I needn’t have worried. C. was very much her old self yesterday, although very weak and pretty uncomfortable. Not in great pain – they’ve taken away her morphine drip. It seemed astonishing, at nearly 80, three days after major surgery. She was still not being given anything to eat, but appetite is returning -- without the feeling of nausea which has been the leading cancer symptom since August.

She likes keeping the cards close to her chest – “there’s lots you don’t know” is one of her favourite lines to me. She soon won’t want her daughter to keep us as well informed as we have been these last few days. I hope we can at least get the report on the daughter’s conversation with the surgeon, when she finally tracks him to his lair.

(Fuzzarelly, I did notice that New Yorker article about cancer. I’ll read it thoroughly when we’re next in Strathardle. That’s where we read the New Yorker, and I often enjoy articles I wouldn’t have bothered with here in real life.)

Meanwhile the daughter’s daughter, “little C.”, her grandmother’s namesake, arrived yesterday for a surprise visit. She is in her final year at Bristol University and has been so distraught all week that her tutor suggested she go home for the weekend. It will be reassuring for Little C. to find her grandmother so well, and a very pleasant surprise for C. herself, but most importantly, a great treat for our niece who has bourn a fearful weight this week more or less alone.

Knitting

Thank you, firstly, Dawn and Susan and Joan, for saying that I have got to re-do the braids on that ear-flap hat. That’s what friends are for. Joan’s idea of using i-cord is interesting. How to finish it, in that case? Small pompoms?

I will do it, but not right now. I am rushing ahead with the scarf to find out what length I get from the first ball. Do I need more yarn? I bought five balls. I’m now at about 11” and the ball is looking bedraggled. I would like 18”, to guarantee a 7-foot scarf. The pattern is 26 rows, and in order to balance the ends, you can’t stop just anywhere. That may involve a bit of waste yarn.

(I know what you mean about scarves not growing, Susan. It’s often more cheering to observe how much yarn you’re using.)

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed, in yesterday’s picture, that all was not well. There is a six-stitch panel at each edge of the scarf which is not affected by the McGuffin. I had succeeded in twisting each of them through 180 degrees. It wasn’t a question of galloping horses – that’s what we call in computing a Fatal Error, and I have re-done it.


I had a terrible time last night with the second McGuffin. Twice I thought I had done it, and knit on, only to see that it was a total mess. I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture for you. It was pretty easy, this morning, and will probably get easier.

I am delighted with my decision to use Cocoon instead of Big Wool.

The Wurm: I found myself worrying about that hem at the beginning. Apart from the slight awkwardness of a provisional cast-on, it means that fit is crucial. Then I had one of those rare moments of enlightenment: why not side-step the problem entirely and start with a perfectly conventional inch or two of ribbing? I think I’ll try that.

No more news. We may never learn how much of the damned thing the surgeon thinks he got, nor does a layman’s answer to that question necessarily affect the outcome all that much anyway. We are going to visit today. I am apprehensive. On the plus side, our niece’s voice sounded stronger on the phone last night. C. has a morphine drip for the pain, with a button so that she can self-administer it. My doctor-sister points out that she wouldn’t have that if her carers didn’t think she was competent to manage it.

Our previous visit was four days ago. It is not only in politics that a week is a long time.

Thank you for all the comments. Do, everybody, read Barbara’s of yesterday. It’s an extraordinary story – and she’s got the answer, as far as yarn-buying is concerned: buy it – and knit it.

A lot of my stash – and I’m sure this is true of all of us – was acquired because something was too good to leave behind, and might not be there next time. That really isn’t necessary any more, now that the Internet has brought the world home. Even if Rhichard and Taiu and Maie shut up shop this afternoon – to take the Worst Case Scenario – Koigu would still be available on eBay for years.

So there is really not much reason, any more, not to follow Barbara’s sensible advice. That is how I mean to go on – concentrating on stash, but occasionally buying when I want to knit with what I buy, right away.

And yesterday was one of those occasions.

I reflected as I strode up Broughton Street that that scarf (see yesterday) didn’t have to be knit with Big Wool. Sure enough, when I got to John Lewis, it turned out that to buy the amount for the long version of the scarf as specified in the Rowan magazine was so expensive that I might as well just give him a yacht. And I’m not sure I’d enjoy knitting with 10mm needles anyway. I bought five balls of Cocoon, instead.

(The yarn-buying counter is right next to Toys. While actually in the queue, I spotted and siezed a Christmas present for Fergus Drake of Athens.)

Cocoon is turing out fine. The scarf, knit precisely as the pattern says but on needles appropriate to the yarn, measures about 8” across. That’s plenty. I’ve executed the McGuffin once, and I think I’ve got it right. Strips on the scarf, left and right, are not just cabled but actually looped around each other. I met Lindsay the Rowan Lady when I was in the shop (she’s one of us) and she said she wasn’t sure she could do it. (I’m sure she could.) She also said that Cocoon sheds a bit, and to warn the recipient.

I used it for a scarf for Thomas-the Elder last Christmas. I love knitting with it. It doesn’t seem to shed for me.

I finished the Japanese hat, except for application of the steam iron. I’m pleased with it, but the braids look spindly. I should have doubled the yarn.


And I haven’t forgotten the Wurm. It begins with a hem. I know I will fail if I try that simple-sounding manoeuvre of knitting a stitch from the needle together with the equivalent stitch from the cast-on edge. Sounds easy. Comes out squint, for me. Either a provisional cast-on, or of course, hem it afterwards. I’ll try in a couple of days, and then alternate scarf and hat.

