The plan was discarded; the yarn is still with me. I must finish winding it, because Koigu-winding looms, and after that the KF jacket.

Donna Druchunas has a link on her blog to an appeal for funds for the Musk Ox Farm. I’d like to know more about what has gone wrong, and what the business plan is. But it is dreadful to think of it coming to an end.

I’ve started Steig Larssen #3. No spoilers, I promise. Reading Wallander, one is much impressed with how early everybody gets up in the morning. In Larssen, it’s how much coffee they drink.

Today’s message from my friend’s virus is captioned “Anne Blondel”.

Here are tiers Two and Three of the jabot being blocked.



And here’s a pinned-together pic of the jabot to date. I am terribly pleased with it. One more tier would probably do the trick, but that would make four – so two more we will have. The more, the fruitier. I am well along with the bottom edging of Tier Four. I just emailed this picture to Beijing.


And here is a close-up of my pins. I think I bought some of these wheels last summer, when I found I didn’t have enough dressmaker’s pins to block the Princess. They're German. Apart from being fun to look at, they have the great advantage that I now know for sure at the end of a job whether I have found and gathered in every single pin.

Non-knit, catering dep’t

Tomorrow’s lunch party is sort of falling apart. Alexander phoned yesterday to say that Ketki and both boys have colds. Over the last two years my husband’s sister has had repeated chest infections. One of them involved a hospital admission and they each have reduced her to weeks of weakness and misery. She’s OK at the moment, and we simply can’t risk being held responsible for the next relapse.

So if they don’t come, the rest of us will have to take lunch away in doggy bags. The organic chicken I have ordered is big, and the first course is to be a sort of salad, hot-smoked salmon, quails’ eggs, watercress, avocado, you name it – all purchased already, all unfreeze-able.

Tomorrow’s difficulty is the need to go to Mass, right in the middle of the morning. I have decided to roast the chicken early and eat it at room temperature.

The menu I am worrying about, if you want to be helpful, is a week later, when the Director of the National Gallery is coming to lunch. We don’t know him. I need something reliably easy to cook, not demanding too much in the way of last-minute, and easy to eat.

I like your salmon fillet idea very much, Shandy. The difficulty is that we’re talking about Monday the 12th, and Monday isn’t a good day for fish. Traditionally, that was because the boats didn’t go out on the sabbath so there was nothing in the market on Monday morning. I think that state of affairs has probably been swept away by progress, but the fishmonger is still closed on Monday.

I like the idea so much, however, that I’ll have a word with him this morning. Could I buy the salmon on Saturday the 10th?

It would be prudent to skip blogging tomorrow. See you on Monday, insh'Allah, and Happy Easter to anyone who's interested.

Today’s need for haste is because I have an early appt with the hairdresser, to look nice for Easter.

Meg, I will act on what you say, and have five tiers for the jabot. The more, the fruitier. It is interesting what you say about floor-numbering in Hong Kong, Janet. I disapprove of superstition, and try to rise above it, but I can’t risk jinxing James. My father and his third wife used to live on a 13th floor in NY, so numbered. The things that happened there were bad enough that it could well be argued that the number was unlucky, if you were so inclined.

And, Tamar, of course. These tiers are quick enough to knit that I can try Number Five with a different centre pattern, and ditch it if need be. I am coming along well with Number Three. I will block it together with Two, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, and gather them in and pin in position and then we will see where we are.

My current thinking on the Koigu Problem continues to incline towards a sleeved Ribwarmer. I could gather the sleeves in to the wrist in the way I admire in that Sundbo soul-warmer, and try to edge the whole thing with her folded st st edging. The body – but not the sleeves – would have to be done in garter stitch, but you can’t have everything.

The weather here is appalling. We might have gone to Strathardle this week, had it not been Holy Week, and much good it would have done us. We hope for next week. Surely it will be spring by then.

Not much to say, not much time to say it in.

Lindsey, thank you for the pointer to the Posh Knitters thread on Ravelry. Most interesting. (I had never even heard of Posh Yarns – so much for me.) If Dee posts those beautiful yarns on her website on Sunday and is sold out by Tuesday morning, I don’t see why she should bother to go to KnitCamp or anywhere else. But her unexplained change-of-mind remains intriguing.

