Isn’t it wonderful how life sometimes fits together?

I am at this very moment printing out Pandaman’s st st version of the baby surprise, the link that Tamar supplied earlier in the week. I thought I ought to have it for the archives, to be kept with the Schoolhouse Press Surprise leaflet.

It involves double decreases on some of the purl rows.

And only yesterday I read another brilliant blog entry by Fleegle – about purl decreases, including a centered double purl decrease so marvellously simple that I think it should henceforth be known as a Fleegle.

As far as my Surprise is concerned, however, I will adopt Fleegle’s own advice: “My favorite method, not described here in detail, is to avoid patterns that require me to do this.” I.e., my own Surprise, as I said yesterday, will be in the original garter stitch for weight, since I am committed to sock yarn.

I polished off another repeat of the Princess yesterday, and again counted ahead to the end, trying to count the links in the chained border edge in groups of ten, because each repeat eliminates ten of them. I got the same answer, that at the end I will finish a repeat with four links still to go. I think I will skip a link on the very next repeat.

Vegetable-growing

We’re going to Strathardle today, for a whole week if we can stand it. I should be back in position by Monday the 22nd at the latest. Will I find all those poor little beans flattened by frost? I’ll take the cardigan along – it’s perfect tired-gardener knitting, and I hope to bring it back in a nearly-finished state.

Beth, the seedbed roll: we had a mini heat wave with drought in May (I suspect that was our summer). When we got to Strathardle for our two-nighter early last week, I found the earth very dry. I think I carried more water in those two days than I did all the previous summer. It’s heavy stuff.

The one instruction for the seedbed roll is, “keep watered”. I think that’s all it was. The seeds dried up at a crucial stage.

Knitterguy asked how I was getting on with square-foot gardening. The answer, it’s still there, in rather diminished form this year. Maybe I’ll have another look at the texts when I re-join my gardening library later today. One of my “raised beds” was devoted to the seedbed roll, and we know what happened to that. The other is at the moment half square-feet and half rows. A square foot is not quite enough for spinach, so I put in a row of that, the length of the bed. That’s the spinach that bolted before it was big enough to harvest, another victim, I think, of the mini-drought. And a row of salsola soda. Ha.

The square feet aren’t doing much, so far. That’s where the salad things are meant to be, and they simply haven't come up.

Here is a recent picture of Alexander’s vegetables on the shores of Loch Fyne, just to show what can be achieved if you put your mind to it.