Tuesday, February 06, 2007

I'm better, definitely better. Not yet well. We have had our flu injections, as all well-behaved oldies should, and that has helped, I’m sure.

Yesterday, instead of blogging, I tackled the problem of squirting my webpages to their new home in the ether. I made real progress, in the sense that I have uploaded a few files to some destination or other, but not in the sense that the website can yet be viewed. I have a couple more tricks to try before I am reduced to phoning the nice young men at Uk-Cheapest.
Problem

I had a message yesterday from Dieppe (in Canada!) about a child’s hat pattern towards the end of Gladys Thompson’s book, “Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys and Arans”. My copy is in Kirkmichael, helping with Ketki’s gansey, so I can only guess. Her problem is this:

The instruction “sl1 k1b pss” , does it mean skip one stitch, knit the following one (leaving the stitch on the left needle) then purl the stitch you had previously skipped? There is also the probably equivalent “sl1 p1b kss”…

My first instinct was to think that it was the familiar “slip one, knit one-back-of-loop, pass slipped stitch over.” But the second example makes it much more likely that the writer from Dieppe is right, and that this is a two-stitch cross. But how could “sl1” mean “skip one”? There’s no “l” in “skip”. If anyone has the book to hand and can solve the problem, I will pass the word on to Dieppe.

Knitting

Lots has piled up to be reported on.

Of which I think the Big Thing was the arrival last Saturday of my first package from The Yarn Yard Club. Wow! Despite clumsy photography, the picture gives some idea of the glow of this luscious stuff. And I had completely forgotten that the subscription would include a small skein of a matching solid yarn.

I’m really glad, now, that Natalie doesn’t seem to have a retail shop. She needs to keep busy with that dye-pot.

Last night I exercised the invalid’s prerogative not to get back to work (on the Calcutta Cup ’06 sweater), and instead finished the travel socks, finished-finished them, Kitchener’ing and loose ends and all. And wound the big Yarn Yard skein, and cast on a pair of socks for Rachel.

She’s got small feet, and she likes her socks short in the leg. She remarked last week when we were in London that she wears socks I have knit for her all the time, and they never wear out. Flattery will get you everywhere.

I’m inclined to think I will go on with this sock at least for today. The yarn is heaven on the hands, and the fabric is turning out rather interesting, no stripes let alone pools.

But I can’t spend the rest of my life knitting Yarn Yard socks. (Why not?) I’ll have to start thinking of sweaters for small boys.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:42 AM

    Translating directly from the abbreviations, it means "slip one, knit one through back of loop, purl previously slipped stitch." Presumably we are meant to put the slipped stitch back on the left hand needle for ease of working, but yes it is basically a two-stitch cross with twisted knit stitch.

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  2. I'm wondering about the possibility of a typo - my copy doesn't have either of those instructions anywhere in the Child's Cap pattern. But it does have 'slb, k1b, pss'(in rows 11, 13, 15 & 17). 's1b' means slip one stitch to a spare needle and drop to back of work. So this would be a two stitch cross - as Jean from Cornwall says.

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  3. Anonymous7:03 PM

    Actually my copies (hb & pb) may well not have the instruction as quoted, but I got the usual auto-defocus syndrome that occurs when I try to read such complex instructions, so I did the chicken thing and found the abbreviations! Looking at the picture of the cap, it would have to be a crossed stitch - there are no decreases in that panel.

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  4. Anonymous4:59 PM

    I am currently trying to work a panel from one of the sweater in this book and have found at least one typo so far, but I was genuinely stuck on this particular problem. Thanks for much for the explanation!

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