Thank you for all your kind remarks about the shawl.

Here’s my new baby, although I hate to let you see it looking so orange:

It turns out (I think) that I need 5% more stitches than Jared’s “Large” size. That’s not rocket science, and I have set forth on the journey on that assumption. I’ll keep checking size and gauge, of course. I love this stuff so much that I think I would actually rejoice if I have to rip it out and start again.

I feel I will need to knit something else in madelinetosh DK after this one. Google doesn’t suggest it will be easy to find any around here. (Loop is good on madelinetosh, but doesn’t have DK. The shop in Amsterdam which sold me the stuff I’m knitting has closed its doors. Nothing on eBay. I haven’t tried Ravelry yet.)

Non-knit

We’re going to Strathardle today, in gloomy weather, planning to come back tomorrow. That’s going to make a strenuous 48 hours for an old woman. My husband is anxious to get the apple harvest in – a frost on May 31 carried off most of it. For quite a while we thought we had only one apple, and then he found four more on low branches hidden in (and probably protected by) the long grass and weeds around the foot of the tree. It’s a small tree, and has since been tidied up.

If they’re not quite ready yet, he plans to bunch netting around the foot of the tree to make a soft bed for them, instead of having them rot in the grass.

And I will harvest my vegetables, which won’t take long – broad beans and runner beans and courgettes. And admire my Brussels sprouts in their vegetable cage, and see how the seedbed roll is progressing. When last viewed, the little plants were visible, but they looked squashed between the layers, rather than growing down through the mat and lifting the plastic cover on their little shoulders as they should do.

Will the autumn raspberries be ripe? Almost certainly not.

Next year’s seed catalogues have started arriving already. I am much more suspicious of their promises than I used to be. This time, I mean to approach the problem as Stout recommends, and plan where everything will go in advance, instead of buying twice as much seed as there is room for.

On a different subject, I had an exciting time in Waverley station yesterday trying to get the tickets I had booked on thetrainline.com. The email from them contained a “booking reference” and a message saying that I would need to key  my “collection reference” into the machine at the station. I was worried about the discrepancy, but there was nothing else in the message which could possibly be a “booking reference” so I set off with high hopes.

It didn’t work.

I stood for quite a while in a queue for tickets FOR TODAY ONLY because it seemed to be the only way to get to talk to a human being. When I finally achieved that goal, difficulties melted away. I put my card into the proffered machine, all the details appeared on the nice man’s computer at once (even without my PIN number); he printed my tickets. It turns out the “collection reference” was in the title of the email from thetrainline.com. I’ll know next time.