thumb gusset

Where did the sun go?

I enjoyed a lovely lunch hour in St James's park yesterday, watching the waterfowl get ready for the mating season. A black swan was making a very inefficient attempt to build a nest right on the edge of the lake nearest a footpath. It had a pile of sticks which it picked up and threw behind it for a bit. Then it did a quarter turn and carried on, then another quarter turn and so on. By the time it had turned right round all the sticks were pretty much back where they started. Then it swam off and a pigeon attempted to steal bits from the still untidy pile.

It made me look forward to the weekend so much because I was fired up to dig a new vegetable patch in our back garden to compensate for losing the allotment. Today is rather grey and cold again and although I have made a start I've given up for the time being (I did quite a lot of other garden jobs first, such as mowing the grass). Here's the view from the top of the house.

As you can see, our garden isn't very big. The plan is to dig out a sort of kidney shape. You can just about see the rounded end that I have marked out with the half moon tool. The pear tree on the left is just coming out. The hellebores below it have been lovely this year, but are just starting to fade. The blue seat is a favourite spot for cups of tea. It catches a lot of sun.

My own little Hatfield (and other things)

I may not have a stately home, but sometimes the garden looks OK - or at least bits of it work at different times. Here are a couple of portions that are looking good at the moment.

 

A pink hardy fuchsia, lady's mantle, a viticella clematis and a red/pink persicaria (knotweed).

I've been enjoying my daylilies on the other side of the garden. I have two different yellows and this lovely red:

 

As you can see, these photos were taken last week when we had all the sunshine!

I mentioned a few posts ago that I bought a nice niddy noddy at Woolfest. Here it is, with some rather special laceweight yarn on it that I have dyed.

 

The unusual thing about the niddy noddy is the handle. Usually you hold them on the central shaft and that's perfectly OK, but it's just a little easier to have a handle. Now for the yarn. I've found a source (strictly hush hush) of undyed Uruguayan laceweight merino which seems to me to be indistinguishable from M*******o. I'm experimenting with dyeing it at the moment.

I have nearly finished the Baktus scarf, but it has been relegated to commuter knitting. At home I'm knitting the Lily of the Valley scarf from Nancy Bush's book, using the cashmere I bought at Woolfest. I'm finding the pattern about as hard as I want to attempt. There are quite a few mistakes in my knitting (including some nupps not quite knitted through properly), but overall it's very pretty. I think there may be an error in the chart, too.

Yellow and pink

Until I had read Christopher Lloyd's thoughts on colour and visited his garden at Great Dixter - http://www.greatdixter.co.uk/ - I thought that pink and yellow "don't go". Now I think pink and yellow can look fantastic. I think if there's a touch of green in the yellow it helps. How about pink and yellow socks?

The pink is Smooshy, the yellow/green is Socks that Rock, the mixture is presently Cherry Tree Hill but shortly to be Koigu in very similar colours, and the dark green is from my Great Granny's stash. How about that for marination!  She died in the early sixties in her 97th year, so the yarn must be at least fifty years old. My Great Uncle George never wore shop-bought socks all his life and by circuitous routes I have ended up with her sockwool leftovers and even some unworn socks. (Uncle George, by the way, fought in the Battle of the Somme and died at the age of 103!)

Great Granny was quite a formidable lady by all accounts. She decided to pass on some stocks and shares to some of her children in order to save on taxes. They sold them, but had to pretend to her that they still held them. This meant that they had to scan the financial pages of the newspapers so that they would be up-to-date with the dividends - which they had to pay to her. Totally illegal of course.

I took a picture of pink roses and yellow lady's mantle in the garden, but it didn't work out, so here's a view of the back of our house - just because there's no scaffolding and I've swept up...

It's rather shady round there, and we haven't got a greenhouse, so I've had to be a bit ingenious in order to grow veg plants for the allotment.

I can move the tables and trays around to catch the sun. I've been sowing the seeds into modules, covering them with black plastic and a sheet of glass. It has worked pretty well. Here I've got two sorts of lettuce, red kale, cabbage, chives, squashes, and several sorts of beans.

I've got more socks on the needles, but this has been a long post, so I'd better save them for next time.

Fresh from the cull

Each night for about a week I've armed myself with a torch, a clothes peg and a bucket of salty water. Can you imagine why? The garden is overrun with slugs and snails and this is my patent method for keeping them at bay. They particularly like pansies, I've found, and mine were looking decidedly trimmed (and non-flowering). So I walk round with my back bent and clothes peg in hand picking the slimy gastropods off and flicking them into the salty death-water. Then the bucket hangs around for a few days and gets decidedly smelly until I empty it down the drain in the road. I know I'll never win the war, but at least my pansies are looking a bit happier.