Yesterday can fairly be called, more than most, the first day of the rest of our lives.

C. is conscious and responsive, and the surgeons are pleased with their work. Our niece hasn’t been able yet to talk to the surgeon who did the operation, so information is a bit vague and generalised. C. has had an iliostomy, a new word to me, but one of the advantages of a classical education turns out to be the way it helps one with the ambushes of medical vocabulary in old age.

Rachel’s father-in-law, not all that long ago, died without recovering consciousness after his cancer operation, and the same thing happened, two generations ago, to my maternal grandmother. Both patients lingered for some weeks in a comatose state. So that’s what I was afraid of, until the telephone call yesterday morning. And we’re successfully over that hurdle.

Our niece, who has had a very tough week, sounded low and tired last night. She had just got home from the hospital. Her mother had seemed fragile and slightly confused. No wonder, after such an ordeal. The plan is that my husband and I will visit tomorrow. Alexander will come over soon.

I got the shawl pinned out, and am rather pleased with it, assuming those scallops stay flat when the pins come out. I see I haven't got that central double-scallop pinned quite straight.



I also finished the knitting of the Japanese hat last night -- again. I think the length I have added has solved the size problem. There’s still the tidying up to do, and the pom-pom, and the braids, and a cautious attack with the steam iron to persuade the earflaps to stop flapping upwards.

I am glad to see earflap hats in the streets again, now that the weather is getting into its stride. Perhaps, of course, the people I see are not the glass of fashion and the mould of form but just prudent souls who have thrust last-year’s protection onto their chilly heads.

All this distress and anxiety has left me feeling (as often, I think, in a crisis) that there is not much point in walking around Drummond Place gardens and refraining from yarn-buying and cider-drinking when death bides on us momentlie. Illogical. But anyway, it is November, and I have been very good for a whole year, and I am much inclined to think I might buy the yarn today for Martin Storey’s “Traveller scarf” in the current Rowan book.


It would fit into my Christmas plans. It would be expensive.

Surgery lasted a long time yesterday, through the afternoon and into the early evening. When I last spoke to my niece, C. was out of theatre and in Recovery at last. Her daughter was about to go to the hospital and try to see her. I am waiting this morning to hear that she is conscious and responding – all we can ask for, for today.

She has been suffering from a totally unrelated series of lung infections for the past two years – finally stabilised with steroids; that has weakened her. And the NHS has been rather slow to pick up on the current symptoms, which has weakened her a lot more.

I’m sure Maggie’s Centre will take a prominent position in the story soon, Fishwife. I’ve even heard of it. Up to now, we haven’t had a moment to think of such things. She was finally – after weeks and weeks and weeks of trying to tell doctors that something was wrong – taken by ambulance to the Western last Thursday. Then after some rehydration they got cracking, at last, with scans and cameras inserted into every available orifice. And here we are.

We all know to treasure the time that’s left; that’s good. And it is better, if she can live with the Knowledge, to die like this, loved and wept for, than to outlive herself and wither away in a care home on the capital she had hoped to leave her daughters.

Everything has changed. One of the three or four times in life. One thinks for a few moments about what-are-we-having-for-lunch or what-would-Thomas-the-Elder-like-for-Christmas, but there is ever the Fact, right there, waiting like a tiger.

Ok, knitting. I finished the Amedro shawl.

I love blocking lace. I hope to have a picture of it in all its glory for you tomorrow. Then on to the Japanese hat – I don’t love braiding and pom-pom-making, but it won’t take long and then I’ll be free to start the Wurm (Ravelry link). I’ve just downloaded the pattern.

9/11, British-style

Non-knit

My sister-in-law does have cancer. Ovary and bowel. She will have surgery today.

She is a depressive character, sharp-tongued, defensive. She has had a lot to suffer in life, including a rotter for a husband. I don’t think, in the 52 years I have known her, I have ever seen her in such high spirits as yesterday. My husband was worried at how much weight she had lost. I was expecting that, and had feared much worse. She looked well. She likes the hospital, its cleanliness, the doctors, the banter, the food.

She told us that the news was “not good”, and declined to discuss it further until she had had a chance to talk to her daughter, who works a particularly long day on Monday. There were clues, including the fact that something was going to happen today, but no specifics. Her daughter came to see us in the evening, after she left the hospital, where she had been able to talk to a doctor as well as to her mother. A very much appreciated visit, rather than telling us by telephone.

This is an ordeal I had long hoped my husband would be spared. He loves his sister unconditionally. Her love for him is tempered by being younger and made to feel in childhood that he was bigger and cleverer and preferred.

We are five – in descending order of age, my husband, his sister, myself, my sister, and – so young as nearly not to count – her husband. My sister and I have some first cousins, but they are substantially younger and I don’t know them very well anyway. Obviously, one of the horrors of old age is going to be mourning each other and it would be a lot to ask of providence to take us in order. But that’s what one sort of expected.

One has to hope that C. will accept chemotherapy. Some people get a substantial remission.

So, not much knitting. I’m half-way across the long cast-off. I put it aside and knit Matt’s socks for a while last night. Nothing like socks.

Wonderful, grannypurple and Donice, to find the same family relationship to the New Yorker as our own. I struggled mightily with the subscriptions yesterday and in the end, I think, succeeded. The website seemed to offer subscriptions including Gift and International, but no renewals. I tracked it down to Conde Nast in the end.

