Cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke (Pattern: Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, pub 2002 by Designer Yarns)

This is such a lovely cardigan to knit, that I need little excuse to set the needles clicking, although news of a new baby helps too! Dove grey yarn – the colour is actually called Silver – seems such a good colour for a baby nowadays when only the tiniest seem to wear white for any length of time.  Most of the knitting I’ve done recently has been for 1-2 year olds so it was delightful to knit the smallest size for a change, especially as it didn’t take long at all – I probably spent more time playing with the 4 colours for the Fair Isle than I spent knitting everything up to the yoke.  Very happy with the colour combination which gives me the same pleasure as blue and white pottery. This is the 9th cardigan knitted from this pattern.

Detail: cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke (Pattern: Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, pub 2002 by Designer Yarns)

The pots of tulips, narcissi and bluebells bought from our local Co-op in what then seemed the depths of winter have been terrific value and planted in two zinc baths have provided welcome bursts of colour at a time when the tête-a-tête daffodils and hellebores have finished flowering.  The tulips – orange flamed with yellow – have now been in flower for more than a month and look like they still have more living to do, while the white narcissi, which drooped and looked like they’d had enough after we moved them into a more sunny part of the garden, have perked up and decided to make the most of their new location. Now shops have opened up I have my eye on salmon pink geraniums (apparently very unfashionable now) in the local flower shop. I must buy them soon as I nearly missed out last year and I love nothing more than a couple of tubs of massed pink flower heads brightening even the sunniest days of summer. Meanwhile, Gin, having got little more than her nose out the door during winter, suddenly discovered the joy of the newly turned soil in the recently planted baths and for a while battle lines were drawn. Somewhere, I’d read that coffee grounds or tea leaves would keep her away. I thought tea, being shredded leaves, might work better than more messy coffee grounds, so for a week or so we drank lots and lots of tea and regularly anointed the earth around the growing plants with the contents of our teabags. It worked. Tulips which had started to look as if they might emerge deformed from the scrabbling of an excited cat have grown straight and proud as have the bluebells which had looked even more reticent. I too am happier as I don’t have to inspect the earth armed with a trowel on a daily basis. (See photos at end of post.)

Fair Isle sample for cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke

Elsewhere, in the countryside, John Lewis-Stempel (Nature Notebook, The Times 1 May 2021) writes of the woods being in their White Period with guelder rose (viburnum), elder and hawthorn in heavy bloom, while the grassy tracks are awash with white flowers – daisies, dandelion clocks, stitchwort and white campion. On Thursday evening he describes standing on the wood’s edge and watching the whiteness around him –  a surfy swirl building, as he watched, into a crashing phosphorescent wave. Heady with his love for the English woodland in spring and the scents of the white campion and the common hawthorn, he wonders whether the wall of hawthorn, is responsible for the hares he’s seen boxing on the track, as triethylamine is a component of both hawthorn flowers and animals’ reproductive secretions – and which I suspect gives the hawthorn that slightly off edge to its initially alluring smell. I remember those hedgerows of cascading white and also the hares from when we lived in the Chilterns but as we live in the town now I shall have to make do with reading about them and cultivating my gaudy shop bought plants!

Cardigan with Fair Isle Yoke (Pattern: Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, pub 2002 by Designer Yarns)

From the 17th of May we should be able to spend the night in someone else’s house and already there are plans for us to go over to Ipsden to finally finish the altar frontal. I just need to check the length, cut off the excess, bind the edge and slip stitch the binding on the wrong side. I can scarcely believe that our grand projet which we began in 2013 could be nearing completion after encountering so many minor difficulties and more major interruptions – notably breaks for house moving (twice), battling with trying to quilt something the size of the average living room with dodgy knees, giving up on quilting it myself and taking it to Wales to be done by machine and then, when almost there, being hit by the once in a century disruption of the pandemic … with the quilt still in Wales . (Quilt kindly delivered by the quilter from Wales during one of the times when restrictions were eased.) That our spare bed might once again be usable is also something wonderful. Fingers crossed and all that.

This is where the altar frontal project began. It will look nothing like anything that appears in this post!!!

Tulips and bluebells

Tulips and narcissi