Today’s event is – Helen.

Lisa, I did write to Franklin on Tuesday when I heard the news. We have corresponded in the past – I provided him with one of the Latin words on the shawl he knit for his niece, and a bootlegged copy, I am afraid, of the Bridget Rorem lace alphabet, now available from the Schoolhouse Press. But no reply this time.

I think I may attempt a message today to the Delores Devotees group on Ravelry, along the lines suggested in your comments. It’s no use writing to the Knit Camp group which is heavily monitored and devoted to messages about KALs and protection against midges. The news of Franklin’s non-appearance was posted there by the organiser, an hour or two before she sent the emails to the paying customers. It has apparently attracted no comment at all.

Life

My new email address (drump at btinternet dot com) has suddenly sprung to life. I’ve ensconced it in Outlook Express. Now I must go through the Outlook Express address book and see if there’s anyone who needs to know about the change. For the time being, it simply relieves me of vast quantities of advertising, the result of all my on-line Christmas shopping in years past.


So the one remaining thing to test, is adding additional computers to the system. That will have to wait until someone comes to visit with a laptop.

Yesterday’s young woman was very pleasant. She did stay to lunch, and for much of the afternoon. She is working on a kind of archive of the reminiscences of elderly art historians. It will be deposited somewhere.

I signed up for Facebook the other day, for an entirely unworthy reason. I had heard that a young woman with whom I am not acquainted often wrote about her mother, whom I know. I wondered if her posts were public. They’re not, and I am ashamed of myself and certainly don’t intend to startle the young woman by proposing myself as her friend.

But the Facebook experience is extraordinary. As soon as I had identified myself, I found a cheerful group of six or eight dear people, wanting to be my friend. A bit like dying, I imagine, and being welcomed by familiar faces on the farther shore.

Knitting

I have successfully established the second rank of Green Granite Blocks for the right front.


Once I had done that, I thought I might as well finish off those blasted socks. I took unusual care to make sure I was operating on the correct, too-long, sock, and then cut off the toe and took it back. For the successful sock, I started the toe shaping as soon as the Oliver shaping was finished, with four stitches remaining between the decreases. That meant that I was able to recover the stitches for this sock at precisely the same point.

I’ll finish it off this evening, if the excitement of the day’s event allows. And THAT means I can select a KF colourway from stash for the next pair!

Rachel’s younger son Joe – the Grandson, of the Grandson Sweater -- embarks on life’s third decade today. It’s the only birthday-ending-in-zero for which there is no specific card on sale, at least at John Lewis. Happy Birthday, Joe, anyhow.



Well. Franklin. Dawn’s comment yesterday says it all, a good deal more neatly than I am about to.

How could this be? He has been promised as a star turn to Knit Campers for the last seven months or so – plenty of time for a double-booking to come to light. Even Franklin doesn’t have that many overseas gigs. Passports and travel plans would have to be in hand before now. He must be in touch with lots of people – including the camp organisers themselves – who would occasionally say, See you in Stirling. Dawn’s hypothesis is the only possible explanation.

If the double-booking was made this year, surely he would honour the earlier commitment?

The substitution, Mary Jane Mucklestone, is brilliant. The organisers did well to get such a big name, and such an appropriate one, at short notice. If I were interested in learning how to photograph fabric, everything would be fine. But since I am interested in being taught how to photograph fabric by Franklin Habit, I’m out of luck and out of pocket. Similarly, Dawn, who I am sure can knit a tomten with one hand tied behind her.

Which day is your cable class, Dawn? Can we meet when I’m there for Japanese knitting on the Thursday? It will be easier for me in many ways to take only one day away from domestic responsibilities. That’s a plus.

Life

I continue to wrestle with my new broadband connection. Specifically, to try to find my email. I tried your suggestion, Judith, but soon ran up against the now-familiar stone wall. I tried sending a message to myself as drump at btinternet dot com from Googlemail. It bounced back with the message that there is no such address at btinternet.com.

Maybe things will settle down after a few days. I have emailed the BT help desk. Eventually I may have to phone them.

Yesterday’s event, lunch with a friend, was very pleasant. Today’s is an unusual one – a young woman with a recording machine is coming to interview my husband about his memories of the founding of the Association of Art Historians in which he was closely involved. We’ll have to offer lunch, although we hope she’ll go away. Piperade, I think, into which extra eggs can be incorporated if need be at the last moment.

Knitting

What with one thing and another, I am still a couple of rows short of the top of the first rank of Green Granite Blocks on the right front.

Stop Press

Franklin has pulled out of Knit Camp.

That is my new Hub. Isn’t it nice? I’m sure the ease of yesterday's transition owed a lot to it. It already knew many of the things James struggled for hours to teach the Netgear router about my former ISP.

I’m now trying to find messages for my new address -- drump at btinternet dot com. It’s no use writing to me there because I don’t know where to go to pick up mail. Googlemail (address in sidebar) works as usual, thank goodness. And I must look into security. James said before he left that it is important to ensure that students in the flat downstairs can’t download porn on my wi-fi.

Knitting

Yesterday’s event, apart from BT Total Broadband, was my husband’s appointment at the Royal Infirmary Breathlessness Dep’t. They can’t do anything for him, but say that he is not declining, or at least not rapidly, and that his resting oxygen level is good. There was a long wait, as expected, and I finished off his second sock.

The first is too long. I Kitchener’d the second in the evening and it’s just right. It won’t take long to re-knit the toe of the first one. Is this an argument against toe-up sock-knitting?

(They had a pamphlet on the rack, just in front of where I sat knitting, called “Coping With the Final Stages of Chronic Lung Disease”. I would have loved to have a look, but didn’t, so as not to worry or distress my husband. The man on the front of the pamphlet looked pale but otherwise as cheerful as any man could in his condition.*)

Today’s event is a friend coming to lunch. I’ll make soup.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the right front of Green Granite Blocks is bounding forward. I should finish the first rank of blocks this evening, and set the second.

I used my brilliant new connection last night to winkle out the information I need about Knit Camp – times and places of classes, what to bring, map of Stirling campus, train timetables. I feel better having all this together, and still think the organisers might have sent a simple email.

They have a “list of tutors” on the Ravelry Knit Camp page – it’s fairly short, and doesn’t include Franklin. I deduce that it is a list of tutors whose classes aren’t full. It does include Donna Druchunas who is going to teach me about Japanese knitting. But of course there is no way to distinguish a tutor who is below the class-minimum from one who is a few short of the maximum.

Vegetables

The walking onions turned up yesterday, too. The plan is to go to Strathardle on Friday, with Helen – her arrival is Thursday’s event. I’ll plant them straight away, of course.

Rachel is already overwhelmed by her husband Ed’s allotment crop – more artichokes than they can eat, marrows, courgettes, borlotti beans, mange-tout peas. Will I have anything? Well, peas, hopefully, and red currants for the summer pudding. Courgettes and the first potatoes and broad beans not far behind. Not too bad.

*see Pepys on the hanging, drawing and quartering of poor Major General Harrison.

Here I am! Full marks to BT!

