Yesterday’s excitement had nothing to do with knitting. We’ve had these shelves made by a joiner-friend in Bridge of Cally, where the Ardle flows into the Ericht – the end of the Glen, or the beginning, depending on which direction you’re going. They were made for the space -- and note the clever accomodation of the electric point used for radio, iron, and toaster. When the shifting-about is finished, the kitchen should be tidier and there’ll be room for more in the bookcase in the hall.

It was sort of fun, arranging My Life in Cookery Books. On the bottom shelf you see the battered remains of my youth – Julia Child and Elizabeth David, especially. Jamie Oliver, upper left, is the author most often consulted these days. An interesting phenomenon: when we are visiting one or the other of our children, I read cookery books from their shelves while the children themselves get on with the cooking. And I think, this is really good; and I buy the book when we get back to Edinburgh; and I never use it at all.

Knitting

I tried to post a link to Hellie's shawl the other day, and Ted pointed out that it didn’t work. The URL is http://www.jeanmile.demon.co.uk/himo's%20shawl.htm. For some reason, it gets truncated after "himo" when you try to use it. Try going to my webpage, moving down to the knitting section at the bottom, and clicking on "Helen Ogden's shawl".

That shawl was done on the same principle as my current effort for my sister – the shape of Amedro’s Lacy Cobweb Wrap, with patterns substituted from Sharon Miller’s “Heirloom Knitting”. I hit a bump yesterday: there’s a mistake in the chart for the “Antique Centre Pattern” which I’m using for the centre panel of the shawl. After much struggle I turned to the Heirloom Knitting Supporters’ Group, and someone promptly referred me to Sharon’s Errata page the existence of which I had not previously suspected. All is now more or less well.

Miscellany

My knitting books arrived from the Schoolhouse Press yesterday. I’ll rev myself to talk about them soon. There’s nothing to make one want to drop the needles and start something new right NOW.

I am grateful to everybody who has tried to help with my problems about arranging the pattern for Ketki’s gansey. It is relatively unusual to knit a gansey with an allover pattern: that may be part of the problem. Jean from Cornwall has introduced a whole new possibility: centre the pattern and fill in the sides with something like seed stitch. I think I’ll probably take a stitch out of the pattern fore and aft, thus producing an odd number of stitches and allowing precise centering. Tamar, I struggled with this all last week and can say with conviction that any combination of full pattern repeats (40 stitches) will result in an even number of stitches not only in the whole circumference, but also front and back separately.

Dawn, the royal couple in yesterday’s picture are wearing the Balmoral tartan. I can’t tell you more than that, although I suppose one could look it up: was it created for Queen Victoria, who was keen on that sort of thing, and loved Balmoral? Or for Prince Charles himself, five years ago? Or for someone somewhere inbetween?

Thanks for the encouragement about my mother’s book (about Brigham Young’s 27 wives – I’m trying to scan it with a view to eventual publication on the internet). I haven’t discovered yet what “rich text format” is, and for the moment have abandoned the project in favour of pressing on hard with typing endnote numbers into their actual position in the text, in my husband’s Magnum Opus, for the sake of the Palm Pilot which suppresses such things. I discovered the MS Word “Select Browse Object” button yesterday, quite by accident – it speeds things up a lot.

Here’s a problem: I followed a link a day or so ago to a glorious page of cashmere and silk lace yarns for Orenburg shawls. I thought the link was in Joe's blog, but if so he’s taken it out. Google has failed me. I remember that it was a slightly confusing page in that there were beautiful heaps of glorious handpainted yarns, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to separate them into specific yarns for ordering. Not that I would dream of doing such a thing. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?