Calcutta Cup Day

There’s not much hope. But you never know.

Stash Haus, kilt hose were specified for the Games once – perhaps it’s time they showed up again. I knit a pair for Alexander; didn’t win. I’ve also knit James some. I don’t feel it’s a genre I have mastered, and would like to have another go.

Princess

That’s dreadful, Cynthia, to have to take out two rows, including the hated No.9. I suspect I would have fudged it somehow. How virtuous you must feel! I’m glad you have recovered the ground.

Someone has posted to the Heirloom Knitting Yahoo group that she finished her Princess centre the other day at a faculty meeting. That’s what I call knitting.

I have finished row 26 of the 13th centre repeat, including the placing of markers in the middle for the signature box. And I have figured out at least a reasonable hypothesis for why I thought I had to start it on row 23, rather than row 27. That’s a comfort. I may have been allowing for four garter stitch rows at the top, not having fully grasped that the entire centre has four garter stitch rows at the top so I don’t need to do them twice.

EZ

I played the interview with Meg about her mother on the Knitting Workshop DVD, and it was interesting. It got me thinking about the whole Schoolhouse Press thing. At the time it was seriously launched (I gather), EZ was a published designer, and had written “Knitting Without Tears”, and taught a week-long summer school at a near-by university – from which evolved the Knitting Camp.

But that doesn’t add up to a living for a family. There is a picture in one of the books of EZ and her “knitted car”. That’s more the level of income I would expect from such a degree of success. Was it perhaps Meg and Chris who saw the potential for something more, and created that unique business? When EZ’s biography comes to be written -- soon, I hope -- we’ll know all.

I wasted valuable time yesterday -- this is obliquely relevant --playing with Google Map’s new Street View. I doubt if I was alone. I began by admiring my own front door, and wandering the familiar local streets. (But where is our car? We like to have it parked directly outside, as it is at the moment and where it will remain all next week when we are in London. I must go back and look for it. Is it somewhere down Scotland Street? It could be in Strathardle, of course.)

After a happy time doing that, I went looking for No. 21 Mt. Nod Road in Streatham where EZ spent some months with her aunts towards the end of the Great War, to get away from the Zeppelins (Knitting Around, p. 27). I found it, after a bit of difficulty. Don’t search for “Mount Nod” – Google won’t understand. And when you find the road, Google will first show you a semi-detached house which is not No. 21, and will then try to keep you on the wrong side of the road, with the even-numbered houses. Persevere!

It looks much as EZ describes it, except that there is no longer a monkey-puzzle tree. I even saw her bedroom window! The house appears well-maintained. I think it must be at the better end of Mt Nod Road. There is a cheap-looking modern horror of some sort next door, where No. 23 should be; perhaps Hitler’s bombs had a wider range than the Zeppelins.