The installation process has consumed blogging-time -- no worse than that. I should be back here tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the day I switch ISPs, so it is safe to assume I won’t be here. (In fact, at the moment, I can’t connect today.) I haven’t yet received the box of kit from BT – which will include a wireless router they call a “hub” – but I am confident it will arrive. I am hopeful (but not confident) that I will be able to do the rest myself. I’ve already got the User Guide, from which I deduce that the hub will be pre-set to talk to BT. That should help.

If I fail, I’ll get a man in right away. This week is unusually fraught with event; that won’t help.

Since I can’t (yet) connect this morning, I can’t re-read yesterday’s comments, but you are right, Lisa, that there seem to be two Geoffrey Duttons, of almost identical age and not entirely dissimilar careers, a world apart. I faffed about for a while yesterday trying to see if they might not be the same man after all, but I agree there were two. In a few hundred years’ time, art historians will find it very hard to believe that there really were two French 19th century artists named, respectively, Manet and Monet.

(I’m connected! Hello, world! Perhaps for the last time.)

As for Kaffe, my belief, on not much evidence, is that he designs fabric, knitting patterns in that sense, and the knitty-gritty of transforming his ideas into garments is done by someone else. But having started to formulate that idea, I remembered the dramatic coat and the bat-winged ikat in “Glorious Knitting” – he must at least have wanted to achieve those shapes, even if someone else actually did it.

I think, in fact, that “Glorious Knitting” shows a certain amount of transitional discomfort on this point. “Knitting patterns” meant something slightly different then. People expected shapes and texture. That’s why they chose that – rather awful, to my taste – thing with a peplum for the cover of the first edition of “Glorious Knitting”. And why my sister-in-law said, when I showed her the book back when it was new, “It’s just colour”.

I don’t believe, in short, that the over-the-shoulder way of knitting was something he insisted on. It is interesting to learn from Judith’s comment that it is a 19th century technique. I did it for his Arabic patches sweater in “KF at the V&A” and didn’t much enjoy the process.

I've finished the ribbing for the right front of the Green Granite Blocks, somewhat slowed by skein- and butterfly-winding, and am now embarked on the pattern. Knitting only half-a-row is going to be fun.

Lisa, I’ve never attempted intarsia in the round. I’ve read about it. I know it can be done (although at the moment I can’t think how). In fact, in a situation like this, I don’t mind purling. The whole experience of a KF design is so different from other knitting anyway.

Helen's shawl

I took some pictures yesterday of the lace yarns I’ve rooted out of stash for Helen’s consideration:

Lorna’s Laces, “Helen’s Lace” (appropriately enough):

Cheery Tree Hill suri alpaca in the colourway “Martha’s Vineyard”. This was an extravagant purchase of mine at Stitches East in ’02. Memory had suggested that there was some possum yarn in the blend, but memory erred. I wonder if it would do for the Dickinson – observe the ball already wound in the middle of the pile:

James’ and Cathy’s Christmas present to me in ’08. It’s labelled “cashmere”, but Cathy says not:

Some purchases of my own made in Beijing on our one glorious visit, in ’05 perhaps. The colours are wonderfully Chinese-looking. I’d love to use them:

Bless you, catdownunder, for saving me from the humiliation of a comment-less day, and even more for actually knowing Geoffrey Dutton. Did someone say something about a small world?

I had one extra advantage in my search for his garden: proving, if proof were required, that we’re going to go on needing the printed page. My husband, with a lifetime of research under his belt, said, start with the phone book, when we read the obituary with its reference to a garden “north of Blairgowrie”. We were in Strathardle at the time, and there is no possible Dutton in the current book.

But here in Edinburgh, we keep the Tayside book-but-one (and do the same for Edinburgh at the other end). And in the older book a Dutton was listed – although without “G” among the initials – for “Druinchardain, Bridge of Cally”.

Well, Google on that and you soon find that that’s Geoffrey Dutton’s address. So then all you have to do is locate Druinchardain.

Knitting

The back of the Green Granite Blocks is properly finished, and I am advancing through the ribbing of the right front.

The pattern – I’ve mentioned this before – asks one to carry on, over the shoulder, and knit the fronts downwards. I don’t see the point. And I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with Kaffe. I don’t think he designs knitwear, in the ordinary sense of that phrase, although he certainly has views about possible – often dramatic – shapes.

So I left the stitches live, and am starting again from the bottom.

I got a bit anxious about the fact that I seem to have used nearly half of the amount of yarn provided for Colour A (which figures prominently in the ribbing). But a quick search of the Rowan odd-ball bag has produced a sufficiency of the right stuff, or near enough. Dye-lots don’t matter here. So that’s all right.

There is one colour whose effect I don’t like at all, as it appears on the back. When you see the colours all lying in their box ready for deployment, it looks as if it would provide an interesting accent. But in practice, I don’t think it works.

The pictures on the models in the California Patches book all seem to be arranged so that you can’t see the places where that colour appears. And there is one mysterious picture of the complete back – knit in a different colourway: Red Granite Blocks, perhaps. No comment in the text, and no discordant colour there.

I don't know what that intrusion at the bottom of the picture is -- the camera case, perhaps. But it underlines one appearance of the offending colour, and there is another upper left.

I’m about to try a substitution from the odd-ball bag.

I looked out some lace yarns for Helen’s consideration yesterday, and became thoroughly depressed at the size of the stash. It’s now eight months since the yarn-fast began, interrupted only by buying one ball of merino lace for James’s jabot – and knitting it. You wouldn’t know anything had happened, in there amongst the yarns.

My plan, roughly, is to buy! buy! buy! in November – when one needs cheering up, anyway – but to buy less than can be knit in a year, and then start another fast. We’ll see

We had a good walk, and were very lucky with the weather. There was serious rain from time to time, but it fell while we were in the car, or having coffee in a nice place in Gullane, or, at worst, walking through trees. We drove west of Edinburgh to Yellowcraig and walked perhaps five or six miles in all, along the beach and back along the dunes. All rather wonderful.

I was too tired last night, in a thoroughly nice sort of way, to get much knitting done. The back of the Green Granite Blocks is finished – indeed, I’ve gone a row too far – but not finished off.

Gardening

I ordered some “walking onions” from an eBay seller yesterday – all your fault, Mary Lou. I’m going to try them in the part of the garden fully exposed to rabbits (and thus well away from the strawberries). There are plenty of rabbits about, but they are, for whatever reason, leaving me alone this year. I had hoped maybe parsnips and perpetual spinach would both be safe, and so far both of them are. Plus some spicy salad leaves. By nature? or because the rabbits have declared an amnesty? We will see whether walking onions can be added to the list.

We have occasionally bought books after learning of the author’s existence from his or her obituary, and did so again last week, Geoffrey Dutton’s “Some Branches Against the Sky”. It arrived yesterday, and has been set aside for thorough reading in Strathardle.

Dutton was Australian to begin with, and his distinction was in biomedical research, but the interest of the book to us was that it described his “natural garden” -- not the same thing as a wild garden, apparently – somewhere “north of Blairgowrie”.

The Telegraph obituary said that he kept the precise location of the garden secret, but you can’t really do that in the Age of Google, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found it, just above Bleeton Hallet on that rather scary road from the A93 to Alyth. Not in Strathardle itself, but well within our orbit. We might have known him, were we more inclined to scrub up and go about in society.

