Aran sweater

Mary Lou, how can you use the saddle as a swatch for an Aran sweater? Isn’t it the last thing to be knit, an extension of the already-finished sleeve?

Annie, I got “Knitting the Old Way” down from the shelf on your recommendation. I hadn’t looked at it for years – goodness, it’s good. It’s sort of worrying in my present situation, though, as she assumes a steek or at least some “platform stitches” when you are going to cut a sleeve opening, and I haven’t got one. What I’m about to do is called “stitch and slash” on page 45, and Gibson-Roberts is not entirely enthusiastic.

But I got away with it on the Grandson, and it’s what EZ recommends in her generic Aran instructions in the Opinionated Knitter, which I am vaguely following.

Shelly, I too love knitting a sweater with an EZ yoke as you describe – but I don’t think it would work here, because of the difficulty of maintaining complicated Aran patterns while decreasing. Might be fun to try. And anyway, although I grumble about lack of progress, I suspect I’m past the underarm.

I remember with a curious vividness a pattern in (I feel sure) VK sometime in the late 40’s, when I was in high school. It was perfectly plain except for a deep cabled yoke. The spaces between the cables were reduced as one got towards the neckline. I thought it was wonderful, but never attempted it. Now, I could re-create it without difficulty. Sometimes I wonder if it was an EZ pattern, flattened and made two-dimensional by the editorial requirements of the day.

I didn’t advance much yesterday – the tennis was too interesting, and since I finished Joe’s socks, I didn’t even have a sock handy to pick up.

Vegetable-growing

I hope we’ll get back to Strathardle this week. Maybe Wednesday.

Catdownunder, I’m going to need you. There was a letter in the Telegraph on Saturday claiming that beans in the southern hemisphere wind themselves around the pole in the opposite direction to northern beans. Could that be true?

British beans are said to go counter-clockwise. I can’t even remember, and the last time I saw mine, although looking for the most part very cheerful, they hadn’t started twining. “Counter-clockwise” would mean that, as the bean faces the pole, it would go to the right, behind the pole, and re-appear on the left? I hope mine will have started climbing when I see them this week, and that much, at least, can be established.

New Zealand beans, according to the letter-writer, go clockwise.

I broke off just now to Google the matter. The top item was a discussion of this very point, with someone asserting that southern hemisphere beans went the other way, and someone else disbelieving it. So, cat, I hope you will be able to find a bean to observe and we will be able to settle the matter definitively. Beans have very strong opinions as to which way they are to go – it’s not random, and the gardener can't persuade them to do it the other way this year.