Off to Strathardle

Blogger has suddenly required me to provide a title. 

I’m glad we took the extra day. I feel somewhat rested, and the sun is shining this morning which makes me feel braver. Off we go. Back perhaps Sunday. Indeed we could drive back Sunday morning and be here in time for the final.

I’ve turned the heel of Mind the Gap. I should surely finish the whole sock in a couple more days. It’s looking good. I’ll take the Pakokku sock along, just in case – nothing would be worse than running out of knitting.

I think the only two things I’ve learned about knitting from fellow human beings, as opposed to books, are:

1)      to cast on over two needles when a stretchy edge is particularly desirable, as for a sock. I think a fellow-knitter at Hampton elementary school in Detroit told me that one.

2)      to avoid the dread Gusset Hole by knitting up an extra stitch into the horizontal bars between the two needles. I take two or even three bars and twist them. Then decrease the extra stitch on the next round. That one was from Margaret McCormick of Brookline, I think.

I’ve made a particularly neat job of this first Mind the Gap sock, if I do say so.

Someone must have taught me to knit in the first place. I have no memory of that, or very little. It was probably my father’s mother. She lived in a small town in Michigan (Constantine) and we saw her often in our Detroit years, and she knit big heavy uncomfortable scratchy sweaters for me. I remember being given a knitting needle with stitches on it, and moving them one by one to another needle – but nothing happened, so there wasn't much future in that.

I cringe at the memory of my mother encouraging me to wear a big heavy uncomfortable scratchy sweater by saying it would make me a “sweater girl”. Early ‘40’s, this was.

For quite a while, in the early days, I twisted my purl stitches. I remember being puzzled by that, long after Detroit. I don’t remember how I figured out what was wrong.

New Topic

There has been talk here recently about what might be called reading-from-stash. Someone has written a book about doing it. I don’t think I could bear it. I could knit from stash for a year or so, forever if I had to – just let me order in a bit more madelinetosh before we start. But I would panic if required to stay within these walls for reading. There are plenty of books here to read – lots of unread Trollope, to begin with, whom I adore. Loved authors to re-read, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, Pirandello, Horace, Barbara Pym.

The nice man from Pickford’s who moved us in here 20 years ago, said that he had moved many a clergyman in his day but had never seen so many books.

Maybe I had better retrieve from memory or Amazon, that book by the female writer about attempting such a feat. Title such as, Henry James is on the Landing. Did she panic?

Miscellaneous

I’ve started introducing myself to Feedly. It looks and feels good, but I haven’t entirely grasped the ins-and-outs yet.

Happy Fourth, people.