He was a writer -- a poet, indeed – as well as a scientist and a gardener. The book promises very well. His approach to gardening sounds much like my husband’s. He deplored improving the soil – it only encourages weeds. I wonder what has happened to the garden. I learn, from dipping into the book, that a natural garden can be recovered from neglect fairly easily. And its outlines would surely survive for years.

Still, you can’t grow vegetables that way. It was Mrs Duthie of Bleeton Hallet who told me, at the Games one year, that rabbits don’t like broad beans. I wouldn’t have believed a lesser expert, but she’s right. I’ve been growing them fully exposed to rabbits for a decade now.

Thanks for the help with the shawl-choice. Susan, I’m saving your advice about beads and feeling, at least for the moment, inspired to try some. I think the Dickinson shawl would suit Helen-in-retro-mode. She’ll be here soon. We’ll see what she thinks.

There was a bad moment yesterday when I had an email to say that their flight today, Athens-London, had been cancelled due to yet another Greek strike. She said they’d drive home, if they had to. But then another email to say that David had found a flight for them. I trust they’re on their way.

Today is St Swithin’s Day and it’s not looking good. Not actually raining (very much) here at the moment, but we are enveloped in a haar. I am meant to be going for a walk with husband’s neice but am inclined to think we should wait for something better. I didn’t get lace yarns dug out yesterday, what with one thing and another. The forecast suggests there might not be a chance to photograph them in natural light before the end of the month.

Angel, I’m sorry to hear you’re not knitting. I like imagining that Oberlin yarn shop. I wonder if there was one in my day. I knit in high school, trying to marry Woolworth’s yarn to Vogue patterns with singular lack of success. For those four years at Oberlin, nothing at all. Then Glasgow, and everybody was knitting, and I remembered how much I had liked it. That was the real beginning.

There’s a thread on the Historic Knitting Group at the moment about Knitting 50 Years Ago, for heaven’s sake. I can’t bear to read it.

All well on the Green Granite Block front – I should finish the back today.

The haar has lifted, and it’s not raining. Not nice, but not raining. Difficult one to call.

A beautiful day yesterday; not so this morning. No hope of natural-light-on-the-doorstep for the Green Granite Blocks.

Otherwise, however, all is well. I have reached the row in which the front-of-blocks dots for the sixth rank will begin to be inserted, and indeed if all goes swimmingly, I should finish the back of the jacket tomorrow.

The computer was slow-as-molasses yesterday, but remained connected. I bought and downloaded and printed – not without difficulty -- both the Emily Dickinson shawl pattern (Ravelry link yesterday) and Anne Hanson’s “Pine and Ivy”. The latter a strong contender: the Faculty Meeting Knitter alerted me to it a while ago, but doesn’t seem to be knitting it yet.

I also flipped through a few books, feeling sort of Faroese. But Faroese usually means fingering weight, and it’s lace weight or finer we’re after here. The Dickinson one is gossamer, and I think really should wait until the yarn fast is over and it can be knit in a proper Dickinsonian grey.

The pattern disappoints by not telling me how to attach beads. It doesn’t tell me how to knit, either, so perhaps that doesn’t constitute grounds for grumbling. I’d need “273 clear glass 6/0 Japanese beads” and a 1mm crochet hook. The positions for the beads are marked on the charts. Good old Google will fill the gap, if I ever get that far.

Now I must seek out some possible yarns.

Slow cooking

I had a good time last week with my new toy. As a way of life when lots of people are about, Helen is right that cooking in the morning while the kitchen is full of breakfast and chaos is a good way to start the day. Then clean it all up and off you go.

I wished somewhat that I had bought the smaller John Lewis programmable slow cooker which I recently gave Rachel. My one seems awfully big, even for four adults. And a couple of meals were near-spoiled by, I think, being cooked for too long. I don’t really need to program it. I can come in from my vegetable-growing at what I deem the appropriate time, and turn it on.

And when Helen gets here next week, she’ll straighten me out on the whole topic.

Vegetable-growing

I have been reflecting lately on the near-miracle of the fact that we can afford to eat at all. I know about agri-business and chemicals and all that. But even so the production of food seems so labour-intensive when one is actually doing it that I am astonished that anyone can do it, and harvest and package and ship the stuff, and sell it – with a generous slice for the seller – at a price anyone can afford.

And in the olden days, three thousand years ago before agri-business and chemicals were invented, how did people grow enough food to support cities? In villages and towns, people can continue to grow a lot of their own. But not in cities. Wheat, is the answer. It still supplies 20% of all calories consumed in the world, I learn from the Economist. Rice, another 20%.

Mary Lou, I will keep walking onions well away from the strawberries. Thank you.

I did it. I got my MAC – Migrating Access Code, or something like that – from my current ISP and relayed it to BT and the changeover will happen next Monday and I will probably never be heard from again. I had better print out what I can, while I can, about Knit Camp. I still don’t know what I’m going to do, but it’s as well to have the options open.

We talked about this Big Change while my sister was here. She thought I could run both accounts in parallel for a while. Can you in America? I think maybe it was possible here back in the simple days of dial-up, before the need for MACs.

A good day on the Green Granite Block front, too. The sixth rank is established. I’ll attempt a photograph tomorrow, when I should be far enough forward to let the fifth rank be seen in all its glory.

Greek Helen phoned yesterday, still in Athens. They’re coming to England later this week (as you should know by now from reading Mungo’s latest blog-entry) but going first to David’s family and only next week to us. So one of the things I must do is look out lace yarns and patterns for her to choose from.

I stumbled across the Emily Dickinson shawl (Ravelry link) yesterday – I like it a lot. My mother was a Dickinson scholar of some distinction, and Helen was very fond of her. So it would make some nice connections.

It involves, however, beads, which are against my religion. On the other hand, again, several knitters whose work I admire and respect are devoted to them. Maybe it is time to move forward. Perhaps I should at least buy the pattern and have it ready for Helen’s views. I’m not sure I have any suitably Dickinsian lace yarn, though. Mine tends towards garish.

Summer pudding (& vegetable-growing)

I use Delia Smith’s recipe for summer pudding, except, as I said, that I use only red currants. And take the crusts off the bread -- I don't think DS says that specifically. My husband says, oddly, that there should be a transverse slice of bread in the middle. That’s pretty well impossible, unless you’re using a bowl the size of a mixing bowl. Maybe he retains a vague war-time memory of days when red currants and sugar had to be made to go further? He’s right that the fruit-soaked bread is the whole point.

Mary Lou, I am worried about the removal of “walking onions” from your garden. They sound fun, and I thought I might go on to them when I had mastered bunching ones. I am trying to encourage every sort of vegetable that has the slightest capacity to look after itself. I constantly buy “spring onions” and I thought having something in the garden that would do as a substitute would be a real blessing.

By the way – I set out five salsola soda plants in the end, and they seemed, in the week we were there, to be taking hold very happily. I even tasted one. Yes! It’s not so much the flavour as the delicious and unexpected crunch.

