Thomas' striped Koigu -- we're nearly to the armpits 

Eyes

All seems to have gone well, and the experience of private medicine, except for the absence of chilled white wine, was delicious. The new eye is much better than the old one, and they are not cooperating very well yet, with the result that I can't actually see very well, but otherwise everything is fine. Thank you, everybody, for good wishes.

I agonised all day Friday about what knitting to take in -- my usual waiting-room socks, or Thomas-the-Younger's striped Koigu? In the end I took both, and a book. I couldn't read, as things turned out, and didn't knit the sock, but I got a lot done on Thomas' sweater while I waited for the doctor to turn up and release me yesterday. Koigu was a particularly delicious yarn to exercise a post-cataract eye on.

Do Dhillon said he learned to knit at school. Garter squares, to be sewn into blankets for Africa. He thought at the time that that was an odd continent to dispatch woollen blankets to. He was at school in Leicester, and is roughly coeval with our children, who also went to school there, but nobody taught them to knit.

Only 79 edging repeats to go! 

Thomas the Elder

I don't know why we had that big gap after the headline in yesterday's Blog. Were they waiting for a picture of Andy Murray? Will it happen again today?

Today's news is that Thomas the Elder got a first. There's no doubt at all that he was in utterly genuine distress over that examination paper on which His Question didn't turn up. And he hasn't got this far in life without sitting some pretty important exams along the way -- he never made an unreasonable amount of fuss about them before. Never mind. It happened. Joy is unconfined.

Princess Shawl

There it is, above, with my original attempt beside it, for comparison. Gauge is now just about perfect. Again yesterday I did  nearly two repeats. I can now manage intermittent short bursts of conversation, and television (unwatched, of course) in the background. That simplifies life. I gather from the Heirloom Knitting list that the yarn isn't offered for sale yet on Sharon's website, but it came with a perfectly normal-looking Hairloom Knitting ballband on it and I feel sure that by the distant time when I need more, it'll be there.

Knitter's

The current magazine turned up here yesterday, rather more promptly than usual. Zilch, I would say, except for a useful-looking article about coillars and a first-rate Perri Klass. That thing on the back cover looks remarkably clapotis-like, although I can see that it's different, and has a head hole. Chicken? Egg? Or just an idea whose time has come?

Eyes

The operation is scheduled for this afternoon, and I will stay in the hospital overnight. Will I get a glass of chilled white wine with my supper, do you think? I should be back here in Drummond Place tomorrow morning. You can start worrying if a new blog entry hasn't turned up by Tuesday. 

 

Andy Murray

I've been enjoying Wimbledon since the teen-aged sensation of the year was named John McInroe. Yesterday was a good day, although it's disconcerting to find the current hero appreciably younger than one of my grandchildren. Thomas-the-Elder will be 21 this summer, Andy Murray is only 18.

The Princess Shawl

...is coming along very nicely. No disasters yesterday, and I did the better part of two whole repeats. At that rate, I could actually finish the edging this year! I'll dress and photograph it tomorrow. The cataract surgery isn't until the afternoon, so I should have plenty of time to do that and to get a picture up.

I wouldn't quite say I am on top of the pattern, but I'm definately coming along side it. In most cases, now, I can look at the chart before I start the row, and then sit back and knit right across without further peering. That speeds things up, and makes it much pleasanter.

I was astonished (and so were other lace knitters) to learn, when Sharon's wonderful book came out, that when you're knitting garter stitch with fine yarn, it doesn't matter which direction decreases lean in. In other words, the symbols / and \ in the chart can both be treated as k2tog. (Or SSK) That helps a lot, too. On the whole, I'm doing directional decreases out of habit, but sometimes when it's hard to get hold of the two stitches, I switch for convenience to whichever one works. And she's right, of course -- the appearance of the fabric isn't affected at all.

My sister suggested in an email yesterday that when her son Theo gets married, perhaps his bride could wear this shawl. That's an exciting thought (assuming he doesn't intend to take a wife this year or next) -- I might actually get to see it in action.

Striped Koigu

I made reasonable progress with the ribbing, too, until the tennis got to be so exciting that I couldn't do even that. I get to stay in the BUPA hospital overnight after my eye is done, so I'll take it along (rather than the current sock).

Today is our daughter Rachel's 47th birthday. She was born in a Glasgow hospital and when they came round with the newspapers I bought an Express. I have it still. I looked up the horoscrope of my new baby and it said, "Not a day you will remember." That's worthy of the Delphic Oracle.

THREE kind people left comments about the tammy. Many, many thanks. Normally, as faithful readers will know, I don't log on when we are in the country. The computer there is for my husband's work, and never connecting to the internet seems to me the surest way to keep it virus-free.  But on the Fourth Saturday of August the house will be full of people with high-powered portables and wi-fi and bluetooth and God knows what, and I will make use of one of them to log on to Blogger and tell you the fate of the tammy.