Last year I didn’t get the annual letter inviting me to renew my gift subscriptions – I think it got swallowed up in some semi-post-office-strike. So I did it on-line, as again yesterday. Apart from not wanting to waste any issues, renewal is essential for James and Alexander who have addresses which are too long for the New Yorker computer. They have to be adroitly shoehorned in. I tried at one point yesterday to enter a new subscription for James, using exactly the wording of his current address label. The computer wouldn’t accept it.

James wants to read the New Yorker on his iPad and is cross (along with a lot of other people) that you have to pay twice, to do that.

We pass our copies on to our admirable neighbours downstairs. Pete is an advocate. He told me recently that the library of the Faculty of Advocates now subscribes to the New Yorker, on his suggestion. I glow with pride. I have made my little mark on Edinburgh life.

Today’s event is a visit to my husband’s sister in the Western Infirmary. She has been suffering from nausea for a couple of months now – we haven’t actually seen her since the Games -- and drs have been slow to do anything about it. She had an out-patient appt three weeks ago at which she was told, in so many words, that she didn’t have cancer, and was then just sent home to get on with the symptoms with a vague promise of further investigations some weeks hence.

By last week she had become so weak and uncomfortable that further delay was impossible.

She and my husband have always been highly important to each other. There are no other sib. Their father died young, their mother in middle age. There are no first cousins. C. is younger than my husband (although not quite as young as I am).

And as for knitting, I have finished the penultimate row of the Amedro shawl. Thank you for your help with lighting, which I shall save, and your admirable suggestion, Anonymous, of “combined” knitting to distinguish knit stitches from purl in a situation like this. I think I’ve got it right – and of course, if I can’t tell, no one else is likely to be able to. I’ve put in several stitch markers as a form of life-line. We’re all right up to here, if the section ends k1.

I don’t see why these final 10 rows couldn’t have been done in garter stitch. Would it have pulled in?

Kristie, you’re young. I started on lace with a basic hap shawl in Shetland jumper weight for the 5th grandchild -- you haven't got that far yet. The pattern was from Madeline Weston’s “Traditional Sweater Book”. (Great book, recently reprinted, I think; the name keeps morphing.) Tremendous fun. The 6th grandchild got one, too – the pregnancies overlapped. For the 7th, whose pregnancy was particularly anxious, I pushed the boat out a bit and ventured on to an Amedro pattern in lace-weight. Leaflet from Jamieson&Smith, who don’t seem to offer it any more.

Most of the rest of the grandchildren (we’re up to 13, where we will almost certainly remain) had lace-weight shawls of my own design, some more successful than others. The best was Fergus Drake’s – the centre is meant to represent interlocking Greek crosses, for his place of birth. The border alternates the thistle and the rose, representing his mother’s and father’s nationalities.

And I’ve gone on from there. I’ve knit the Princess. (It’s time we had a bride to wear it.)

Your time will come, Kristie, I hope. It’s more fun than anything.

Back at the ranch – I resolved my problem with the Amedro shawl much more easily than I expected. I mean, I had worked out the solution in my head and didn’t expect it to work in real life, but it did.

I moss-stitched all the way back to the edge where I had picked up the wrong 18 stitches. (see yesterday) I dropped them off the needle and ripped, producing a loop of yarn. I then picked up the right 18 stitches, turned and knit back, still using the loop. The last few stitches were a bit tight, but do-able. And there we were. There’ll be a wee bit of tidying to do at the very end, but completely invisible to anyone even ambling by on the back of a cart-horse.

At the moment, about 4 7/8 rows of moss stitch remain to be done, and then the long cost-off. Tomorrow, at the latest, barring disaster.

Life

Christmas presses. When I was younger, I used to think that the secret was to keep-on-going after my husband’s birthday, which looms not this week but next. He will be 85. (I read somewhere once that that is now regarded as the beginning of Real Old Age.) In youth, I rarely did (keep on going from that date). Now, I am hard at it already and already feeling panic.

Yesterday I made the pudding. Today I mean to renew the New Yorker.

All five households have subscriptions – my husband and I, and the four children you see in the sidebar – and all, I think, in our various ways, depend on it. It was part of my growing-up. I remember (in particular) reading John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” – a whole issue, no cartoons; and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” – could this be saying what it seemed to be? Those are both the sort of burned-in memories where one remembers the setting as well.

And (when fully grown) “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and Capote’s “In Cold Blood”. I "discovered" William Trevor and Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri in the New Yorker. Alexander made me an alphabet book for my 70th birthday (some time ago, now). “N” was for “New Yorker”, and the page shows the covers nearest to my birthdays in 1933 and 2003. The two are astonishingly harmonious in colour and design.

VKB

Thank you for all the good wishes. I mean to bid high enough that failure is very unlikely. I know now that I can trust eBay not to take the whole amount unless there is a determined underbidder pushing it up. The secret, of course, is to put in one’s massive bid in the last few seconds, so that rivals don’t have time to push you up. It takes very steady nerves. That’s where Helen C.K.S. excels.

Another pre-war issue (from a different seller) is coming up tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what it fetches.

Back in Ought Six, eBay used to tell you bidders’ code names, at least while the auction was going on. I made myself a spreadsheet showing the bidding histories of VKB’s I was interested in, my few failures as well as many successes. Littlepinksparrow was my most frequent underbidder. Leesonia43 was another formidable opponent. Rosemaryknit kept trying small bids – I hope she got some in the end. How they all must have trembled when Tayside00 entered the lists!

However, eBay decided in its wisdom that revealing even that much was undesirable in some way. One still knows, of course, that rival bids have been placed, but not who placed them. Much less fun.