Everything seems all right this morning, connectivity-wise, but failure lately has been sudden and unprovoked, as if the machine knows that James is gone and I’m on my own. I must get back to the prob of switching ISP’s, rather neglected in recent days.

Strathardle was wet and midge-y but we had a grand time. No knitting to speak of. Cathy and Alistair and I went to see “Noises Off” at the Pitlochry Theatre.


James and Alistair went camping. I drove them up Glen Fernate along an interesting single-track road and then they skirted the south edge of Ben-y-gloe, if I’ve got it right, and walked down Glen Tilt,


to Blair Atholl, where we picked them up the next day at the Atholl Arms Hotel.


Now they’re in Cornwall, celebrating Cathy’s parents’ Golden Wedding.

Vegetables (and weeds) progress. I am becoming obsessed by the concept of bunching onions, and increasingly hopeful for my own. My vegetable-growing books aren’t terribly much help, being much more interested in the growing of onion-onions. Googling seems to suggest that we are talking about alium fistulosum, of which there are many cultivars. Not all equally hardy, perhaps.

There seems to be a nice range of interesting oriental ones. I might have a go at some of them next year, and also try the red variety of the Siberian (or Welsh) Bunching Onion, said to be the hardiest of all.


Siberian or Welsh:


Italian (cipolotto da mazzo):


For the Fishwife, these things grow like weeds – literally. They seed themselves pleasantly in odd corners of her garden. (Towards the end of her July 4 post.)

As for the rest, the mange-tout peas and the Colossal Climbing Victorian ones are coming into flower. In the background, on the dyke, you can see one of Helen's mosaics. The design is, essentially, the same as Green Granite Blocks, except that the blocks are facing the other way.


Beans are cheerful but, except for the broad beans, not making much progress.


The nematodes have expired and the slugs are back at work on the second sowings, especially the lettuce. The red currant bush, carefully netted, promises a summer-pudding's-worth of harvest again this year. (My husband insists, contrary to all authority, that summer pudding be made entirely of red currants.)

No knitting in Strathardle, but I have happily resumed the Green Granite Blocks. I should finish the 5th rank today, and accomplish some or maybe all of the setting-of-colours for the sixth. And the sixth rank is the one that doesn’t get finished, because one reaches the shoulder seam first.

Connectivity problems. Back soon, I hope.

A new follower!

So we’re off. If we can stand it, we’ll be away until the end of next week.

As hoped, the dots have been placed on the 5th rank of green granite blocks – it’s a good place to stop.

Our dentist keeps good time, and his office is so near that there’s no need to arrive early, so I didn’t get much sock-knitting done yesterday. I think I’ll take them along to Strathardle, pushing the poor old Araucania sweater which lives there even further down the queue. I’m well along the foot of the second sock, and I’m getting tired of them.

Thanks to yesterday’s commenters, Sister Helen and Meg, for ideas for the expected lettuce-glut. Wilted lettuce salad sounds a very interesting idea – I’m sure I can find a bacon dressing for it in cyber-space, and we’ve got good bacon in Perthshire.

I have a living-in-Italy book for you on the tip of my mind, so to speak -- a reference to a remark in Meg's fascinating blog. I hope I’ll recover enough detail to recommend it specifically – maybe quicker to look for my own copy. Set in the 40’s, decaying castles and, even then, good food. Author’s name begins with K I think.

Got it: “A Tuscan Childhood” by Kinta Beevor. I remembered that I gave it to someone for Christmas once, and found it by digging out my invaluable Excel spreadsheet called “Xmas” and unhiding columns for Christmasses past, and then unhiding rows for loved-ones dead. There it was. Good book.

Yesterday afternoon I went to John Lewis and bought a slow cooker for Strathardle. There isn’t room for one in the kitchen here, and it’ll be more use there anyway. Rachel seems to be having a good time with the one I gave her recently. I got an even bigger one for us, on Greek Helen’s recommendation.

The operation involved parking in a multi-level Stygian car park with lost souls wandering about looking for the way out. Never again, if it can be avoided. But I succeeded.

Thank you for the kind comments about the jabot. It was well received – I have every hope that the jacket will be ordered in due course. There’s a specific target – the Beijing St Andrew’s Night Ball. That should help concentrate the mind.

And for the good wishes (rather alarming in tone) about migrating from one ISP to another. I didn’t hear from Alistair yesterday – he was meant to pursue the attempt to get hold of the necessary migration code from the current supplier. At the very worst, I won’t be gone for long. I’ll get a Man In.

Janet, I have already told Cathy that you were reading “Slaughter Pavilion”, and will certainly tell her tomorrow that you enjoyed it. I love your “red” photography project (June 28). It is astonishing how expressive of Ireland it seems. Could I do something like that for Edinburgh?

Here are the Green Granite Blocks, with four ranks complete. I sped forward yesterday, once Rank #5 was established. If progress is as good today, I should reach the mid-block dots.


I maintain an electronic Filofax, largely devoted to knitting but helpful as a birthday-reminder. I also weigh myself every morning and record the result there. (I reached my present level, and stuck there, in January of this year.) I also make a note, on the first day of every month, of where I am with what I’m knitting. June 1 reads “nearing top of first rank of Green Granite Blocks”. It doesn’t seem like much for a month’s work.

Salsola soda

This is rather embarrassing, but you deserve to hear how the story has unfolded.

You may remember that on a recent visit to Strathardle I found two little seedlings in the otherwise-bare salsola soda patch which tasted so wonderful that I was inspired to fill up my Roottrainers with compost and sow the rest of the seeds.

When we were in Strathardle last week, the little seedlings had got bigger, and I decided that their delicious and complex flavour was nothing more or less than self-sown rocket (arugula).

That leaves the Roottrainers, here on the doorstep. They now contain three plants – with a fourth currently unsure whether to live or die – which must be salsola soda. I’ll have to take them up and plant them out when we go tomorrow. So there’s some hope that I will, in the end, find out what they taste like.

I wish I could remember how I got started on this pursuit.

More on vegetables

An overdue blog post from the Fishwife shows how it ought to be done.

I’ve got the books from the famous cooks who claim to grow their own vegetables – Jamie Oliver’s “Jamie at Home” and Nigel Slater’s “Tender”. I find them surprisingly useless. Example: my first crop of lettuce – if it hasn’t bolted already – is going to need serious attention straight away. It happens to anyone who’s ever grown the stuff. Neither man offers a cooked-lettuce recipe. Nigel doesn’t include lettuce at all. Fortunately the ever-fecund Internet is richly productive of the sort of recipe I need.

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.

The weather was glorious – very dry, although only a fortnight before it was heavy rain that drove us away a day early. I made the beds upstairs, and got a certain amount of minimal tidying-up done, but most of the time was spent carrying water to my dear vegetables and rescuing them from the encroaching weeds.

Things are looking pretty good.


Except for the white currants, which are being consumed by (I think) gooseberry sawfly.

And the pak choi and spinach have bolted.

This is the year devoted to beans and onions. The climbing beans have started climbing!

And the dwarf ones have started blooming!