It does sound as if the organiser of KnitCamp is over-stretched -- running a new LYS and doing the camp in her spare time. Wait and watch. I was surprised to learn that there had been one last year. I remember the Ravelry weekend in Coventry, but not a camp. It couldn’t have been on the scale of this one.

Jabot

I finished Tier Two, but haven’t blocked it. Tier Three, slightly larger, is well underway. I am toying with the idea of having a different lace pattern in the central rectangle of Tier Four. It will be the largest of all. The idea of change is to amuse myself – the current pattern, although I think effective for the purpose, is pretty boring. A change would violate the very first principle of design: Keep it Simple, Stupid. On the other hand, the central pattern doesn’t really show at all – expect perhaps on the lowest tier – so no one would notice.

The Doris edging does show, and must remain unchanged. The only trouble with it is, it’s so easy. I keep finding that I have fallen asleep at the wheel and don’t remember what row I have just knit, and therefore what comes next.

Here are some pictures to cheer us up on a cold, wet morning – James and Cathy on their wedding day, he in an antique jabot he had borrowed, demonstrating that there’s no one right way to do it.


And Thomas-the-Elder – just plain Thomas, in those days – wore the kilt as well. But without a jabot.



This all happened on the First of August, 1992. It was the 2000th First of August – there is a passage in Cassius Dio which allows us to date the decree of the Roman senate changing the name of the month Sextilis to honour the emperor Augustus. (The next emperor, Tiberius, was offered September but turned it down – what if there are more than 12 emperors? he said. You’ve got to love him for it.)

Comments

Tamar, Sundbo’s discussion of soul-warmers strongly suggests that you are right, that they originated as bed jackets.

Jean, I very much like your idea of testing a pattern by asking yourself whether you could do the washing-up in it. I will remember that.

Mary Lou, I love the idea of not wanting to look like a tourist on the Beijing subway. We missed out on public transport when we were there – usually a major pleasure of travelling – because the SARS scare was at its height. On the other hand, we had the Great Wall entirely to ourselves

The second tier of jabot lace is finished but for one edging repeat. A friend is coming to lunch today – what to feed him? – which will delay blocking slightly: the dining room is the normal locus for that operation.

And it’s more fun than anything, blocking something so small. I enjoy the operation in general, but crawling around from one edge of a shawl to the opposite point can be athletic. With a jabot tier – a doyley would be the same, but I’m not going to start knitting those – the whole job can be done from one position.

James wrote from Beijing yesterday: “Frothy and fruity! This will be a true test of nerves. I did see one person wearing a jabot at the last ball, but I think he was a foreigner.” What exactly constitutes a “foreigner” at a St Andrew’s Night ball in Beijing is left unspecified.

Koigu

I’m cooling off on the shrug idea. Shandy’s remark about how they tend to slip off the shoulders meshed with something I had vaguely felt as I was posting that picture yesterday. I’ll have a look at everybody’s shrugs on Ravelry one day soon, though.

What about a sleeved Ribwarmer? Woolgathering #58. For that one, EZ seems to have abandoned her fine talk of “your gauge” and “K” and just written it at 4 sts to the inch – which will hardly do for Koigu. But that much thinking I think I can manage, especially because I have knit a ribwarmer and can work from the actual object.

And the Socklady has found some promising free sock-yarn sweater and jacket patterns at the Garnstudio.

My current thought – no doubt there will be something different here tomorrow – is to knit that VK scarf I mentioned yesterday in Koigu when the jabot is finished, and then put the whole question aside while ideas, we might hope, jell. I’ve got plenty of Koigu – there will still be a couple of jackets’-worth when the scarf is subtracted.

I might turn next to Kaffe’s “Green Granite Blocks” from “California Patches”. A dear friend gave me the kit years and years ago. I think it may have ripened sufficiently. I got it out last night. It looked good. It is an emotional necessity for me to have the Next Big Thing lined up in advance of the completion of this one.