Amedro shawl

I made a dreadful mistake last night. It will be interesting, today, to see if it can be fudged.

The roundels are finished, and I have proceeded to moss stitch. The first thing to do was to pick up 18 stitches from the cast-on edge of the first scallop in the edging, then turn around and knit back along them and moss stitch across 431 stitches, then pick up another 18 from the cast-off edge of the final scallop.

It was while I was performing that last operation, congratulating myself that the moss stitch seemed to have come out all right – beginning and ending with a k1 – that I began to feel uneasy. I looked back, and sure enough – in picking up the initial 18, I had gone past the cast-on stitches and on up the side of the scallop.

Tinking 431 stitches is unthinkable. Untinkable. Ripping out is a possibility – there is a row of plain knitting after the roundels, where I might be able to recover the stitches without loss. For the moment, I am moss-stitching back, wondering if there is something I can do when I get back to that edge.

I think I said earlier on that I could hardly tell which side of the shawl is which, although it is knit in st st. The problem becomes acute with moss stitch. I really can’t see what I’m doing, whether the stitch I am about to knit was k’d or p’d in the previous row, and whether or not, therefore, I have regressed to k1 p1 rib.

Maybe I really do need an Ott light.

Well.

Very, very faithful readers will remember much of what follows.

When I was young, I eagerly bought the Vogue Knitting Book twice a year. It died the death in the late ‘60’s. In later life, I started trying to find old copies to bulk out my collection – the library of the Knitting and Crochet Guild once sold off half a dozen very tatty examples, I remember.

In the summer of ’06 I connected with eBay, and got seriously to work.

It is fairly easy, if you keep an eye on things and have a bottomless pocket, to acquire the ones from the 50’s and 60’s. That is undoubtedly because people like me are currently of an age to be shuffled off to care homes or to their longer rest. Whereas the attics of knitters who bought the early copies, in the 30’s and 40’s, have already been cleared. But there is still a trickle.

Publication began in the autumn of 1932 with a joint British and American edition. Its cover is pictured in the anniversary issue of the current publication, a few years back, with “25 cents” clearly visible. But it must have bombed, because there were no further American ones until late in the war. Whereas the British edition appeared without interruption.

I paid a lot for my copy of No. 1. It came, not as usual from a dealer or an attic-clearing grandchild, but a charity, Feed the Children. I like to think that someone brought it in to a shop and a volunteer worker had the wit to see that it was worth offering on eBay.

It would be interesting to know the precise relationship between the British and American editions in the later years. There is a near-total overlap of patterns and illustrations, but the letterpress of my copies is entirely British. Designs have either been re-knit (on one side of the Atlantic or the other) in a yarn locally available, or else the editors have made the substitution in the text without actually venturing on the experiment. Horrors!

Designers weren’t named, although photographers were (and there are some famous names among them). I wonder, in the 50’s, in the days before the Schoolhouse when EZ was selling to magazines, did she ever appear in the VKB?

During the war, the issues were smaller and things were obviously tough. There are instructions for unravelling old garments and re-using the yarn. But Vogue was stoutly Vogue throughout; unpleasantness was kept at bay. (Although there is a delicious example, in those days when projects had but recently been recommended for golf or après tennis or a cruise, where a sweater is said to be just the thing for wearing in the air raid shelter.) If you actually wanted to knit for someone in the armed services – as I am sure almost all knitters were doing almost all the time – you had to get the separate “Vogue Service Woollies”.

I was buying VKB's hand-over-fist in ’06 and ’07. Things slowed down as I got near the end. There was only one acquisition in ’08. Two in ’09 -- my last purchase was almost exactly a year ago, made as many were with the help of Helen C.K.S.’ steady nerves and eBay expertise.

You’ll have guessed long since where this is tending: the last one I lack has been offered for sale. Bidding closes a week on Sunday. It looks like a splendid copy.

New followers keep flowing in!

It is terribly exciting, Kristie, to learn that James is quoted in Wikipedia. Yes, he was there for Tiananmen. He was the BBC Peking correspondent at the time, pretty young and new to the job. Somewhere I have a letter from him -- these were the days before email -- wishing that something would happen in China so that he could prove himself to the BBC.

He won a Sony Radio Award for his reporting. He went to London for a week last year and made two programmes about it for the World Service on the occasion of the 20th anniversary. They put it out in a nice plastic box, but I can’t find it on the BBC website now. Must have sold out.

Jeanne, that’s an amazing clip from Lucy Neatby showing how to knit with three stands of yarn, when what you’ve got is one big cone. On a recent visit to Strathardle, I spent quite a while winding lace-weight yarn into separate balls – that stuff goes in for serious yardage; it took a while. So I am ready to roll, without the Neatby trick, but it is one I will remember.

I don’t think knitting with two or three stands together, from separate balls, is all that difficult. I’m not so sure about a number higher than that. This might be an occasion for facing up to some of the tricks in “Knitting Brioche”.

Jennifer, thanks for your encouraging remarks on the subject of knitting multiple strands of lace yarn. I like the Wurm Hat (Ravelry link) you mention – it might be a wiser choice than the EZ Snail, when I move on to hats. EZ is rather fierce, as she can occasionally be, about not attempting yarn substitutions for that pattern. I’ll download the Wurm – it may inspire me to do something about replacing my printer. I notice you used four strands – maybe I’d better do some more winding.