And Daisy wrote directly (jean@jeanmile.demon.co.uk) to suggest coloured Boye circulars for the Princess shawl, because of the way the stitches will show up against the colours. I am very grateful for the suggestion, and am earnestly pursuing a source. I will order long circulars in both 2mm and 2.25 sizes.

Striped Koigu for Thomas-the-Younger

I didn't get much done yesterday. I must at least finish the ribbing before my cataract is done on Saturday.

Princess Shawl

That, on the other hand, moves forward nicely in the gossamer yarn. I've done three repeats but won't dress it yet because I can't bear to give it up, even for a few hours.

After the first two repeats, I decided that the result really was going to be slightly smaller than Sharon's prototype, so I thought I'd do the third repeat on a 2.25mm needle just to see. Well, that needle is dull grey and not as sharp as my nice shiny Chinese 2mm so things progressed not quite as well, but I stuck at it and suddenly, inexplicably found myself in the middle of a major disaster. I still can't understand what went wrong. It was not easy to recover any sort of locus standi. Apart from the obvious problems, the yarn sort of sticks to itself and is hard to unravel.

You'll be able to see the faulty bit clearly when I finally dress and photograph it. Meanwhile I went back to the nice Chinese needle and all is going well again. Maybe it doesn't really matter if my shawl is only eight feet across the top instead of nine.

 

New beginnings 

Eyes

I am to have the first cataract done on Saturday -- great news. I had given up hope that it could be so soon, not having heard anything from Dr Dhillon on Monday. The following two Saturdays are less convenient, as various friends will be coming and going, and on July 2 anyway Edinburgh will be in chaos for the G8. And July 16 is so far away I might almost have stayed with the NHS. Anyway, Saturday it is.

Princess Shawl

Sharon was as good as her word -- a ball of her gossamer wool arrived in yesterday's post. I cast on at once, and made good progress. I'm not quite sure I enjoy the experience as much as I did with the other yarn. This stuff is like knitting air. But the great thing is, I can do it.

EZ says in one of her books that Shetland cobweb yarn is "unknittable with".  An intolerant remark, I've always thought -- and lady, you ain't seen nuffin.

I've actually gone down a needle size, to 2mm. (Sharon specifies 2.25; I had been using 2.5 with the other yarn.) I have a nifty 2mm circular which I bought in Beijing two years ago -- shiny metal like an Addi Turbo, on which the stitches show up well, and nice and sharp. It'll be funny if I now wind up with a shawl smaller than Sharon's prototype. The trouble is, this needle is too short to take on the entire shawl, so I've only got six or eight months (while I knit the border) to find something as good, but longer.

Like last time, I'll knit three repeats or so and then dress it and we can have a look.

Another striped Koigu

And I also cast on for Thomas-the-Youynger's striped Koigu, having at last dispatched the disliked tammy to FO-land.  It's the perfect antidote to gossamer knitting, the perfect Wimbledon project, and ought to be good for post-cataract knitting, too, if eyesight should be wonky for a while.

The tammy, being blocked on a dinner plate. My entry for the Strathardle Highland Games Home Industries Tent this year: "A hat, any craft" 

I complain so in November -- I shouldn't let this day (of them all) pass without saying how I love the summer light. We live just around the corner from the house in which Robert Louis Stevenson grumbled, in A Child's Garden of Verses, of having to go to bed by day. I'd love to see the summer solstice in Lerwick, which is hundreds of miles further north.

Tammy

I finished it. I hope I will get it blocked soon, and post a final picture in a couple of hours. It looks OK, I think. It's wonderful to be rid of it. I got half-way with the casting on of a striped Koigu for Thomas-the-Younger.

Princess Shawl

But the real knitting excitement yesterday was that Sharon Miller rang up. Rang me up. I posted a note to the Heirloom Knitting group, referring to yesterday's musings on the Blog about shawl size, since they are always wanting to hear about how our projects are getting along. She was worried that leaving a couple of "feathers" out will distort the shawl and diminish the design (not just in size, I mean). She is going to send me some of her new gossamer wool, which is fine enough to knit the pattern as written.

Under the circumstances, I didn't knit any more of my edging yesterday. I missed it sorely. As soon as the new yarn comes I will cast on and try. It is bone-coloured, she said, not utterly white. That may make it easier to see.

She clearly understood the wrench it would be to abandon even as few as eleven repeats of the edging. And I am still not ruling out the possibility of knitting the shawl as written with the current yarn, and just letting the result be huge. She said she used to do about four points a day, when she was knitting that edging. I doubt if I could ever manage more than two.

 

My Princess Shawl edging, this morning 

Princess Shawl

The picture shows where we are -- the 12th repeat. This breakneck pace will not be maintained over the next fortnight, for today is the first day of Wimbledon and this is not Wimbledon knitting.

