World Cup

We are not interested in football.

At the moment, around here, that feels like being given a whole extra month of life. My sister and her husband will be here next week – I will ask her how it felt actually to be standing on African soil yesterday and not be interested in football.

However, today is an exception. A recent New Yorker article about the “Miracle on Grass” – the day, 60 years ago, when the USofA beat mighty England – has kindled a temporary interest. I think the article said (we left it behind in Perthshire) that the two teams have not played each other from that day to this. The Queen (not personally, I don’t suppose) has added her touch by giving an MBE in this morning’s Birthday Honours List to the 90-year-old sole survivor of that game. And our goalkeeper is a New Jersey man.

So we’ll be watching, and cheering for the underdog.

Knitting

Here are the Green Granite Blocks. Somehow they look more three-dimensional in photography than they do in real life. I’m very pleased.


Here’s the back – I hope I am leaving enough percentage points, as I advance my Progress Bar, for the clean-up at the end. No joke, with Kaffe. But the point of this picture is to let you see, to some extent, I hope, how the new system – butterflies for the larger patches of colour – has produced somewhat fewer ends, in the second rank of blocks.


I got out Kaffe’s “Pattern Library” yesterday. There are, after all, some things I’d like to do. Divide the left-overs into two piles, and knit the famous Persian Poppies or Earth Carpet? Both from “Glorious Knitting”, I think. Or three, and go for almost anything else? That would have to be far in the future, either way.

Magazines

I got an awfully nice note from Wendy yesterday, asking what British magazines I would recommend. Golly. I’m not sure, a la fin fine, if I wouldn’t now agree with my friend Helen C.K.S. and choose the Rowan magazine and leave it there. Far and away the best for design; good articles, too. It’s expensive, and of course limited to Rowan yarns, but on the other hand appears only twice a year.

I still subscribe to Knitting – the one the Curmudgeon has said is the best mag on either side of the pond. I’m always glad to see it on the mat, but I’d drop it pretty quickly if I had to cut back. Looking her up for that link, I read the Curmudgeon’s enthusiasm for Verena, of which I’ve never heard. Hmm.

Like Wendy, I read The Knitter once and it was sort of impressive in its expensive way, but not enough to make me yearn for – or even look for – the next issue.

How often do I knit from a magazine? Almost never, with the VK Chevron Scarf as an interesting exception, this year.

When I was young, the Vogue Knitting Book was all there was. Its twice-yearly appearances were Events. These last ten years, I’ve been swamped with knitting magazines. Delicious at first, but I wonder if it’s not time to pull back.