I am sure I
will have remarked before, that May 31 is my favourite of the 365. I am always
slightly surprised that May has 31 days, when November has only 30. Yesterday
was a particularly good one – driving Archie back to school on Thursday (the 30th),
the sun was shining and Edinburgh
But
yesterday was not only the 31st of May, it was also a plain vanilla
Friday. A grand day.
At the
other end of the year, when one has fought one’s way through the misery of
November, everything feels a bit more hopeful on 1 December. The winter
solstice is in sight, with Christmas not far behind. Things will get better.
Contrariwise,
on June 1 one knows that everything will soon get worse – this wonderful light
will soon be withdrawn. Just saying.
Tomorrow we
will have lunch at the Botanic Gardens with two of our nieces. It will be their
mother’s – my husband’s sister’s – 82nd birthday. I am sure he
misses her constantly, but the 2nd of June is particularly important
to him.
And that lunch will conflict with Archie’s hopes of escaping the paint-balling session. At
least I figured that out in time to make adjustments.
However,
this has nothing to do with knitting.
Relax2
continues well. I am within shouting distance, I think it could be said, of the
point where I start increasing for the underarm. I am puzzled by a note in my
own handwriting about how many rounds that involved on Relax1, but I think I
have figured out what to do this time (=increase every third round). I haven’t
tried assessing the circumference. It looks beautiful, which isn’t to
guarantee, big enough.
I got to
thinking about the Baby Surprise, after linking to that Twist Collective piece
about stashes (day before yesterday, I think). The problem, of course, is not
finding suitable stash-busting patterns, it’s finding time to knit them. But
never mind that, for the moment.
I knit
Rachel an Adult Surprise once. On the strength of an unrefreshed memory, I
think what one does is pick up stitches somehow and knit a sort of skirt (with
horizontal stripes) to lengthen the jacket. And what I got to thinking was,
would one need to? Wouldn’t a waist-length cropped jacket be just as useful for
an adult as for a baby?
This line
of thinking sent me back to the Schoolhouse Press. My subscription to
Wool Gathering must have lapsed – I’ll do something about that. And I discover
that Cully (who has clearly inherited his grandmother’s geometry-of-knitting
gene) has devised a
Surprise which can be knit in the round (scroll down a bit), thus opening the door for the incorporation of two-colour patterns. EZ must be proud of him,
from the further shore. And I must have that pattern, too.
But, as I
say, time is the problem, not patterns.
I was instantly smitten with that pattern. now if i could just remember where i put it.
ReplyDeleteMay 31st is my favorite too...it's my birthday! My mother was pregnant and miserable in the heat that year in Colorado. She attended some Memorial Day activity (in those years, Memorial Day always fell on the 30th of May) and complained loudly that she did NOT want to be pregnant in June. I was born at noon on the 31st, in Fitzsimons Army Hospital
ReplyDeleteThe new version of the surprise jacket is very pretty and should increase the number of knitters using it. I scrolled even further down and saw a sweater described as using a "pallet" of colors; I saw no easy way to send a direct comment. Last I heard, a "pallet" was a rough wooden platform on which heavy objects are stacked. A palette, on the other hand, is an artist's paint-holder, and by extension, a chosen group of colors (not to be confused with a palate, which might by extension involve a preference for a group of colors).
ReplyDeleteTamar, you or I must email Meg and point this out. Which will it be?
Delete