I had a very happy afternoon knitting at Stash Yarns in Putney, meeting old friends and new. We all helped Alice choose her Lion and Lamb yarn for a Clapotis and tried not to scare off the real customers! Stash have very kindly agreed to house a collection box for the Kisiizi baby clothes appeal. You can take your finished knits there and also drop in or pick up yarns. I left some Rowan dk light that Dawn had passed on. I put in mostly blues and purples. Here are the other colours that Dawn sent:

Aren't they gorgeous? I can see some more stripes coming on!

Agnes

No, she's not a Rowan cardigan:

She's a rugosa hybrid rose, and I wish I had smellovision so that you could appreciate her beautiful scent. She has now made quite a tall, arching shrub. She shares this part-shaded bed in our back garden.

Ninety degrees to the left:

The rose is Madame Alfred Carriere and she's doing splendidly this year. In the centre, with mid-green deeply cut leaves, is Paeonia davidii that I grew from seed. Last year I took a photo on 7 May of its first flower. Now, on the 4th, the three flowers are finished - so there's a little phenomenological evidence of the early spring!

Our front garden is much sunnier and drier. Here: cistus, euphorbia, sage, Geranium renardii and a pink (Mrs Simpkins).

Here: iris (Jane Philips), nigella, lavender, and a self-sown thing that I can never remember the name of (begins with c, bees love it).

One last one, sorry. Euphorbia again, lambs lugs, a perennial wallflower and more sage (and a little cotoneaster peeping in at the top).

Essence of yellow

I haven't blogged about the garden for ages (and as for the allotment!). In the last week or so I've started tidying up and it's lovely to see it all coming back to life. Just at the moment yellow is the dominant colour, soon to change to green when the leaf buds break. Here in no particular order are some favourites this spring.

Are these the hands of a knitter?

Yes, I've been gardening - and not before time, too. Things look so much better after a tidy up!

A gloomy day with some highlights

I have elected to stay at home this week because no. 1 son is sitting his GCSE exams. The rain and enforced domesticity (cooking lunch and supper!) made the day seem rather long and I hit the sherry with some relief at six o'clock. Looking back, though, it wasn't all bad.

Earlier in the year I mentioned cutting a rose called Madame Alfred Carriere back rather hard. Well, she has withstood the onslaught:

This is usually listed as a white rose (a climber) but in cooler weather the flowers are a lovely blush pink.

I decided yesterday that the Latvonian mitten was too narrow for any human hand. I've reverted to the four repeats (again!) and even though it may be a bit wide, it looks much better. Funnily enough I'm finding it much easier to knit, too. Each needle has exactly one repeat and I hardly have to follow the chart after the first needle.

I think I must like red

About six years ago I sowed four seeds of Paeonia delavayi. Three germinated and in the second year each had a single leaf (peonies grow a root first). A year later they had made tiny plants and the following year I planted them in my garden. One didn't survive, but the other two made decent little shrubs (delavayi is a tree peony). Last summer they flowered and I was interested to see that one had much nicer flowers than the other. I decided to move the better one into prime position this spring and gave away the other one. It's going to be difficult to part with this peony when we move house...

Isn't it gorgeous?

Now that I have finished the sockapaloooza socks I can return to some unfinished business. Before I went away I started some mittens using two-colour patterns from Estonia, Latvia and Sweden (sounds swanky, doesn't it!).

The main pattern for the hand has a 24-stitch repeat and while I was away I realised that four repeats was far too wide. I thought three repeats would be too narrow and wasn't sure how to proceed. Then there was one of those lightbulb moments. THUMB GUSSET. You'd have thought that with a blog so named I would have got there a bit quicker. So, I decreased after the cuff and am doing three repeats with a thumb gusset. Here's progress so far. The gusset is on the right.

Can anyone guess what this is?

Things are growing

... and not just in the garden. I've finished the first Sockapaloooza sock and have started the second. Although the pattern changed on the foot because I used smaller needles, I think it is acceptable. Let's see if the second sock matches. I have found it rather difficult knitting for someone I don't know. My sock pal gave me good guidance on sizing and colour preferences, but I've no way of knowing what she really likes in terms of style etc. It made me tentative and I changed my mind a lot, so now I'm racing to finish somewhere near the deadline. I now realise I was equally vague in my own description!

I love the fresh green of Tellima grandiflora in the spring. It's really a more limey green than is showing here - on my monitor anyway. Of course it fades a bit through the year. The sprays of tiny bell flowers are not dramatic but they are rather charming. It's a reliably hardy plant in the UK and puts up with some shade. The little coral flower is Geum rivale 'Leonard's Variety'. It's another modest plant but the flowers seem to go with everything and keep coming over a long period.

Things are certainly springing up quickly now. One loss over the winter that I'm surprised about: all my campanulas seem to have died out. I wouldn't have thought they would mind a cold winter.

It's my first day with the house to myself since the end of March! That means unimpeded access to the computer, but I musn't stay here too long; I need to get out on the allotment. I'll take some pictures to show progress there since January.