Another pleasant day, weather-wise. Another good walk. Helen and I are contemplating attempting two circuits of the garden tomorrow.

 

And I’m somewhat further with the Evendoon. The colours have been straightened out, anyway. All my life I have been congratulating myself on having a passion that required so little physical strength – I could go on knitting into extreme old age! It’s still true, but I’m not doing much. I thought today I would try watching my once-beloved quiz program, Pointless – and found I was watching a prime ministerial coronavirus program instead. Not much knitting got done.

 

Mary Lou, I have very little experience with the Magic Loop but it certainly seems worth trying. It used to make me feel as if I were tripping over my shoelaces.

 

“Knitting” magazine arrived today – the British one. There are two interesting articles about sheep farming. One is from homefarmwensleydales.com where Wensleydale sheep (a rare breed) are raised for their wool, never for eating. The magazine is going to take us through the shepherd’s year – this article is about introducing the rams to the ewes; the next, in the spring, will be about lambing.

 

The other is about colonsaywoolgrowers.co.uk. on the island of Colonsay, where they use the waste products from a local gin distillery as a source of natural dyes. Their yarn is too heavy for my taste. The Wensleydale yarn is better. I think I knit with it once, many years ago, purchased at a fair of some sort, made into a striped sweater for Helen’s husband David. If I’m right, it was lovely stuff to handle.

 

Newspapers have been grumbling again recently about how farmers have to compost their wool and spread it on the fields because nobody wants it. Newspapers don’t know that sheep bred for their meat don’t often produce much of use in the way of wool. An exception might be Shetland sheep – but they are small animals and I don’t think their meat is much exported from Shetland itself.