Meanwhile, Amedro moves forward. I finished the second row of roundels yesterday. I have no memory, as I’ve said, of the difficulties of picking up stitches for this final sprint, but I am beginning to think I do remember feeling a surprise which is stealing over me again, at how wide the upper edging is. There will be another 10 rows of moss stitch when the roundels are finished.

Still, the end is in sight.

Judith, thanks very much for the info on dehydrators. Where can I read the not-so-good reviews of the Lakeland one? I love the idea of rose-petal confetti

Here, in a nutshell, is the lace knitter’s difficulty when it comes to stash busting:


You’ve seen that box before. It’s the Chinese cashmere – more correctly, I think, “cashmere” – James and Cathy gave me for Christmas, ’08. It is now clear that the Amedro shawl is going to use just about exactly one 100 gr ball. Maybe a few yards left over, maybe a few taken from the next ball. I cast on that shawl on the 2nd of September. I’ve got about a week to go. At 2 ½ months per 100 grams, you’re looking at 10 months knitting in the photograph above.

Hopeless, at my age, given the amount of Koigu and sock yarn and Shetland jumper-weight I’ve also got to get through...

I haven’t given up on the idea of knitting three or four strands of lace-weight yarn together. It’s just that the first experiment was unsuccessful colour-wise. I have a big fisherman’s-knit scarf vaguely in mind.

(The weight of the Chinese yarn is not uninteresting. Amedro specifies “7 hanks” of J&S cobweb. 20 grams? 25 grams? In either case, the Chinese yarn is appreciably lighter. Eyeballing it, the shawl appears to be roughly the same size as the earlier exemplars. It’s delicious to handle, no knots, reliably strong. It has even survived a couple of those episodes where I start across the room and find it is wound around one of my shoes. I’ll measure it precisely when blocked, to compare with Amedro’s measurements.)

The knitting continues well. In fact, I’m enjoying this upper edge enormously. No more picking-up-stitches, no more peering at charts, no more counting. Just easy-peasy lace knitting. The first (of three) row of roundels is finished, the second set. Photography is difficult, because 14 stitches at each end were left behind on safety pins after the initial pick-up from the straight edge of the scalloped border. They are now being incorporated into the text a stitch at a time – but it means that the residue are hanging about at the end of each row. I can’t stretch and smooth the thing out to be photographed until this process is done.

Comments & non-knit

Bless you for the sudden influx of followers.

Expense is rather a limiting factor, but I'd love to get Alexander a dehydrator like yours, Kristie. He makes fruit leathers. He has built himself a smoker. It would fit right in.

I can’t think of anything of the slightest interest to say about the American elections. I’m glad Harry Reid held Nevada. These are strange times.

La Fete des Morts

The 50th follower! O, frabjous day! Welcome aboard.

And today’s offering from my Google Reader consisted of Franklin & Jared. What a way to start the day! Neither needs feeds from me, especially Franklin – but be sure not to miss his dialogue between Einstein and the Queen about Christmas knitting.

And Jared reports that his new yarn, Shelter, is doing well – great news. I am interested in the emphasis he puts on American yarn. I would have expected America to be rich in her own yarn. Surely – apart from anything else – there must be parts of the US where merino sheep will thrive? The damp is too much for their chests, here in Britain.

One thing to be said for Christmas, I reflected yesterday, is that it speeds one forward through the darkest and grimmest weeks of the year. It must be terrible in the Antipodes, when in effect the Christmas panic consumes May and June. I bought the ingredients for my Christmas pudding yesterday, which is not quite the same thing as getting it made.

I finally got those stitches picked up for the top of the Amedro shawl, and am now speeding forward, knitting again. I must do three rows of roundels, that’s 24 rows of knitting, over 431 stitches. Then some moss stitch, then we’re home. I am pleased to report that after considerable fiddle with the stitch count, the row in which the roundels were established came out perfectly, to the stitch.

I am surprised that I have no memory of this difficulty from my three previous efforts. I think if I ever do a fifth, I might just pick up the chain of stitches from the edges and increase the count on the first row.

Angel, I couldn’t agree more about sock-knitting and airplanes. I have been transformed from the most nervous of flyers, dry of mouth and sweaty of palm for days beforehand, into an intrepid birdwoman. It began in ’96 – so recently? – when we went to the US for my mother’s 90th birthday. I had just discovered the Internet and Patternworks and Socka Colors and set out with socks to knit, which I hadn’t done for years.

I found last year when I went to Theo’s wedding, that socks have done their work and I can now fly in the discomfort we all share, but without panic. I had socks along, of course, but got very little done on them. I remember once towards the end of my mother's life, getting a whole pair of gents' socks done during one of my visits -- and it couldn't have lasted much longer than last summer's sojourn.

I gave them to my brother-in-law on the spot.

Remarkably little to report.

The Amedro shawl has nice chained edges, like many a thing from which stitches will later be picked up. Knit the last st of every row, slip the first one purl-wise. I plunged into the picking-up without a moment’s thought, knitting up the links of the chain. But soon grasped that since there are 188 rows or so in the centre of the shawl, there are only going to be 94 links in the chain. That is not enough to produce 177 sts.

After a certain amount of ripping out and starting again, I think I’m on the right track. I put it down altogether last night to watch the first episode of the new series of “Getting On”. It’s funny. I hope for better news today, knitting-wise.

Comments

Marilyn, I do like your idea of turning Franklin’s design into a clutch bag – or not, if one adds a handle. I am totally incapable of setting in a zipper neatly, but could always give it one more try. Or add an extra flap, and close with a snap?