Germination of broad beans has been on the disappointing side – or else mice have made off with the seeds. I think my trouble was planting three fancy varieties – one with red beans, which a magazine recommended for deliciousness; one with small pods which can be eaten at the mange-tout size; and one from the Victoriana nursery which had some other merit. The mistake was not to sow a mainstream variety from a mainstream seedsman.

With onions, the result has been exactly the opposite. I have failed, or nearly failed, as usual, with the mainstream easy-peasy varieties, White Lisbon and Ishikura. Poor germination, little progress since. But I think I am getting somewhere with the rarer ones. Germination was best for the Italian Cipollotto da Mazzo,


but I think the Siberian Bunching from Real Seeds are making the most progress.


I have brought in the radish crop, and today for lunch we will have this, from one of Robin Lane Fox’s gardening articles in the FT two years ago:

“Lightly fry an onion, put in about two dozen sliced radishes and the chopped leaves from their tops. Add garlic and cook until the leaves flop. Add the mixture to a big spoon of the water in which you have cooked tagliatelle. Mix in the pasta, grated cheese (strong cheddar does the trick) and top with fresh parsley. The result is remarkably satisfying – a pasta del giardino that is within the competence of us all.”

I even grew the variety of radish he recommends for this purpose, namely Rougette.

We managed this dish once before. It tastes a lot better than it sounds.

As for knitting, I literally didn’t touch it while we were there. Here in Edinburgh, I am posed for the slow row near the top of the fourth rank of Green Granite Blocks, where I set the colours for the tops of the blocks and introduce some space-creating blackness.

But I doubt if I’ll make further progress today, because James and his children must already be airborne. Tomorrow, insh’Allah, we’ll go to Kinloch Anderson and see about that Montrose jacket.

Green Granite Blocks

They continue to progress. I’ve put the dots on the fronts of the Fourth-Tier blocks.

The fourth tier brings two events:

1) Cast off five stitches each side for the underarm. I’ve already done that.
2) Move to the next page for the rest of the chart – that’s only eight rows away.

What excitement!

“California Patches” is a big (?A3) paper-back, essentially a pamphlet. The whole chart is printed sideways, spanning two pages. And in eight rows I will move from page 23 to page 22.



Kristie, you ask about weaving in ends. Gosh, yes. I’ve set aside 10% for that stage in my Progress Bar over there – it may not be enough.

Years ago, back in the second millennium and the glory days of the Knitlist, Selma threw a virtual party for those of us who couldn’t get to Stitches. We sat around her virtual swimming pool, sipping virtual Chardonnay, and indulging in our knitting fantasies. I can’t remember any of the fantasies, even my own, except for one – someone said she’d spotted Kaffe over to the side, darning in ends.

Selma is now a flesh-and-blood friend; ends remain a problem.

Angel, thank you for the link to the Knit Camp vest – I didn’t know about it, and it looks kinda fun. Does this mean that the US VK has different material from the UK “Designer Knitting”? I thot they were the same – maybe I just haven’t received that issue yet. They had a nice plug for Knit Camp in the last one. It sort of makes up for the stony silence of the British “Knitting” magazine.

If I stay away from Camp it will be because of the difficulty of making domestic arrangements, and nervousness about driving unfamiliar routes. But if the organisers inspired more confidence it might spill over into those areas. “You are requested to bring a print out of your order confirmation with you to Camp. This will be e-mailed to you once we have completed entering your details into our database. “ I don’t think I’ve had such an email; I wouldn’t hesitate to turn up without it. But its absence adds to the niggling worries.

We’re going to Strathardle today for two or threee nights, to get things ready for the Beijing Mileses who will be with us any minute now. I haven’t been able to secure the services of the wonderful woman who has cleaned the house and made the beds in preparation for the summer invasion in other years, so I will have to do it myself. It won’t be fun, toiling indoors with my vegetables there just beyond the door.

Art, knitting, salsola soda – where to start?

Roger and Helen left yesterday, for London, then Paris, then London again, then CT, then (for Roger) Africa again. We have reached the stage in life where I found myself thinking of my favourite literary parting, Brutus to Cassius (or perhaps the other way around) before Philippi:

If we should meet again, why, we shall smile.
If not, why then this parting was well made.

Jupiter Artland was – is – terrific. Seize the chance, if you can. The owners, Wilson by name, bought a country house near Edinburgh only last year and have made a sculpture park of the grounds. They have commissioned every living sculptor I have ever heard of (Gormley, Kapoor, Goldsworthy), and people whose work I recognised although I didn’t know their names (Charles Jencks and that man who paints stripes on the floor)

and a good many more. (That's Roger, who sat down to fiddle with his camera.) Almost all the work was made for a specific place chosen by the artist; much of it was made on the site.

One walks through a woodland garden and discovers these remarkable things, unlabelled, unfenced, unguarded but, where appropriate, the grass about them tended if need be with nail scissors.

Helen had a cold and was, I think, exhausted by Africa and travel. She stayed here. This is a picture of Roger and my husband looking at the Kapoor.

There was even knitting. An artist none of us knew, Shane Waltener, had contributed both a temporary installation in the woodshed (originally “commissioned by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York for the touring exhibition 'Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting'”):

and a permanent piece on the edge of the woods:

(Maybe Mrs Wilson is a knitter?)

The remarkable thing is the dimension such art acquires by being experienced like that instead of, bewilderingly, in galleries or even in the courtyard of the Royal Academy.

And it was amusing to think of the contrast with Pollphail (my blog entry, June 3), which was also an occasion when art was experienced directly. Arte povera, in that case; as opposed to arte ricca, here. Mr Wilson is chairman of a company called Nelson Homeopathy which must be rather profitable.

Salsola soda will have to wait. Here are the Green Granite Blocks this morning:

Roger and Helen spent last night on the shore of Loch Fyne, after what I trust proved a happy afternoon messing around in Alexander’s new boat. They’ll be back here soon, I hope with pictures, and today’s plan is to aim for Jupiter Artland with a picnic (and a camera).

Roger and I – Roger, in particular – spent a good whack of time on Wednesday afternoon trying to install the wireless router James bought for us a year ago. It would have been a great triumph to succeed where James had failed, but we didn’t, despite phone calls to the ISP and a re-setting of my password and much fear that I would find myself cut off from the world altogether. James thinks I should abandon my ISP and switch to British Telecom.



Knitting

I have finished the third rank of Green Granite Blocks, and am most of the way across the next Slow Row, setting colours for Rank # 4. Again, I’ll delay the photograph until I’ve done a few more rows and the three completed ranks can be seen in all their glory. And that probably won’t happen today, after an afternoon of art.

I continue more and more uneasy about Knit Camp, and may decide not to go which would be a great waste of money. The impression one gets on the Ravelry website is of hair-tearing. I learned just now that classes are removed from the website when they are sold out – that doesn’t seem to include either of mine, Franklin on photography and Donna Druchunas on Japanese Knitting. And with their removal goes any reference to preparatory homework.

The chief hair-tearer says that the information will all come back soon in PDF form.

I have been to two Camp Stitches on the shore of Lake George, oh! happy memories, and one Stitches East. Little as one loves “the X’s”, I never felt adrift like this in the anticipatory weeks. I think it was a great mistake on the part of the hair-tearers not to send a single sheet of paper, in the mail, to each camper acknowledging payment, confirming classes and dates, specifying what you needed to bring and do for each class, and perhaps including a map of the Stirling campus. Computers should have been able to do the work: it wouldn’t have taken much of human money or time.

