Safely back. The weather was fairly unpleasant, but not nearly as bad as forecast. Too cold and wet for seeds, but I risked putting some potatoes in. And weeded and manured the fruit hedge. It’s looking well, and 2012 is the year in which there will be no caterpillars or pigeons or American gooseberry mould.

We ate a few stalks of our own forced rhubarb. Utterly delicious.

Wood anemonies ("wooden enemies") along the burn on the way to the commonty:

I was taken aback at how tired we got. A bit of mild faffing about in the morning, a late lunch, and we were ready to sleep by the fire.

Knitting

The Japanese shirt (which is being knit in one piece) is almost half-way from cast-on to armhole, and very near the third buttonhole. Both these landmarks should easily be passed next time. It’s sock-weight yarn on a small needle with lots of stitches. Progress is slow. I’d like to bring it back here to be the major Edinburgh WIP at least for a while, but there’s too much going on in the form of Games-entry snood, Tulip cardigan, and the Sock Project.

As for the snood, I’ve nearly finished stripe CCC. All is well. It occurs to me that I do have one chance to show off for the judges – everybody is going to have to join their snoods into a loop, and I’m confident I can do a row of grafting that they will have to search for pretty hard. Off the top of my head, st st grafting is all I can manage. But I've got books. I did some neat garter stitch grafting in the Round the Bend jacket, and Sam the Ram, five years ago, has some grafted ribbing on his stomach. I’m not afraid of seed stitch.

I seem to have ordered “The Sock Knitter’s Handbook” by Charlene Schurch and Beth Parrott from Amazon. At any rate, it has turned up. It’s good – and it’s spiral-bound. Everything imaginable is briskly set forth, with excellent illustrations.

The authors seem particularly keen on the “Strong Heel”, first expounded by Gerdine Crawford-Strong in Knitter’s in Fall, ’03. “Easy and lovely”, they call it. I ought to have that issue in my archives and might try to find it. Will that be my next heel?

Candace Strick’s “revolutionary” sock book should surely turn up from the US before long.

Miscellaneous

You don’t need a recommendation from me to read the Panopticon’s latest blog entry. It’s just that that lace insertion, towards the end, reminds us, if reminding were needed, that Franklin is a demon knitter. We love him for wit and cartoons and photography at all of which he is so brilliant that it is easy to forget that he isn’t just kidding, when it comes to knitting itself.