I am glad to find I am not alone in my enthusiasm for Bill Gates. I like the fact that his vast wealth is founded on his own wits – as I understand it, he and his pal wrote MS-DOS and licensed rather than sold it to IBM for the first IBM PC. Followed immediately by a great wave of other PC’s, all running MS-DOS.

If I had that sort of money, I might spend it at Herculaneum to speed up the excavation of Piso’s villa. Herculaneum was buried in lava rather than ash as at Pompeii; that makes the going harder. Piso was Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. There are grounds for hope that his library might contain substantial amounts of lost Latin literature. The Dark Ages were darker in western Europe than in the east, and much more of ancient Latin has been lost than ancient Greek.

The Renaissance was correspondingly more wonderful in the west.

But Gates’ own choices for spending his money are doing a good deal more for humanity.

Shandy, I am grateful to you for re-connecting me to Jared. I had lost touch when he migrated to the new site. The new yarn looks wonderful. I am now going back to the bookshelves to re-acquaint myself with the difference between woollen and worsted. The colours are terrific, too. My sister is coming in the spring. I haven’t used her to carry yarn for a long time…

Barbara, your experience with the Interweave Holiday issue this year was exactly mine last year. I was in my wonderful LYS – K1 Yarns, too little visited these days – buying, as I remember, a Christmas present for a granddaughter. There was the magazine, I’d heard of it, I picked it up, and like you, only discovered at the till what I’d let myself in for, price-wise. And I didn’t feel, subsequently, that it had added anything of use to my own mental pile of presents-that-might-be-knit-if-I-had-more-time.

In odd moments yesterday, striding about between shops on Broughton Street, for instance, I tried to think of something other than a paperback book that Franklin’s lovely cover could be used to cover. Without success. It looks too big for a mobile phone.

As hoped, I finished the main patterning of the Amedro shawl yesterday, and started picking up stitches for the top edging. The plan had been to take Sunday for the Japanese hat, but I can’t stop at a moment as exciting as this. The picking-up is particularly easy – a feature I had forgotten – because you just steam along picking up everything in sight, and then reduce to 177 sts-per-wing on the next row.

Much easier than trying to hit a precise target while picking-up, a process I always find stressful. Easier, at least, if one winds up with more than 177 stitches. We shall soon see.

The other major issue in life, my printer problem, would be too boring to write about were it not that knitting is peripherally involved.

You remember that jabot I knit for James? And how, to be properly turned out in highland dress, he needs a Montrose jacket to wear it with? We went to Kinloch Anderson in the summer, hoping to get him measured for one, but it turned out that you can’t be measured for a Montrose jacket without your kilt.

They gave him a form to take back to Beijing so that a Chinese tailor could measure him. He has only just now had it done – too late, surely, for St Andrew’s Night this year. I need to print it out and take it to K.A. He can go in for a fitting when he is here for Christmas.

You also remember that I recently broke a vital Little Plastic Piece off my printer. I have tried superglue. It didn’t work. Yesterday we had a nice long email from Rachel about this and that. I knew my husband would want to read it, so I tried tying the printer together – and it worked!

But this morning it won’t print James’s measurements. (It looks very loose in that picture. I've tightened it.)

There are work-arounds. I can send the measurements to our neighbours downstairs for printing, for instance. But it’s sort of depressing.

Non-knit

An often-amusing feature of the Saturday Financial Times is their “Lunch with the FT”. A wide range of people (we’ve had both Michael Caine and Larry Gagosian recently) are invited for lunch and a chat. The guest chooses the venue for lunch, the FT pays.

Yesterday it was Bill Gates. The choice was a pleasant but modest-sounding spot across the street from his office. At the end:

“I drink up my coffee and ask for the bill. As I produce my credit card, Gates looks slightly amused. ‘You’re sure you want to pay for this?’ he says. ‘I’ve got money.’”

We had a nice walk. The weather wasn’t what you’d call good, but far less abominable than predicted and we were both glad that we had forged stoutly ahead with our plans. We walked for a couple of hours near an Edinburgh city reservoir in the Pentland hills. Now I know where the Pentlands are.

In the evening Amedro finally leapt ahead – I should finish the main patterning this evening. Next comes the top edging, and I may well find that picking up stitches from that dark yarn is a task requiring natural light, and leave it for tomorrow. We shall see.

Knitting, miscellaneous

Someone wrote to me the other day about the “cul-de-sac” pattern. She had lost the last page, she said, and needed to know how many stitches to pick up for the edging. Could I help? I didn’t think I had ever heard of the pattern, let alone knit it, but I Google’d in case senility was affecting the memory.

It’s a Lavold pattern, a seriously nice one. It was published in Knitter’s, so I must in fact have seen it before and could even have tried to dig it out from the pile and help the poor woman. I sent her off instead to another blogger who had actually knit it. The last thing I need is another addition to the HALFPINT list, but it’s one to remember.

Franklin has had some patterns published, throwing his groupies into a tizzy. One is a book cover – beautiful, yes, but useful? – in Interweave Knits Holiday Gifts 2010. I bought last year’s issue for a lot of money, and regretted it. The other is a lace stole, based on Jackie Kennedy’s wedding veil, in a book called “Modern Knits, Vintage Style”. His first pattern in a printed book. He is deservedly proud of it. It’s knit in Lorna’s Laces Helen’s Lace, too, one of my faves, well represented in stash.

But absolutely the sort of book I don’t buy.