On the other hand, my husband is beginning to talk of another trip to London. I am very keen not to have it happen in July or August, so I am glad to have Knit Camp in position to use as a counterweight if necessary.

Salsola soda

Here’s where we are so far. Seeds keep coming up, in the form of spindly stems, and then collapsing as if damping off before they’ve even started. No cotyleda, even. Perhaps it’s not exactly poor germination salsola soda suffers from, but a lack of life skills. As well as the two little green plants you can see – assuming they’re not passing weeds – there are three spindly stems which haven’t yet collapsed and which seem to be evidencing seed leaves. And it’s only 10 days since the seeds went in – there may be more to come.

Everything is more or less in position. Clean sheets on the spare room beds, at least. My sister and her husband are probably on their way to Kings Cross at this very moment.

Alexander has just got himself a boat.

(He wanted to call it “Drummond Plaice”, Drummond being the name by which he is known to the world – “Alexander” is just for family. His wife is the only person in the world who started out calling him “Drummond” and has stepped across the line. But apparently it is bad luck to change the name of a boat so it is the Puffin Puffin. Those aren’t his sons.)

Everybody likes boats. Helen and Roger plan to go over tomorrow and mess about in it a bit. They have been sailing on the CT River for many years. James and his family, when they arrive next week, will go over for a while, too.

As for knitting, I was closer to that slow row than I thought I was, yesterday morning. So now the tops of the third rank of Green Granite Blocks have been established. Another session, whenever it happens, should polish them off. And I have reached the half-way point of the jacket back, which is sort of exciting.

A new follower! Oh, frabjous day!

Don’t miss Mungo’s post called “Trip to Delphi and Dream Job”.

Yesterday was one of those (rare) days when I Got Some Things Done – mopped the kitchen floor, washed my hair, sent a stamped, self-addressed envelope to the Home Industries Secretary so that she could send me the Games programme, and more. And it just leaves one feeling as Hercules must have felt when he first tackled the Hydra.

There’s definitely some movement in the salsola soda box. I’ll photograph it as soon as there’s anything that would show up in a pic. I had hoped for three or four little plants. Now I have raised my aspirations to half-a-dozen or more.

Slow cookers: You’re right about John Lewis, Judith, and the slow cooker I gave Rachel is just expensive enough to qualify for free delivery. Trouble is, according to the website when I had a look yesterday morning, it’s out of stock.

Perhaps just as well, because soon thereafter I got some emails from Greece saying that we need a six-litre model. The John Lewis one is only 3.5 litres. The Greeks recommend a discount electrical place in Callander which, they claim, amazingly, has delivered slow cookers to them not only in Athens but also on Mount Pelion. (They have two.) So they ought to be able to manage Drummond Place.

I am worried, now, about having given Rachel a smaller one. The only consolation is that hers is fully programmable which means that when she is out of the house for eight or ten hours at a stretch, as must often happen, it doesn’t have to be on the whole time.

Greek Helen says “I will spend all summer training you up and then you should have the idea.” So I suppose I had better go ahead.

Knitting

Green Granite Blocks forges on. Today I should reach and I hope at least begin the slow row towards the top of the third rank of blocks where I set the colours for the tops of the blocks and introduce blackness. I simply can’t keep my hands off it. I even find myself wondering whether I really have to knit that preemie jacket.

My sister and her husband are coming tomorrow. GGB will have to be laid aside. I could continue knitting it while paying attention to a conversation and occasionally contributing sage remarks, but I couldn’t manage a conversation in which I was a major participant. Maybe I could get the preemie jacket started today – no, can’t bear the thought. Conversation-knitting tomorrow and thereafter will have to be my husband’s sock.

And the end of next week brings the Beijing Mileses. Plenty of non-GGB time looms. All the more reason to revel in them today.

Grannypurple, absolutely not (comment yesterday). Printed matter of all sorts, including downloaded patterns if printed out, counts as potential archival material of interest to the future historian of knitting. Not as stash. I’m not kidding.

Little to report. The third row of dots are installed.

Greek Helen phoned last night with a brisk catalogue of summer plans. She says a slow cooker is now absolutely essential to life. I’m not sure I can face carrying another one home from John Lewis. Maybe they’d deliver.

There are stirrings in the salsola soda tray in the dining room this morning. Some seeds have found their way to the surface and are trying to sprout. I will sprinkle some earth over them shortly. These seeds are notoriously reluctant to germinate, and also are said to deteriorate fairly rapidly. The Italians often sow them as soon as ripe, and nurse the little plants through the winter.

Information from Real Seeds – highly recommended, not just for salsola soda.

So maybe next year I’ll start them on the windowsill in March. What I don’t know is how hardy they are supposed to be. Real Seeds says to sow at about the time you would sow French beans, which sounds as if they are not hardy at all. On the other hand, they don't like great heat, at least when germinating. That is an easy requirement to meet, around here.

Inspiration fails, this morning. In lieu of it, I leave you with three-dimensional pics of the Drummond Place doorstep vegetables – lettuce, which we’re eating, and “mignon” carrots, which promise fairly well. The herb garden on the other side is in daily use. The thyme here is much better than its source plant in Strathardle, which has become woody and entangled with weeds. That’s mint, in the separate pot.

World Cup

A draw. At least we spoiled their party. Or, at any rate, their own goalkeeper did. If I knew a lot more about the game, would it become interesting? Whether or no, that’s the last you’ll hear of the World Cup here, although some years we get sufficiently swept up in it to watch the final.

Magazines

Donice, I think you may have the answer – to let the knitting magazines lapse, and take up Piecework. I haven’t seen much of it, although I have the famous issue with Bridget Rorem’s lace alphabet, which I have often used. (The alphabet is available from the Schoolhouse Press, now.) In my case, Knitter’s must go, and Knitting. I’ll stick with IK a bit longer, maybe.

My problem will be – life is absolutely full of problems like this, to which inertia is the easy solution – that I pay for both Knitting and VK by direct debit. Cancelling is easy, since I bank on line. But first I’ve got to figure out which is which. Both payees have unexpected and non-knitterly names, and the sums are similar. I’ll get down to it.

I think at the moment VK is pack-leader for design again, after a period in the doldrums. I’ll hold on to it.

I had a look at the Verena website yesterday, recommended by the Curmudgeon. Not entirely bad, I agree. Europe’s most popular knitting magazine, it says. Never heard of it, myself. I had a moment of temptation over the idea of subscribing to the digital edition. Much cheaper, and it wouldn’t contribute to the piles of magazines on the bedroom shelves. I’ll at least have a look on-line at the fall issue when it comes out. But really.

It is hard to remember, now, what knitting life was like before I got online in the mid-90’s. VK International. LYS’s, such as they were. Some books, although nothing like the 3rd-millennium flood, in which one actually has to choose which knitting books to buy. (As opposed to buying them all.) EZ, Sheila McGregor, Sarah Don, Starmore, Barbara Walker, Gladys Thompson, Odham’s Encyclopedia of Knitting – I had all of those when we moved to Edinburgh in ’94. And, come to think of it, have knit from almost all of them.

