Games Day

And here we are, Perdita and I, in Edinburgh.

It's a good day, here at least, but with that nip in the air that the Games always bring: September is waiting in the wings, with worse to follow.

Helen and her family are there and I hope will return (tomorrow) with some worth-while gossip. The knitting categories this year are a) a cardigan for a premature baby, to be donated, pattern supplied; and b) a tea cosy. I don't feel terribly sorry at having missed out on either of those. Maybe Helen will take some pictures, but her main target for photography is the trees we have planted down the commonty. Every year at Games Weekend I photograph each tree with appropriate grandchildren. Each tree commemorates, one way or another, one of our four children and the associated family. This year Helen's sons will have to stand in for all their cousins.

There is also a tree, now, for my husband's sister, and one in the paddock for our 50^th wedding anniversary. Lots of photography required on Games day.

When my time comes, I have asked for a Wellingtonia (=California redwood).

I went on with swatching yesterday, and would have finished the second swatch but for the return of All Those People from their afternoon activities. Today, I hope,I will actually finish, and then on to the Tokyo. The actual watching of Franklin's third lesson will have to wait a day or two so that I don't start feeling guilty right away about not having done the next homework.

My other knit-related task is to mend a small hole in the back of Archie's new sweater. A snag is a more likely cause than a moth. It won't take a minute – except that I can't find the odd ball (there must have been one) and was therefore reduced to winding a whole skein. The Tempter suggested taking just the yard or so that the task requires – but that's an easy way to reduce a skein of precious madelinetosh DK to a tangled mess, so I resisted, and have wound the whole ball.

I've got quite a lot of MT DK in that bag of leftovers, with Whiskey Barrel and Roasted Hatch Chillies to follow, due to chronic over-ordering. I must get Sally Melville's stash-knitting book out and see if there are any appropriate ideas there.

On a higher note, the Craftsy class on Portuguese knitting (also incomplete, despite being less dedicated to swatching) sent me to Donna Druchunas' “Ethnic Knitting Discovery” for the chapter on knitting in the Andes. They knit in the Portuguese way there, yarn around neck. Druchunas, in turn, sent me to Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' “Knitting in the Old Way”. I had quite forgotten how good that one is.

Druchunas confesses – incredible! – to not having read Zimmerman. But I can see how it might happen, after re-visiting Gibson-Roberts. She provides an abundance of schematics for various garments, with the stitch numbers expressed in percentages where the maximum girth (good old “K”) is 100%. I will keep her “Shaped Vest” pages open when the Roasted Hatch Chillies turn up.