Chilli-growing

We seem to be having a settled spell of fine weather at the moment, for the first time since last May. I am thinking of setting the chillis out on the doorstep today, once the sun reaches it. It’s still too cold, at the moment.

I am embarrassed to have to tell you that I ordered a pollination brush yesterday (they’re very cheap). A chilli flower can pollinate itself, I have learned. Such a flower is said to be “complete”. But lots don’t; they just fall off.  More than half, I should say, do that on Big Nameless. So I thought I’d help a bit, especially with the precious Apache flower.

The Big Nameless chillis seem to be reluctant to redden. That’s where I thought a few hours in the sunshine might help.

Knitting

Continued progress with Relax2. I have decided that the only way to measure with any hope of accuracy is over the end of the ironing board, so I’ve just done that. I won’t want to do that every morning.

I am determined, this time, to master M1R and M1L when I get to the underarm increases (fairly soon, now). It is a refinement I usually ignore, and have never mastered, in a long life. It came up in the swatching I was doing for the lacy capelet recently, and I don’t think I was getting it right.

But the design of the Relax is so meticulous and Japanese, I feel I ought to try. Meg says somewhere that she always religiously does it. The instructions aren’t included with the pattern – there is a reference to amirisu.com, and when you get there you find yourself referred to an admirable YouTube video by the Knit Purl Hunter.

I could never make an instructional video, or teach a Craftsy class – it would take  months to get my fingernails up to the required standard.

Queer Joe is pleased, as well he might be, to find himself listed among the Top Ten Knitting Blogs by Liberty’s Yarn. There are some blogs there I don’t know about – it might be time to broaden my horizons. One notices that there’s no sign of Franklin. His remains the best knitting blog in the universe, so that can only be because he doesn’t blog as often, these days.

I tried googling Best Knitting Blogs UK (for it is by googling that the Top Ten list is said to have been compiled). I appear, eventually, on Page 4. A long way to go before I qualify as the Queer Joe of Drummond Place.

Today’s excitement – it’s all go, here – is a dental appt for my husband. He hasn’t got many teeth left, and one of them has broken. The dentist is very close, but steeply uphill. We’ll drive up and then I’ll park if I can, or come home and then walk up myself. We may be able to walk back. But the point here is, that I’ll get in some more work on the Pakokku sock.