Whereas now the shelves groan with un-knit-from books. And now I am in touch with the whole world of knitting every day.

Knitting

I am about to do those dots in the middle of the third rank of blocks. Before this rank is quite finished, I will be half way up the back of the jacket. The other four pieces are much smaller, two fronts and two sleeves, so that’s a significant landmark. The sleeves have only three ranks of blocks. Maybe I’ll even knock off a sleeve next.

World Cup

We are not interested in football.

At the moment, around here, that feels like being given a whole extra month of life. My sister and her husband will be here next week – I will ask her how it felt actually to be standing on African soil yesterday and not be interested in football.

However, today is an exception. A recent New Yorker article about the “Miracle on Grass” – the day, 60 years ago, when the USofA beat mighty England – has kindled a temporary interest. I think the article said (we left it behind in Perthshire) that the two teams have not played each other from that day to this. The Queen (not personally, I don’t suppose) has added her touch by giving an MBE in this morning’s Birthday Honours List to the 90-year-old sole survivor of that game. And our goalkeeper is a New Jersey man.

So we’ll be watching, and cheering for the underdog.

Knitting

Here are the Green Granite Blocks. Somehow they look more three-dimensional in photography than they do in real life. I’m very pleased.


Here’s the back – I hope I am leaving enough percentage points, as I advance my Progress Bar, for the clean-up at the end. No joke, with Kaffe. But the point of this picture is to let you see, to some extent, I hope, how the new system – butterflies for the larger patches of colour – has produced somewhat fewer ends, in the second rank of blocks.


I got out Kaffe’s “Pattern Library” yesterday. There are, after all, some things I’d like to do. Divide the left-overs into two piles, and knit the famous Persian Poppies or Earth Carpet? Both from “Glorious Knitting”, I think. Or three, and go for almost anything else? That would have to be far in the future, either way.

Magazines

I got an awfully nice note from Wendy yesterday, asking what British magazines I would recommend. Golly. I’m not sure, a la fin fine, if I wouldn’t now agree with my friend Helen C.K.S. and choose the Rowan magazine and leave it there. Far and away the best for design; good articles, too. It’s expensive, and of course limited to Rowan yarns, but on the other hand appears only twice a year.

I still subscribe to Knitting – the one the Curmudgeon has said is the best mag on either side of the pond. I’m always glad to see it on the mat, but I’d drop it pretty quickly if I had to cut back. Looking her up for that link, I read the Curmudgeon’s enthusiasm for Verena, of which I’ve never heard. Hmm.

Like Wendy, I read The Knitter once and it was sort of impressive in its expensive way, but not enough to make me yearn for – or even look for – the next issue.

How often do I knit from a magazine? Almost never, with the VK Chevron Scarf as an interesting exception, this year.

When I was young, the Vogue Knitting Book was all there was. Its twice-yearly appearances were Events. These last ten years, I’ve been swamped with knitting magazines. Delicious at first, but I wonder if it’s not time to pull back.

Not much, today – blogging time has had to be diverted to taking the car in for its annual MOT.

As hoped, I’ve finished the second rank of Green Granite Blocks and am working my way across the slowest row of all, the one where all the colours are re-set for a new rank. But I’m getting the hang of it, including butterfly-winding.

Ron spoke at the beginning of the oddities of the chart. There are one or two places where the colours change in the middle of the 15-stitch stretch across the front of a block. (There are lots of places where they change from one row to the next, making subtle stripes on the fronts of the blocks which add a good deal to the Kaffe-ness of it all.) I like to think that these are the places where the Master ran out of his pull-through strand of yarn half-way across a block, and reached for something else. And that the chart-maker came along later and devotedly reproduced his every stitch.

For the great thing about Kaffe is that he really does (or did) knit -- it's not all done on computers and produced by out-workers.

I spent (=wasted) some time yesterday mooning around the American eBay shop where they sell old Rowan kits, with the real yarn. It is worth being reminded that even the Master made mistakes – and it’s his mistakes that get put in the back of stash cupboards ready to be fetched out twenty years later and sold for a nice profit.

I think I’ve probably knit all the Kaffe’s I really want to, through the years, once the GGB’s are finished, and the one more I have in stash, the Mosaic pattern. “Courthouse Steps” is sort of nice, though…

By tomorrow I should have a couple of rows of the third rank done, which will let the first two photograph nicely.

We’ll start with knitting today.

I’ve reached the point, towards the top of the second rank of Green Granite Blocks, where I stop knitting the fronts of the blocks and start knitting the tops as they recede into 3-D space. That means a slow row, which I have nearly worked my way across – changing colours for each of the five blocks, and also adding black and nearly-black sections to represent Space. Once this row is set, I shall speed forward to the end of the blocks, and take another picture.

The current system is working well – butterflies for the fronts of the blocks, 15 stitches at a time; long pull-through-the-tangle strands for the other colour sections. I had a struggle with the winding of butterflies, due, I now think, to the fact that one of the videos which come up when one Googles the subject, is wrong.

You’re winding a small centre-pull ball. That must mean that the end of yarn you start with winds up being the end of yarn you knit with. The other end is used at the end to wind around the centre of the butterfly and secure it. Now that I’ve grasped that, things are going even better.

Another topic: there was an article in the Scotsman yesterday about something called the Moray Firth Gansey Project. It hunts for old patterns and also encourages local businesses “to use local gansey patterns in new ways, including glass.” They are about to stage their first exhibition, called “Extravagansey”, fortunately far from here.

This would be harmless enough except that they have received grants of ninety thousand pounds to carry them forward. The usual suspects: the Lottery Fund, the Scottish Government, the EU, and a couple of local sources.

And what will they achieve that Gladys Thompson didn’t manage half a century ago – when there were still fishermen about who wore the things? I am sure she never saw ninety thousand pounds in her life. Nor Sharon Miller for her work on Shetland lace, still, precariously, a living tradition. We could all, easily, list a dozen other names of scholars who have done distinguished work on the Scottish knitting traditions, for little or no reward.

A few interesting ganseys may emerge from drawers, for that much money. Nothing wrong with that.

But Extravagansey! Forsooth!

Vegetables

Salsola soda has been sown in the dining room. Results breathlessly awaited.

Thanks for yesterday’s comments. Hat, thank you for the encouraging news that bunching onions may turn out as I anticipate, and for the offer of some garlic chives. Anonymous, if bunching onions deliver the goods, I won’t need to sow more seed, but I will bear your auggestion in mind – sowing in the autumn and over-wintering the little onions.

The opium poppy, papaver somniferum, turns up in my garden as a weed, as it uncannily does wherever there is empty, cultivated ground. I love the flowers, and always leave a few. Last year they were scarce, and I worried. One of you comforted me by saying that there are years, and there are other years. Well, you were right. They are back in super-abundance. I have been pulling them out by the fistful (although of course leaving some). It's Kandahar-sur-Ardle, this time.

Grandson Joe – he of the Grandson Sweater – is about to cycle from John o’Groats to Land’s End to raise money for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. More accurately, I think, he and a mate are doing the ride for fun and adventure and the sponsorship has been added as an afterthought.

