Thursday, July 05, 2007

Exciting news, today.

ONE: we’re not going to have a Core Path past our front door after all. Our neighbour, who was also affected (but not much), sent his protest in early and succinctly. He has already heard from the Council that our path has been struck off the Core Path list. He kindly forwarded a copy of their letter. The Council say that they expect the path to remain open for walkers; we can live with that.

TWO: Natalie at Yarn Yard is hard at work dying for the shop, now that Woolfest is over. She’s posted a tantalising page of lace yarns, including one called “Melon” aiming to be the colour of the Melon Shawl on the cover of VLT. Amongst them she is offering some skeins of the yarn I’m currently knitting with – and she has named it “Jean”! How’s that for glory!

I had nearly an hour and a half of knitting time at the hospital yesterday, and used it industriously. The centre panel is finished, and I have started the edging.

It’s very easy, but I’m finding things a bit awkward. The pattern says to leave the centre panel stitches on the circular needle. I’ve done that, but I’m going to put them on some waste yarn today. I don’t like the thing flapping about.

As you can perhaps dimly discern, I have followed my own advice and slipped some selvedge stitches onto another circular needle, which I am using, along with a short dp, to knit the edging. I think maybe when I’ve polished off the current needle-ful, I’ll try it the other way, with two dp’s, collecting the selvedge stitches one by one as I proceed. The whole thing keeps getting twisted: that’s a matter of learning to turn it one way and then the other, at the end of successive rows.

As you can also see, I have made no impression at all on the original skein. It is clearly impossible to use it up, and I worry that Natalie can hardly expect to sell very many in that case -- were it not for the primitive stash-acquisition instinct in us all.

Miscellaneous

Dawn’s interesting comment about the weather came in yesterday – I’ve now got Blogger set to email comments to me – but is attached to Monday’s post. Well worth reading. I looked at a long-range forecast yesterday. Dreary, dreary, including St Swithin’s day.

Judith, the Strathardle Highland Gathering is on the fourth Saturday of August, always.

Two questions arise from a visit I paid to my Google Analytics pages yesterday – a fun, free service for bloggers.

One – what is meant by “bounce rate”? Mine seems very high. All I know about “bouncing” is when you send an email and it comes back to you undelivered for one reason or another.

Two – why are people suddenly interested in Margaret Velard? I looked at the list of words typed into Google which resulted in visits to this blog. Amongst the wholly predictable ones were several “Margaret Velard”’s. (If you try, you’ll find yourself in July ’05 – Margot’s visit is there, and much talk of my cataracts, as well as Margaret Velard.) I hope she’s OK.

4 comments:

  1. Jean, your skein was a hundred grammes ... almost a mile of yarn. I wanted to make sure you had enough for anything at all from the book. The regular (horrible word which makes me think of constipation) skeins are a little over 65g, which is about 1000 metres. This is still plenty for most projects, and most are dyed in pairs so it's easy to get two at a time for more expansive knitting.
    I should perhaps have asked you what your favourite colour is... maybe you are really an iridescent purple girl, or your favourite sweets are Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts or Soor Plooms?

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  2. Hi Jean
    Your bounce rate is the number of visitors who look at your first page only then move on to another website, rather than looking at other sections of your site.
    For blogs this is always going to be high, as people call regularly, read your latest post then move on. For a commercial website, it would be worrying if your customers only came to your home page then made a sharp exit!
    Hope that makes sense, luckily my husband works in IT so explained it all to me.

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  3. Hi Jean, Stash does indeed have a great selection of yarns and I am lucky that it is, if not quite my LYS, at least on my way home from work if I take a very convoluted route! Thought you might like to know that Get Knitted now has a nice selection of Malabrigo laceweight - I am tempted by the Glazed Carrot, even though I am not fond of orange, simply because I love the name. Glad to see you upholding the correct usage of "decimate" - I am a Hansard reporter, so struggle with similar linguistic outrages every day!

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  4. Hurray, no core path!

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