Slow but steady progress this week, not helped by Edinburgh having its annual heatwave, uncomfortably hot and sticky, temperatures in the unimaginable high twenties/low thirties celsius, seagulls flopping down exhausted in the shade, too fagged to peck the garbage bags open. All in all, not the kind of weather to have the equivalent of a woollen blanket on your lap, even if you’ve got the windows open and are exposing your pale, unsightly legs to the faintest hint of a breeze, not to mention the neighbours (well, they deserve some excitement, I thought) as I was. Also still troubled by this cold I can’t seem to shake off, which resulted in my sleeping through about half of the weekend (it’s just like being a student all over again).
The cold it was that made me miss the Moray Firth Partnership’s Scottish Traditional Boat Festival at Portsoy this weekend, with workshops and displays on knitting and ganseys. If anyone has any information about it, how it went, I’d be interested to hear. (According to their website they seem to have most of their funding in place for their gansey project, so that’s one to keep an eye on.)
In the meantime, on with the sleeves. I’ve almost finished the gusset, and will soon have finished the pattern band, after which it’s plain knitting all the way to the cuff. As I’ve mentioned before on these blogs, it’s a good idea to keep moving the stitches around the needles if you’re knitting in the round on double-pointed needles, so the break doesn’t always come on the same stitch. Otherwise, the danger is that you slacken the tension slightly as you move from needle to needle, and that can have the unfortunate effect of producing a line of looser stitches running down your sleeve, which looks like a pull in a pair of tights. As my pattern row comes every third row, I just slip a couple of stitches from needle to needle when I reach them to break things up a bit. Sorted.
There won’t be a blog next week, as that’s when the Big Move to Edinburgh takes place, cat and caboodle to coin a phrase, but hopefully normal service will be resumed in a fortnight. See you then!
I hope the move is successfully completed now.
Thanks for the good wishes, as always. As usual, things took a little longer to get sorted than I’d hoped, but we’re in now. Normal service will henceforth be resumed! (Or at least “gobeithio”, as I learned to say in Wales – “I hope so!”)