But Great Ormond Street is definitely a good thing, so here’s the link. I’ve put it in the sidebar for the time being, too.

We had a good time in Perthshire. The weather turned disgusting, however – the sort of remorseless rain that drives even us indoors – so we came back a day early. I did scarcely any knitting; perhaps back-and-forth is just too banal after the intellectual excitement of knitting Kaffe. Today I will write about vegetable-growing.

Onions

You must bear in mind that I have never succeeded in growing an onion. They are supposed to be an absolute beginner’s vegetable, like radishes. This year, I am determined to get some onions.

Well, they’ve come up, most especially the Cipollotti da Mazzo, so I put in some more of those. The Siberian Bunching Onions are looking good, too. No garlic chives, alas. The question now is, will they go on? Or will they just stand there, two inches high and gossamer-lace yarn in circumference, for the rest of the summer?

I now see that “mazzo” means “bunch” in Italian. So maybe those are bunching onions, too – i.e., in effect, perennial. I imagine them as something like big chives. You dig up a bunch, and prise off some for use as baby onions, and replant the residue to bunch up again. Chives do brilliantly for me, so I am hopeful.

Beans

I have abandoned runner beans, after succeeding with them – I don’t really like them much. 2010 is to be the Year of the French Bean. The ones I grew on the windowsill here in Edinburgh look pretty miserable, although they cling to life. I think we may have had the merest touch of frost. But on the day I set them out, I also planted seeds of all four kinds, two climbing, two dwarf. And those little plants look very happy.



Other

Some pak choi, bought in as plants, and the Victorian Climbing Peas. Sure enough, they don't twine, they climb with little tendrils like any normal pea:


I am trying, as last year, to grow something called salsola soda, or barba di frate. I think it's also called saltwort.Three sowings yielded zilch last year. I thought the first one had produced a similar result this time, but when I got down on my knees on Monday to re-sow, eyeball to eyeball with the soil, I found two little plants that might actually be salsola soda. One was big enough that I could taste a tiny leaf without entirely destroying the plant.

It was sensational – a delicious, complex taste. So, as well as re-sowing out of doors, I have filled my Roottrainers with seed compost and brought them back. We’ll try the dining-room windowsill again. Even one or two little plants would be worth the effort, if they’re going to taste like that.

Strathardle today. Back Thursday or so. Has frost got the apple blossom? Did the salsola soda ever come up? Have caterpillars stripped the current bushes? Many an interesting question. This is the stretch of the year during which it feels a bit frustrating, after all one’s hard work, not to have anything to eat as the result of it. But there’ll be more rhubarb and another sorrel soup and perhaps even an exiguous salad. We shall see.

Knitting

The compulsiveness of the Green Granite Blocks is something akin to the border of the Princess shawl. Despite the vast expanse of the task ahead, it is exciting – not too strong a word – to accomplish each row because it is unique and it carries the story forward, by however small a step.

In this case (unlike the Princess border) the overall pattern repeats – but the colours are constantly changing.

I’m getting on nicely with the second rank of blocks, and can hardly keep my hands off it. And to think that I felt I was running out of steam, only a couple of weeks ago. There’s much to be said for digging in the stash cupboard.

To move on: the Faculty Meeting Knitter is full of enthusiasm (June 2) for the new Pine-and-Ivy shawl. She says it has created a great stir on Ravelry; I’ll have to have a look.

At Theo and Jenni’s rehearsal dinner last summer, my sister wore the shawl I had knit for her 70th birthday – Amedro’s Cobweb Lace Wrap, with patterns substituted from “Heirloom Lace”. Greek Helen said she’d like such a shawl.



The one aspect of my stash which hasn’t even been touched upon yet, is my vast assemblage of lace yarns. I hope when Helen is here soon to choose a yarn and a pattern. Amedro’s shape is eminently wearable; I’ve knit it several times, with different lace patterns. But Pine-and-Ivy is similar, and might be worth the venture.

It looks difficult.

The Faculty Meeting Knitter has done a Princess. I feel our names ought to be inscribed on a roll of honour somewhere. It is surely the largest and most elaborate lace pattern ever published in English.

Non-knit

To finish off the account of our happy weekend in Argyll: the problem with pig-keeping (in case you’ve ever wondered) is that they are affectionate and intelligent animals to an extent that eventually makes eating them unbearable. So I am told. I am a bit suspicious of them, myself.

Alexander thinks he has solved this problem. The Pig Man on the other side of the loch is raising a litter. Alexander has bought one of them – but he doesn’t know which. Every so often they go over and feed their pig, along with the others which aren’t theirs. This is supposed to make it easier at the end.



So on Sunday we did that, and then Rachel and Ed and my husband and I went on to Inverary to Mass while the others went back and cooked a delicious lunch. This is the scene that met us when we got back – champagne left over from Alexander’s recent 50th birthday. That's Ed with the little boys.

Green Granite Blocks is proving obsessive, as KF patterns often do, and I’m awfully pleased with the way it’s looking. Much of last night’s knitting time was spent on establishing the next rank of blocks. I’m now using a mixture of butterflies and pull-through-the-tangle long ends. Time is needed for untangling as one proceeds along the row, but it’s probably less time than was previously devoted to attaching new yarns, and the smoother back is a big plus. I haven’t yet tried winding two colours together into a big butterfly – that might help. Having two butterflies flapping about for each colour area adds to the tangling, no doubt.

I checked the gauge at last – bang on. It’s not a matter I usually give any thought to, with Kaffe’s patterns, but James’s sweater (May 27) came out too big – a real tragedy.

I must wrench myself away and knit that preemie jacket before Games Day creeps up on me and pounces.

Pollphail

It is a dormitory complex – not exactly a village – built in the 70’s for workers at a near-by oil refinery. As things turned out, there never was a near-by oil refinery, and Pollphail was never occupied.

I am a great lover of romantic ruins, and I can assure you that this is not one of them. It is damp and squalid and muddy with sheep droppings, in a setting of astonishing natural beauty. It is remarkable, in this day and age, as we say, that Health and Safety has not bulldozed it – or at least, insisted on secure fencing – decades ago. Broken glass abounds, great shards of it, and open cellars in which to fall.

The only notice concerns the bats – we didn’t see any – which are a protected species and not to be disturbed.

At the end of last year, with the permission of the landowner, a team of graffiti artists moved in for a weekend. The idea was – as mentioned in the link I have provided above – that demolition would follow almost at once, but it hasn’t happened. The plan is to build holiday chalets – maybe the developer can’t get finance? Maybe the Bat Protection Society intervened? Anyway, it’s still there, and we went to see it on Saturday.

That last one is the little boys' favourite. They were eager to show us "the skeleton" -- I fully expected the decaying remains of a sheep.

By the way

A recent entry in Fleegle’s blog, ever interesting, has an account of a charting program called Intertwined Pattern Studio. She’s a designer, of course – would I find it useful in planning the Bavarian Twisted Stitch sweater-or-jacket which remains high on the Possibles list for the end of the yarn fast?

It’s very reasonably priced.

Or is that just silly?