KnitCamp

Janet did meet Franklin in Seattle, and says that he is looking forward to the camp in Stirling – so maybe I can stop worrying. I can see that not sending anything in the post saves them a very considerable amount of time and money, but I do feel that the occasional “Dear Camper” email would provide a helpful sense that someone is in charge and that plans are moving forward.

Jabot

I think I’ve got it. Current plan is to add three more tiers – I’ll cast on one of them tonight, insh’Allah. Last night, I polished off the Mystery Project.

Dawn, Joannie Newsome did it your way, gathering the tiers by decreasing violently at the end. But what about blocking? I could put the stitches on hold and block before the final decreases, but I think that is more tedious than gathering by hand. You’re right, successive tiers won’t need edging at the top. That’ll make them appreciably quicker.

I spent an interesting half-hour last summer at Kinloch Anderson in Leith, kilt-makers to the royals, looking at jabots. I talked to a very kind, very grand man – surely Mr Kinloch or Mr Anderson. He said that when he wore a jabot, he didn’t include the lace cuffs because they tended to drag in the soup. For this year, anyway, I’ll skip them.

Maybe I can go back there with James in the summer and get him kitted out with a Montrose jacket.

Looking at the distinctly fruity jabots in both those links, I think I’ll go for four tiers on mine, and make the rest of them a wee bit wider. Could the bottom one be longer? Total length needs to be 10 or 11 inches, I would judge. The whole thing is ridiculous. I have said before that there is no country in Europe in which a man can do himself so well without joining the army.

The Koigu problem

It’s not as straightforward as I hoped yesterday.

The Kaleidoscope pattern, written for Koigu, is in garter stitch. I couldn’t face that, so soon after the ASJ. The Sock Yarn Sideways is written at 5 sts to the inch on no 5 needles, a bit more relaxed than I would like. Neither provides a schematic, making adaptation difficult. (Ravelry links to both in yesterday’s post.)

This morning I thought, what about a Koigu soul-warmer? No lice, of course. I have enough that I could do the whole thing in variations of a single colour, red (probably) or green. And I have a couple of skeins each of near-solid charcoal and of off-white, either of which could serve as the binding.

I’ll keep that on a mental back burner while I go on knitting the jabot.

Tamar, what I meant about the “false underarm seam” was the line where one round becomes the next one, not obtrusive but visible when you’re knitting lice as I discovered on the Grandson Sweater. However, the current notion does away with steeks as well as lice. The soul-warmer could be opened for the body part at any point on the sleeve. Couldn't it?

The new VK turned up yesterday and is, I think, very good. They’re definitely back at the top of the heap, design-wise. More about that tomorrow. For now, a final remark about

Cider.

Thank you for your comment, Fizz. I am glad not to have disappointed. I am sure you are right – the awful stuff is called “Diamond White”. As well as the tax increase due tomorrow, we are vaguely promised another one, later in the year, on very strong cider. Yesterday’s comment applies, in spades: he’s thinking of bums on street corners and Diamond White. But many of the honest, traditional ciders are strong (including my beloved Weston’s Vintage) and they will suffer.

Jabot

Real progress. It looks rather small, but edging added to the fourth side will widen it, and blocking will make a difference. Once it’s been blocked out and gathered in, I’ll know whether I’ve got another test square or an actual tier. I am very hopeful. At the worst – if it proves to be a test square – it should provide all the data I need to proceed. It seems to me to strike just the right note, fruitiness-wise.

Soul-warmer

Dawn, I’m sure you’re right that when the pattern says “length”, it is referring to the length from cuff to cuff. Once I had grasped that, I thought that Tamar’s previous comment – that there was no increasing to be done for the body part – was certainly right. Her comment yesterday, which came in after I had thought that thought, underlines the point.

I agree that a steek should actually be cast on. It would continue, wouldn’t it? the false underarm seam of the sleeve?

If you’re really thinking of knitting one, Tamar, get hold of the book (Sundbo’s “Knitting in Art”) and look at the picture. It’s a full page, near the end. You don’t need to buy the book, because you’ve already got the pattern except for a little chart showing decreasing into the cuff. I’m sure you could wing it, for that.