If I persevere -- it'll be months yet before I regard myself as committed -- it will definately be with this yarn (Heirloom Knitting's own 2-ply merino lace) and needle size (2.5 mm). So the resulting shawl, if there ever is one, will be bigger than the big prototype.

I did some calculations yesterday. The first three repeats were dressed, as I think you can see, so I've got a more or less accurate piece to measure and calculate from. Trouble is, the calculations involve square roots, and there's no back-of-the-book to look the answers up in.

My edging is 8.5 cm at the widest point, as against Sharon's 7.5. My repeats are 5.5 cm, hers 5 cm. I think my finished shawl (if I knit it as written) would have a hypotenuse of about 11 feet. Sharon's is nine feet. I calculate my perpendicular measurement, however, to be 65", whereas Sharon's is 64". Could that be right?

The answer is, I think, to forge ahead as I am doing -- I am delighted with the look of the fabric, I'm enjoying the knitting, I'm even beginning to get the hang of the fiendish pattern. At some point in the months ahead, I will do the calculations again. I will also calculate how many edging repeats I would need if I were to take two "feathers" out of the border. The answer is,  about 71 repeats, I think (as opposed to 85) -- I worked it out, but didn't keep my working. When the edging reaches that length, I'll dress it again and measure and then decide whether to reduce the pattern or just let the result be very big.

Bridget Rorem's famous wedding shawl for her daughter, described in Piecework, was about 76" square, she says.

Tammy

I'm down to the last 4 or 5 rounds, and it's awful. Double-pointed needles and colours everywhere. I've just got to set my teeth and do it. I can, I will, I must, to coin a phrase. The next project-- a striped Koigu for Thomas-the-Younger -- is perfect Wimbledon knitting.

Or I could finish off Thomas-the-Elder's socks. He will graduate from Cambridge next week, and turn 21 in August, so it would be nice to send him some socks. His mother Rachel rang up last night to say that he was in a state of great distress about his final exams, now complete. He was reading history, and the question he was expecting and hoping for, for which he had been preparing for a year, didn't turn up. Modern youth, saddled with debt, needs to worry, I gather. Nobody is going to hire you with a lower second degree, I am told. We should have the actual result soon.

Lettuce and rocket, this morning 

Vegetables

We'll be harvesting lettuce and rocket leaves from the doorstep soon. The picture shows the current state of play.

Eyes

No date yet for the eye replacement op. Drs at the BUPA (private) hospital vie for operating theatre slots like airplanes queueing to take off, he said, and the booking office wasn't open on Saturday. I'll hear from his secretary early next week. He only operates on Saturdays -- the 25th would therefore be the earliest possible, and I sort of gathered that that wasn't very likely. The Saturday after that, Edinburgh is likely to be fairly paralysed by a preliminary-to-G8 demonstration.

He confirmed my impression that the cataracts are getting worse fairly briskly.

He admired my waiting-room socks (for Thomas-the-elder, nearly finished) and wondered if turning a heel was particularly difficult. This from a man who takes people's eyes apart and puts them together again. It is the sort of things drs say to old ladies, of course.

Princess Shawl

I meant Pythagoras -- the man who is going to help me calculate the finished size -- not Archimedes. I will also want to calculate the length of the line from the point of the right triangle to the middle of the hypotenuse. What's that called? The perpendicular, perhaps. Up to about five and a half feet might be all right -- beyond that it would be trailing on the floor behind the bride and only really appropriate for a wedding in Westminster Abbey. Prince William could do worse than one of my granddaughters, but we can't count on him.

I've finished ten repeats of the edging.It's getting to be more and more fun, and I certainly have no wish to search for another yarn. I'd better put in a marker here. And I hope I'll face up to those calculations for tomorrow.

Tammy

Since there's only one of me, not much got done on it yesterday. But since I am now decreasing 14 stitches every other round, it's getting smaller fast and will be done soon.

Eyes

Today is the day I have an appointment with an Eye Man. (He is named Pofessor Dillon, but spells it with an "h" -- which looks to me like an affectation.) What one gets when one Goes Private, apart from unusual spellings, is promptitude for elective surgery, or so I have always understood. I will be very disappointed if I come back today without a fixed date for my eye replacement, and that in the near future.

Princess Shawl

I'm doing the 9th edging repeat. When I've done 10, I'll photograph it again, and also do some serious calculations concerning size. I would judge from the picture that the shape is essentially a right-angled triangle. I have the data to calculate the eventual length of the equal sides a) if I knit the shawl as written and b), the currently favoured option, if I reduce it in order the achieve the original size with the thicker yarn I am using. And from there I can work out the length of the third size, putting Archimedes to practical use for, I think, the first time in my life. I have forgotton how to calculate square roots -- it involves a certain amount of hit-and-miss, I seem to remember, like long division. But I see that the calculator provided with this computer has a sqrt button.

