I’m shaping the toe of Ketki’s second sock – should polish it off today, and then I'll darn her old pairs before I move on. For one of them, I’ve got the original yarn. The oddballs from the other pair must have got subsumed into colourful bedsocks.

Starting this sock marathon with a pair more than half-knit has given it a great boost. I mean to turn next to the Yarn Yard’s offering from last August, but I haven’t quite finished winding it, and may find myself forced back on KF’s Landscape Fog, picked up on impulse at John Lewis recently.

I’ve found a British source that offers the complete KF sock yarn range, with separate code numbers for each. The site which assigns the same number to three different colourways – there doesn’t seem to be much point in providing the link – hasn’t replied to my email or corrected the site, and charges 5p more per ball anyway.

I am much inclined to order at least the three Landscapes (=stripes) I haven’t got before Regia moves on to something else and they disappear.

FiberQat, thanks for the note on Noro sock yarn. Maybe I’d better just succumb.

Non-knit

Here’s an art historical story. The asterisks and obfuscations are to prevent historians of the period, and most especially art historians interested in My Husband’s Artist (MHA), from finding their way here.

My husband reads widely in biographies and autobiographies connected however remotely with the circles in which his artist moved. He recently read “Robert Gourl*y, Gadfly” about a man of Fife who went to Canada and made a name for himself and then, I think, came back. However, that doesn’t matter. Early in life, the books says, MHA visited the Gourl*ys in Fife, drew Gourl*y and his wife, and painted a picture of their young son Oliver. The author describes the picture as if she had seen it.

And she reproduces the drawings – they’re by MHA all right.

We started by Googling the author of the book. It would appear that she wrote nothing else, and that if she is still alive she would be in her late 90’s or early 100’s and so not a likely source of information.

We tried Googling “Oliver Gourl*y”, the subject of the picture. No dice. He either died young or led a singularly uninteresting life.

Then we went back to the book. The author thanks a Miss D., a collateral descendent of Gourl*y’s, for access to family papers and information. Did Miss D. have the picture? We Googled her, and hit paydirt. She was one of those energetic women, born just over a century ago, whose hopes of marriage died in the mud of Ypres and Passchendale. She was a distinguished botanist who lived near Dundee.

Then we turned to BT’s on-line telephone directories, and found the D’s still living there. My husband wrote a letter. Many, many weeks later a Mrs D. rang up, from Hexham, whither the letter had pursued her. Sure enough, she’s got the picture. She’ll bring it to us to see on Saturday morning, since she has to be in Edinburgh anyway.

It is entirely possible for a picture to have a good back-story and still be wrong. But we’re hopeful, and it’s exciting.