I’ll have to leave it on the HALFPINT list until my year’s yarn fast is over in November – despite re-setting the slider, I regard it as still in progress. And what I lack, in all that stash, is solid colours (or near-solid; that’s what I really love) in sufficient quantity to knit anything.

Koigu jacket

The Socklady came up with a gem of a pattern for me yesterday – her most recent blog entry says that she was looking for one for herself. It’s another sideways cardigan (Ravelry link), this one incorporating the very short-row wedges to add swing which I had been thinking of trying to introduce into the Kaleidoscope cardigan. (another Ravelry link).

I’ve bought it and printed it. Once jabot-making is out of the way, I think I’m ready to roll.

Non-knit: the Budget

Two things.

It is traditional for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on Budget Day, to carry a battered old red dispatch box which used, I believe, to belong to Mr Gladstone. When our current Prime Minister occupied that office, he had a horrible new box made for himself – no doubt, at considerable expense to the taxpayer, and no doubt part of the New Labour programme to sweep away fuddy-duddy-ism. The current incumbent, I am glad to note, has reverted to the old one. We are lucky Brown didn’t put it out with the rubbish.

There is to be a heavy new tax on cider, which the Chancellor has probably never tasted in his life. I am sure he thinks all cider-drinkers are low-life, as many of us indeed are. There’s something called “White Heat” much favoured by the derelict. But there are also serious cider-makers – mostly in Herefordshire -- like my friend Mr Weston, not part of any huge consortium, and I fear for their future. This is a picture of one of the bottles I hope to consume on Easter Sunday.

Despite yesterday’s good intentions, I got so depressed with my sloppy attempt at cotton-knitting that I abandoned it. I spent an anxious and unsatisfactory half hour or more cruising around in cyber-space looking for the ideal yarn. Does Lorna’s Laces Helen’s Lace come in a solid white? Can you get Jaggerspun Zephyr over here? What is “Sugar Rush” with which one of the gents on the jabot forum is knitting himself a jabot?

Then I calmed down and tried casting on the Heirloom merino lace I just bought. And I think we’ve got it. I’m not going to move the Progress Bar until I feel a lot more sure – but this could be it.

The clincher, with the cotton, was opacity. You can hardly see it, in some contexts. I can’t imagine it frothing up into the Bonnie Prince Charlie abundance I have in mind.


Plus I was making too many mistakes. It was like riding a horse you know is too much for you. Even if you stay on, even if you avoid making a fool of yourself, you and the horse both know that you’re not in control, and the ride is no fun.

I don’t blame the cotton. I think I guessed wrong about those numbers. Franklin has some nice edging patterns in the new Knitty, translated from 19th century originals. He uses “Coton Perle 12”. I don’t know if that’s relevant. I ordered “80” because it was less than “100” which Sharon Miller sent to swatch the Wedding Ring shawl with.

For a while yesterday I thought of reverting to the idea of knitting a piece of lace “about the size of a computer keyboard” (as another of the gents on that forum puts it) and trying to zigzag-stitch it to the backing. But for now, I’ll stick with tiers and go ahead with my current idea. The pattern in the centre is "Razor Shell", HK p. 59, as easy as a pattern gets.


Soul Warmer

Thank you, FiberQat and Tamar, for your help with the Sundbo shrug. I think I’ve got it. I will print out your comments and keep with the book. I am struck with your idea, Tamar, of not increasing for the body at all, or perhaps only very little – and I think that may be the way it’s meant to be done. I would want to knit the whole thing as a tube, with a steek for the middle, because of the lice. The edging, in the book, looks like fairly fine st st, folded over and hemmed. Very neat.

The pattern says – if “pattern” is the word – “The length of the soul warmer is the sleeve length + ½ the body width x 2.” Since the body width is the sleeve length, that should mean that the overall length is three times the sleeve length, and that is surely preposterous. Maybe that final “x2” should be “/2” which would give a length of ¾ of the sleeve length; not impossible.

