News from all over

Scaffolding has gone up at the Linklaters’ house on the other side of the square, where they had a terrible fire in the very early hours of 2006. Quick work. (See blog entries for January 2 and 3, if you’re at all interested.)

I’m quite pleased with the result of my hair cut yesterday.

I finished yesterday’s “Diabolical” Su Doku in the Waffy, using an advanced technique Marcella taught me. Self-confidence is somewhat restored.

And I finished the First Holy Communion veil. Now we’ll see…. I hope there will be a photograph of it being blocked, tomorrow.

KF

I tumbled the yarns together from my two recent eBay purchases of Rowan kits, thinking, I’m going to regret this: but I’m absolutely sure I will never want to knit either pattern as supplied, and I wanted to see how they worked, together. The answer is, fine.

Then I arranged the coloured balls in the eight compartments of my Kaffe Fassett Yarn Holder. I think it is actually a thing for butlers to arrange crockery in. My husband got it for me years ago, during my major KF phase. It helps a lot. You arrange the balls in order according to the colour scheme – A and B in the first compartment, C and D in the second, and so forth – and then you can find them readily as the chart demands them.

This time, the idea is more that each compartment holds roughly similar shades. The idea will be to select a compartment at random…

I haven’t worked out how to do that, yet. Karin’s suggestion (for which I never thanked her) of using dice is a good one – neither of the toy shops near here had dice, however, when I tried yesterday. I’m sure there are some in Edinburgh somewhere (all of ours are at Burnside, which is where grandchildren play games). The link Obscure provided to a random stripe generator looks good, too, especially since it addresses the twin questions of random colours and random stripe-width.

I didn’t get any swatch-knitting done yesterday, but I did wind a skein of a dark yarn to start off with, and knit a couple rows of garter stitch to get things rolling.

The first two pages of Kaffe’s Pattern Library show 13 different stripe patterns, all involving random colour choice and most also involving random stripe width, but each organised differently. There is a good deal more method in that man’s approach to pattern than his easy-going manner would have us believe.

My husband has been an assiduous gallery-goer all his adult life, and he never throws a hand-out away. He actually has a list from a KF exhibition, back in the days when KF was an artist who hadn’t yet discovered knitting. He wasn’t really terribly good, I’m afraid, and would never have got all that far, I don’t think, except for the happy accident of picking up needles and becoming the Leonardo of knitting.