I am making some mistakes. I think my main difficulty is not being able to anticipate which side of a decrease the YO is going to appear on. I will have plenty of time to give this matter serious thought, if I persevere. Much less peering at the chart will be necessary once I can get my mind around it.

Tammy

I've started the crown decreases. Not far to go now. I think the single most useful thing anyone has ever told me about knitting, came from Margaret Stove herself: namely, the first stitch a needle enters for any decrease, will be the stitch that winds up on top. I don't think I've ever seen that in print. Knowing it, has saved me hours scrabbling through the books reminding myself which decrease I want for a particular effect. For the tammy, we're using what Starmore calls a "vertical double decrease" -- thus making slightly heavy weather of the fact that the centre stitch of three winds up on top.

 

Clematis montana 

Broad beans 

I'll mark time with more gardening pictures today.

We've had many an unsuccessful struggle with clematis, but I think we've finally got a montana going on the front of the house. It's been in a year; these are its first flowers. It's growing with enthusiasm -- the last thing my husband said as we got into the car on Tuesday, was that it had reached the gutters. We'll have to attend to it first thing, when we get back.

And here, too, is a picture of some broad beans which actually came up. A second sowing, two days later, same seed packet, but in a sluggier part of the vegetable patch, achieved about 20% germination.

Tam o'Shanter

I read the poem. Sure enough, he's wearing his "gude blue bonnet" -- but there's nothing to explain why he should have given his name to it, up there with the Duke of Wellington and Lord Cardigan.

My own tammy progresses. I've started to decrease, and may even be able to finish it off over the weekend. What a relief that would be.

Princess Shawl

If I knew for sure what the word "Zen-like" means, I might say that this is a Zenlike experience. There is no realistic prospect of finishing in any sort of imaginable future -- of finishing the edging, even, let alone the shawl. The whole pleasure resides in the process, like life itself.

And I am enjoying it. I'm somewhere in the 8th repeat at the moment, more and more resolved to go on with the present yarn. Someone on the Heirloom Knitting list said yesterday that she can't make headway with the #70 crochet cotton prescribed, which rather strengthens my preference.

Rachel's striped Koigu -- latest 

 

Jen -- wonderful to hear from you. Please email me directly, jean@jeanmile.demon.co.uk so that I can reply. I need an "Email Me" button on this Blog.

That's Rachel's Koigu sweater above, my country knitting, with the start of the first sleeve. When I finally finish, I'll post the pattern on my website. The toddler version is already there --- www.jeanmile.demon.co.uk. I printed it out and am using it to design Rachel's version, changing the numbers as I go. The next project here is going to be another toddler-sized one, for Thomas-the-Younger's first birthday in November. I have found some improvements I want to make in the smaller version of the pattern -- it's not wrong, but there are bits which could be more clearly expressed.

Tammys

I'll try to stick to that spelling, the one Starmore uses in the pattern I'm knitting. I pressed ahead grimly last night, for fear I would come to hate the project so that it would stay unfinished. I've got to have something to enter at the Games.

Panela's question a couple of days ago, set me wondering. Why is a tam or tammy so called? The Oxford Dictionary says -- as I had always believed -- that it is named after Tam o'Shanter, the eponymous hero of Burns' poem. So I guess my job for today is to read the poem, to see whether there is any reference to Tam's headgear.

The classic work on the subject is Mary Rowe's book "Knitted Tams". It's a good, comprehensive work, although perhaps a bit thin, since there isn't really a book's worth of things to say about tams. The shape is more or less that of old Scottish bonnets -- as in "...follow the bonnets of Bonny Dundee", a stirring song. Rowe says that Fair Isle tams came in in the 1930's, which would seem likely.

The fun of them lies in those crown decreases (which I haven't reached on mine) when the pattern behaves like a kaleidoscope.

Princess Shawl

To say that I am "inching" forward with the edging of the Princess, would be to give a far more sprightly impression of my progress than I deserve. Moving forward, however, I am. Sharon says on the Heirloom Knitting mailing list that she now has a gossamer wool yarn, finer than the finer-than-cobweb merino which she sells and which I'm using (and which is too big for the pattern, if you remember).

She sent me a skein of something with my order, to try swatching -- that is presumably the new yarn. Also, the very morning last week when we left for the country, the cotton yarn which she herself used for the prototype shawl arrived in the mail. I haven't yet tried either. I continue to like the look of what I'm knitting with the heavier yarn -- ha! heavier! And the fact that, if I persevere, I will have to reduce the pattern, gives me some hope of finishing in my lifetime.

Some designers farm out their designs for others to knit up. Sharon is surely the only woman in the kingdom who could have knit the prototype -- let alone design it.