Non-knit

We heard yesterday of the death of an old friend. 

It was just about exactly 55 years ago, in late February ’57 therefore, when I met John and my husband. We were having a party and were a bit short of men and one of us knew someone who knew John and knew he had a friend with whom he was often seen, and so we invited them along. They proved to be, in the event, the two lecturers in the Glasgow University Dep’t of Fine Art. I vividly remember opening the door to them – John was standing slightly in front of the man I married six months later – and thinking, This is a bit better than we might have expected, inviting strangers to our party sight unseen.

Knitting

Another skein has been wound and attached to the v-neck vest, and it matches perfectly. A couple more sessions should get me to the armhole.

I acquired GoodReader yesterday – alas, before I had read your comment, Daisy. It looks terrific. I then bought the first Swing Knitting workshop. I haven’t figured out how to get it in to GoodReader, and I may not bother. It is currently in my Ravelry library which means I can read it on the iPad, and as I feared it goes on and on and on and the sheer weight of words makes it very difficult – for me, so far, impossible – to grasp the central idea.

And when I do get it, it is going to involve attaching a lot of little safety pins.

I haven’t so far got anything into GoodReader, in fact, but I’ve looked at their help topics and I think I see how to proceed. When I’m ready to start my Effortless (currently a PDF on the desktop computer) I’ll move it in.

Snood, yet again

Your story about circular scarves called “gaiters” is an extremely interesting one, Elizabeth (comment yesterday). The OED hasn’t got that meaning for "gaiters" (any more than they’ve got “Kitchener stitch”) but they do have an interesting – and surely relevant – quotation from “Plain Knitting”, 1880: “Gaiters (i.e., legs of stockings without feet)..are very useful to those who are obliged to walk out in all weathers”.

Fiberqat, I am touched that you are concerned for me to get my Games entry right. I really, really don’t care. I’ll enter to support the cause, and to make things more fun for other competitors and for the spectators, and to give the grandchildren a reason to rush into the Home Industries Tent as soon as the door opens. Winning is irrelevant – I’d rather knit what I want and can use, within a broad interpretation of the rules. It’ll probably be a circular scarf.

I’m used to being slightly out of step. I knit this – that’s Thomas-the-Younger, almost certainly photographed on Games Day – when the rubric was “motif sweater” four years ago. It was unplaced. All the other entries had one large motif each.

It's a VK pattern that I had knit a couple of decades previously for one of Rachel's children. 

My sister-in-law, who died a year ago, firmly believed that I was fiercely competitive. Maybe I am, in some respects, but not when it comes to knitting for the Games.