The Estonian mitten book is splendid – just page after page of Estonian mittens with charts for the patterns. Two color knitting on four needles is tricky, but it can be done. I like an idea I read about on, I think, the KnitList long ago, of knitting a bunch of single mittens to keep in a basket by the back door so that people could choose non-pairs as they pleased on snowy days.

Shirley Paden’s design book is also very good, but doesn’t add anything to what I already had in the way of Montse Stanley and the Vogue book and a number of others.

So much knitting excitement yesterday that one could scarcely contain oneself.

The Schoolhouse Press package arrived at the crack of dawn, as you already know. Mid-morning brought Shirley Paden’s design workbook from Amazon – I’m afraid I didn’t tell you I had ordered that – and when the post itself arrived, it included both the DMC crochet cotton and the Heirloom merino lace.

I cast on my current jabot idea in cotton and have progressed rather briskly. That is about the only good thing I can say about it. I tried to take a picture just now, but was not sorry to discover that the camera battery is flat, sparing embarrassment. Those cotton stitches are slippery and each escape has been less successfully retrieved than the one preceding it. The whole thing is something of a mess by now.

The only thing to do is to go on and finish and block and see what we’ve got. It won’t take all that much longer. It looks, at the moment, as if the result will be somewhat smaller than my target size. It also looks surprisingly ethereal. Surprisingly, for cotton. All this is useful information. Regard it as a test square.

Joannie Newsome knit her second tier to come all the way up to the top of the first tier. They are joined by a three-needle bind-off. The top part of the second tier, where it doesn’t show, is plain garter stitch. The third tier reaches about half-way up the second one. Extra overlap may prove useful, to add substance.

The Mystery Project is within an evening, or at worst two, of completion, and is looking good. At least reasonably so. I could retreat to that for comfort, but I think I’d better press on with cotton and humiliation.

I love “Knitting in Art”. Sundbo is the one who studies scraps of old knitting – she actually owned a shoddy factory. (“Shoddy” is a technical term in that sentence, not a comment.) She has written about this resource before, in “Treasures from a Rag Pile” and other books.

This one is a worthy successor. At the back, there are some patterns, very elliptical and Vibeke-Lind. I am particularly taken with a shrug, which in Norwegian is known endearingly as a “soul warmer”. This particular one has full sleeves gathered in to the wrist, and is decorated with lice. The edging and cuffs must be st st, folded over.

The instructions are about as terse as you can get: “The garment is knitted in one piece and is the same width across the body as for the sleeves. The length of the soul warmer is the sleeve length + ½ the body width x 2. At the cuffs, decrease the stitch count so that the cuff fits the wrist and then knit an edging or a ribbed cuff.”

Now you know.

I was thrown for a while by that bit about decreasing for the wrist – on the first sleeve you’ll be increasing from the wrist. I am painfully literal. And re-reading what I have just typed, the formula for the overall length looks far too big. Since it’s got lice all over, one would want to keep knitting in the round, but steeking shouldn’t be impossible for the centre bit.

Judith, thank you for the pointer to the Ravelry KnitCamp group. It doesn’t entirely dispel my unease, but I feel somewhat more cheerful. Perhaps I should face up to following the story on Twitter, as the organisers suggest

Janet, if you do see Franklin in Seattle, you could ask, in a quiet moment, if everything is going to plan for the KnitCamp in Stirling in August. You could even say that a friend of yours is a bit anxious. You could even mention my name, which I think he might remember: we have corresponded a bit, and I almost got to be one of the 1,000 Knitters: I missed him in London by a couple of days.

Since I sat down to type, the doorbell has rung and the postman delivered “Knitting in Art” and “Estonian Mittens” from the Schoolhouse. Both look wonderful. I sort of “collect” knitting in art – as a list in my electronic Filofax, not canvasses on the wall. The majority turn out to be French from the third quarter of the 19th century, shepherdesses sitting on rocks churning out large socks, sort of thing.

I expected a good deal of that from this book, but (even on a five-minute inspection) it is much more sharply focussed. The author was looking more for knitting-being-worn than knitting-being-executed (although the latter is present too), in old photographs as well as paintings. The emphasis is solidly Scandinavian (good) and she comments as well as illustrates (better).

