I wonder if I have met an unwinnable Freecell? How I wish there were a way to save it, and forward it to you, and keep it for my sister and/or Alexander (who are both very clever), and Google for a solution – and thus set me free to go on wasting my time. But I fear I’m beaten.

Here, at last, my Polliwog, progressing slowly but happily. Soon I will embark on some interesting short rows. The whole point of this pattern is that it is meant to slip easily over a baby’s head (and I’m sure it will). Not a matinee jacket, anyway. I'm very pleased with it.

Ella Gordon has posted a new blogpost – always a welcome event. And in her discussion of Whalsay knitting, she illustrates two items from the ‘30’s (I can’t see, and she doesn’t say, what the “items” are) with different motifs as one proceeds along the row – just like the Museum Sweater!

I am continuing to watch Andrew & Andrea systematically. We had an interesting episode recently, No. 6, with an interview with a natural dyer. I’ve done a bit of that myself, in my day.

It is interesting how everybody, world-wide and throughout history, seems to converge on wanting red. It must be something to do with the construction of the human eye. Or not necessarily human, considering how the birds will strip my red currant bush if not netted, but leave the white currants which taste very similar.

During my own dye phase, I found some ochrolechia tartarea above the Croft of Cultalonie, (rather proud of myself, for that),  and from it dyed some yarn purple and other yarn a rather convincing red. To turn it red, I had to macerate the lichen for a while. Urine is recommended. I made do with vinegar.

But it is interesting how humble people whose lives must have been rather difficult, took the time and trouble to discover the properties of ochrolechia tartarea, while the more leisured derived their reds from more exotic sources.

There is a famous passage in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue – the “Messianic Eclogue” – in which he imagines the sheep in the age-to-come wandering about the fields all red and gold and purple already. Virgil has been rightly censured for being ridiculous. But the commentators I have seen (the English language ones only) have rather missed the point, I feel. He doesn’t use the normal Latin colour-words here, but rather the names of the expensive dyes of his day, crocus (=saffron), murex, sandyx. That’s what we’ll be able to do without, he is saying, when the Red Revolution comes.