I’m going for a walk today – a real one, without my MP3 player. My husband’s niece and I did this once before. (She is an infant teacher, currently working half-time, lives in Morningside.) One of Edinburgh’s many merits is how near the real country is, just outside. It is often possible to stand on a street-corner and see out, to the hills beyond. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a little book about Edinburgh – he mentions that feature, and it’s still true.

So that should make a pleasant day, except that the weather forecast is atrocious. I keep twitching the curtain: still dark, no rain so far.

Thanks for your help on American health. There was a good New Yorker article back when Hillary was trying to reform it, about how she hadn’t taken the insurance industry sufficiently into account. I’m sure, by now, insurance is part of the problem as well as part of the solution. American friends seem to talk of little else.

Another thing that surprised me in Annie’s article was the fact that Gerry is covered by Medicare. He has multiple myeloma, and was covered for the first couple of years by insurance he had through his employment. But I thought Medicare was only for the over-65’s. I tried Googling, and it immediately became obvious I could be there all day. If Annie says he has Medicare, I’m sure he does.

One good thing, I gather: elderly Americans can travel. If my husband and I were up to it, which we aren’t, it would be difficult and by now very expensive to buy insurance for a trip. Whereas Medicare, apparently, covers you from Patagonia to Peking.

Linda, Annie was teaching knitting in Italy. Her account made it sound like pure holiday, but she always writes like that. I seethe anew at the thought of her not getting paid – fees or travel expenses – for Stirling in August. Maybe things have got better? But she shouldn’t even have had to wait and worry.

Knitting

Another good Amedro session.

I went on thinking about Christmas. Thinking about quick hats (see yesterday) took me to the Knitter’s Almanac. I grew interested in December’s “Wishbone sweater”. Perhaps for a small person? And very interested in EZ’s remark that it is not to be attempted with fine yarn – it won’t work. She is emphatic, and repeats the advice. But she doesn’t know why.

The pattern is written for Sheepsdown again, 2 ½ sts to the inch. I did a bit of Googling, and found several examples in worsted, nothing finer. It’s been a long time – I wondered if Meg might not have tackled the problem, just as she solved brioche-in-the-round. But a search of the Schoolhouse site for “wishbone” produces nothing.

The problem is intriguing. But then I remembered that anyway, I’ve got some worsted. I bought it at Camp Stitches in ’99 with a sock-slipper pattern. It should be ripe by now.

But first I must finish Amedro, and Matt’s socks, and the Japanese hat. Then we can think about these fripperies.

Christmas

Mel, “cool” tee-shirts is/are a brilliant idea, which I shall make use of. Especially as it can be employed for those most difficult members of my list, young teen-aged boys whose interests and expertise lie entirely in the field of computer gaming.

And, Angel, my husband has those very slippers, and is equally devoted to them. Alexander and Ketki wanted to give him slippers one Christmas, and I said – how did I know? – order those, from LLBean. It was obvious that they wouldn’t come in time; Alexander and Ketki would have given up and gone for British slippers. I said no, persevere. So on Christmas day all my husband had was the description cut out from the Bean catalogue but later he got the slippers.

Christmas has always been a big thing in my husband’s family. It’s hard work, but it’s the price that has to be paid for returning light and the coming of spring. One of my few efficiencies in life is to keep a spreadsheet of what I give whom. Most of the columns are now suppressed, to make room on the screen for the last three years. And some of the rows are hidden, too, as people drop off the perch. I’ve started the 2010 column. Just contemplating it helps.

Yesterday I remembered EZ’s hats in Knitting Without Tears: they are practically instantaneous, and there are some people on the list who haven’t had too much knitting lately. I’ve got a brioche watchcap of my own, and am fond of it. One has to fiddle with stitch numbers, if one’s stash contains nothing as huge as Sheepsdown. I knit the snail hat once and the result was about big enough to fit a snail.

Amedro shawl

Here is a progress report:


The odd thing is how I don’t seem to accomplish any more rows-per-evening, now that individual rows are so short. Never mind; I am progressing nicely. Now there is only one column of patterning left in the wings, and I am half-way through the penultimate repeat of it. The centre pattern remains demanding, but I’ve got hold of it.

Non-knit

I do not at all understand poor Annie's struggles with health insurance (just as I have never understood much about American health). I thought Obama's much-maligned reform meant that everybody had to buy insurance, and that insurance companies couldn't turn you down for pre-existing conditions. Clearly not so, on either count.

One rained-all-day, three brilliant-sunshine-and-hard-frost. We had a good time, ate a dish of autumn raspberries, some sorrel soup and also an artichoke soup. That was the first harvest from the Jerusalem artichoke tubers the Fishwife gave me on Groundhog Day. It’s a bit early to lift them, but I was curious. Mine are pretty small (so far), compared to the parent tubers, but the soup was delicious.

We also had some perpetual spinach – tough and chewy. My husband wouldn’t eat it. I found it rather tasty, worth the effort. And a first picking of kale – again, too early to start taking it, really, but I thought, if the deer are going to come and get it, I might as well get in first. It was very good.

Not exactly living off the land, but fun.

I got some beds cleaned, manured and covered, including one where artichokes (real ones) are to go.

And I tackled the Japanese hat. It was rather odd, descending from the pure Olympian realms of pattern-decipherment into the heat and dust of needles and yarn. With no edging at all, the bottom edge of the hat curled atrociously and perhaps partly for that reason, but mostly because I had been cavalier about gauge, I didn’t notice until I had finished the top that the hat was seriously too small.