Here is an example of the sort of thing, except that this one is from me, rather than the book – a picture painted in 1815 of “Napoleon on board the Bellerophon in Plymouth Sound”. It is in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and its interest to us is the honest British tar in the foreground in his striped, drop-shoulder jersey. Unusually clear.

“Estonian Mittens” makes me wonder if I should do some mitten-knitting. Memo for next Christmas? It is a field into which I have rarely strayed.

Jabot

I dashed off a couple of repeats of the Doris edging in DMC Crochet Cotton 100 yesterday, as supplied by Sharon Miller for swatching the Wedding Ring Shawl, and found that I could do it. A great morale-booster, after the failure last week to knit 100 stitches of a very easy lace pattern is gossamer merino. Perhaps when I was approaching the Princess, it was with silk that I matched Franklin’s failure, rather than cotton.

On the same principle that led me to order yarn the other day – to get something a bit heavier than gossamer – I spent an uncomfortably long time looking for DMC Crochet Cotton at 70 or 80. (I don’t know what I’m talking about – just guessing here.) All the good websites seem to be north American, even when I specify that I want UK sites only. And some of the UK ones proved difficult or impossible to order from.

I finally found some 80 that I could actually have, and ordered a ball of that. I’m not going to re-set the slider again: a) because crochet cotton is not “yarn” and b) because it counts as part of last Saturday’s purchase, something a little bit solider for the jabot.

I’m still not committed to knitting a cotton jabot, but I’ll try.

You’ll have noticed the change. I ordered a ha’pworth of tar from Heirloom Knitting yesterday, that’s what it was.

To elaborate: I went off and had my bath after blogging yesterday morning, still thinking hard about jabot-knitting. It occurred to me that if what I want in the result is fullness and fruitiness, perhaps a gossamer yarn is not the best choice. I have ordered two balls of Heirloom’s Merino Lace yarn in Bright White.

I thought it proper to change the TickerFactory progress bar before I sent in the order. When I finished doing the latter, I found Grannypurple’s comment already in place. It cheered me up a lot.

The yarn is slightly finer than Shetland cobweb, the Heirloom website says – not exactly chunky. I know and like it. In fact, I started my Princess in it. I had eight or ten edging repeats done when I stopped and blocked – a very unusually conscientious step, for me – and established that the resulting Princess was going to be (even) bigger than the pattern predicted. I was sort of thinking of eliminating a couple of “feathers” in the border pattern.

I must have blogged about it, because Sharon Miller herself rang me up to say, Stop! Her Gossamer Merino was brand new then. She sent me a ball to try, and the rest is history.

I can’t find that aborted effort – it must be somewhere amongst the stash. But even if I could, one incomplete ball might not be enough.

Orders from Heirloom Knitting are filled with something like the speed of sound – I should be able to start again later this week. But it was no use going on with my pretty little edging yesterday, so I re-started the Mystery Project and feel much more cheerful about it. I will be able to correct a couple of small flaws in the first attempt, as well as size. Donice (comment yesterday), I love the use you made of the Doris edging.

I had noticed the hand-knit jabot you mention, Tamar – including a four-tiered version – on offer at the Scottish Tartans Museum gift shop. It is the same one – Joannie Newsome’s design. Either she is offering to knit them herself, or has given her pattern to outworkers. The price is steep enough almost to make it worth the knitter’s while, although I suspect if you divided it by hours-needed-for-completion, you would still get a figure far under a living wage.

I had also thought (in that same bath) of starch, as you suggest, Tamar. I have heard of starching knitted lace – is there a reference to it in Gathering? It sounds bizarre, but I will explore the idea.

Not entirely non-knit

I don’t think I ever told you that the Calcutta Cup match this year was a draw. So James-the-Younger will have to wait at least a year, and probably much longer, for his CC sweater. (See my blogging of March 10 for elucidation.) Draws are relatively rare in rugby, but there is no provision against them – no extra innings or extra time.