Miscellaneous

The current New Yorker cover is brilliant.

Knitlass, thank you for the pointer (comment, yesterday) to the two-colour brioche knitting. That item has also turned up in my Zite magazine – I tell you, they are uncanny.

Tamar, that’s a distressing story about your husband’s fall. I wasn’t strong enough to lift my husband on my own. We tried several variations of posture – I can’t even remember which one was successful in the end. It would have been easy with one other person, not very strong, necessarily, lifting from the other side. We were within sight of the path along the burn, but it is not much frequented and there were no dog-walkers that Saturday afternoon.

The scariness was mostly focussed on, how much longer can we go on indulging in country life, silly old fools as we are? But the danger of an after-shock was scary, too. We seem to be out of the woods (!) on that one.

Knitting

I’ve now attached the sleeves to the electric red Brownstone, and am putting in some short rows, on Jared’s instructions, before starting the raglan shaping. Very soon now, like today, I am going to have to stop and plan the end-game with care: how many stitches do I want at the end? How many rows do I want for the finished length? How, exactly, to arrange the raglan decreases and the v-neck shaping?

While in Strathardle, I didn’t get as much done as I might have hoped on putting the vegetables to bed for the winter. I am embarrassed to show you such weed-filled pictures.

In high summer, I thought all I had to do would be to chop up the broad beans and spread them around to achieve a pleasant mulch. Alas, the deer (who have been back) have stripped them of leaves as well as beans. All I could do was chop up the stems. Still, I did some forking-over and some creeping-buttercup-extirpation. Better than nothing.

And the deer still haven’t got the Brussels sprouts. My husband thinks they will eventually jump into the vegetable cage, which is not entirely netted on top. I don’t think they will, although they might figure out how to move the netting aside. We shall see.

I worked industriously on the Japanese shirt. It has deepish vents at the sides, so the first thing to do was to knit three rectangles. They have now been joined into one, with an elegant four-stitch overlap; the first buttonhole is in place, and I think things are going to go faster, not slower, now that I’ve got a million stitches on the needle.

Colour not good, there. It's madelinetosh "Cosmos", a rich, dark brown shot with green.

Another wonderfulness about the iPad is that I can temporarily increase type-size to make it easier to read while I knit – and I can switch from Henry James to a video of the one-row buttonhole technique without getting out of my chair.

I thought at one point that I might bring the Japanese shirt back here to be the Principal Edinburgh WIP. That could still happen, although not before the New Year.