That stopped me in my tracks for a bit. Add some length? Regard the whole thing as a swatch and start again with some Rowan DK? (Two, at least, of the five exemplars on Ravelry were knit with that yarn, and, hey! it’s nearly November.) Eventually I calmed down and chose the first option. I’m adding length, although I fear it will spoil the neatness of the pattern. I’ll need to take a day off Amedro soon to finish it again, and to add a pompom and braids. And block – those earflaps keep trying to flip upwards – aiming for a bit of width.

In my musings about Japanese knitting, before we went away, I found this blog. She's Japanese, her English is fluent, she lives in London, she designs knitwear, she keeps cats. As they say, what's not to like? Maybe I Knit could hire her for a day-class in interpreting Japanese patterns.

Meanwhile Amedro progresses. I have turned the last page of the pattern. There are currently three motif-columns in each wing, and I am about to start nibbling at the outer ones. Pic soon.

I have done a bit of Christmas-browsing (Science Museum, IWOOT) and have retreated, depressed. There seems to be little anyone could conceivably want, and it costs £35. It makes me wonder whether I should try to knit somebody something after all, when Amedro is finished. Christmas knitting is against all my principles, but the situation looks desperate.

Just after I launched yesterday’s post into the ether, I was visited by a Moment of Illumination.

That four-row chart for the edging of my Japanese hat is there to show precisely how the edging goes around the ear-flap. On the third of the four rows, there are decreases at the inner corners – where the flap grows out of the hat – and increases at the outer edge. Obviously, since you’re working in the round, you’re going to encounter one flap from the back and the other one from the front. There is a little code at the top of the chart (it had been puzzling me a lot) with arrows pointing right and left – and with the Japanese characters for “right” and “left”, it turns out – to reassure you that you treat both earflaps the same no matter which direction you’re going. Decrease, increase, increase, decrease.

That’s pretty well it, then. A great many Japanese characters remain un-interpreted, even when you allow for the fact that some of them must say “hat” and “earflap”. And I’m still slightly puzzled by that chain around the earflap, and quite possibly around the entire lower edge of the hat.

I’ve ordered the “Hand Knitting Techniques Book” from Needle Arts, a companion work, apparently, to the stellar “Clear and Simple Knitting Symbols” which I’ve already got. I am hoping that the chain will appear there.

Maybe this pattern doesn't use a provisional cast-on at all? Maybe the chain around the bottom of the hat is just the cast-on edge, with a crochet chain added to the earflaps to facilitate a smooth pick-up all round?

Never have I had such fun with a pattern before casting on a stitch. We’re going to Strathardle today – back by Tuesday or so – and since the whole Strathardle-project thing is up in the air, I think I’m going to try the hat. I’ll take Matt’s socks along to fall back on in case things go wrong.

The pattern seems to use something like DK yarn, a quality in which my stash is sadly lacking. (I’ve got tons of lace-weight, Shetland jumper-weight, and Koigu-and-sock weight, fingering I think you’d call it.) I’ve decided to try using the left-overs from last winter’s Grandson Sweater.

This has been such an exciting intellectual adventure that I wish there was a Japanese sweater pattern which transported me with delight, so that I could throw myself into its interpretation. There are lots I admire, but nothing that makes me want to knit it Right This Moment.

See you next week.

I am not doing very well, these days, at thinking of the obvious.

It should have occurred to me that Lord Peter started from inside the church. As I struggled with my Japanese hat pattern, and grasped that the edging and the hat must involve a provisional cast-on, since they are knit in different directions, I should have thought that maybe you knit the hat first and then attached an edging.

I was struggling with the mental concept of knitting the edging first, with the ear-flaps somehow contained in it, until I read Jeanfromcornwall’s comment yesterday. The alternative hypothesis (knitting the hat first) was soon confirmed by Mary Lou’s comment and re-confirmed, later in the day, by my finding the Japanese characters for “pick up stitches”.

I thought of seeking help from Ravelry, although not immediately, but even then it didn’t occur to me for quite a while that someone else might have knit this very hat. In fact, five Ravellers have posted it. Two of them, the two best, seem to contribute only in Japanese. A third is French. I have sent a Ravelry message to one of the others, so far without result.

I think maybe I should try writing to the Japanese.

So the case must be – unless I am overlooking something else obvious – that you knit the hat and then pick up stitches and then knit the ear-flaps – might be a chance to try some knitting-back-backwards here – and then edge the whole thing. I can’t think of any other way to do it. A drawing of the ear-flap shows a kind of chain around it. I feel sure that I read somewhere yesterday that Japanese designers often do such a chain from which stitches are then picked up. If so, I can’t find it now.

That leaves the four-row chart for the edging itself. It contains many opacities. At that point I could just wing it, but I’d like to get it right.

Marsha at the Needle Arts Book Shop – can’t recommend highly enough – has prepared a free hand-out on Japanese knitting, downloadable from the website. I’ve got it and have printed it, back in the days when I had a functioning printer. It’s very basic, and very helpful.

She recommends this wonderful Japanese website. It’s got a good Japanese-English knitting dictionary. If you go there, be sure to look at the knitting haiku’s – lower left-hand corner of opening page.

And I love this bit. Incomprehension is a two-way street:

"'Knitting Pattern' is the biggest obstacle for Japanese. Usual English-Japanese translator tend to translate knitting pattern to Japanese text which we don't make sense. We try to make a descripton of it."

I very much like the idea of Jeanfromcornwall’s cast-on producing a “messy loopy edge” as an alternative to a provisional cast-on which is a bit of a nuisance.

All well with Amedro. A new landmark looms – soon there will be fewer stitches in each of the two wings than there are in the unchanging centre portion.