Ospreys 'n' Knitting

I've been very remiss about keeping you up-to-date with the ospreys. A lot has happened. The female has stuck with the new male who turned up, and he has been a dab hand at turning up with fish. She laid three eggs, which is the usual osprey clutch, and they have all hatched.

The dad was seen with a length of fishing line attached to him, about 40 feet of it, which caused some anxiety for a while, but it seems to have fallen off and he is back on maximum fish duty. There's lots of feeding going on, and lots of chirping.The chicks are growing stronger by the day, visibly, and things appear at the moment to be going well.

When I was watching this last year, I was optimistic and possibly a little casual about it all, but none of last year's chicks made it - one died in the nest with a fair amount of help from the family, one disappeared over the ocean on the way to Africa, and the last one disappeared just as she was about to return earlier this year - so this year I am a bit more on edge.

Knitting
I was thinking that the pain I had in my right hand was down to excessive mousing, but I realized on Monday that it was probably down to excessive lace knitting, so I tore myself away, with considerable difficulty, from the off-blog project and have picked up the Silk Garden Lara again. This means I have a great heavy pile of mohair and lambswool on my lap during the hottest days of the year, but then that's what knitting is all about, isn't it?


I am doing the decreases using Fiona's method for getting smooth edges instead of steps. I saw it last year when she posted it, bookmarked it, and was able to find it again when I needed it, amazingly enough. It is absolutely brilliant.

A kind friend gave me a couple more balls of the yarn for my birthday and I think this may see it to the end, or to within about half an inch of the end if my luck is as usual. The colours really are gorgeous, and the greens are even brighter than they look here. And yes, one of the dark blues does match my nail polish, how did you know?

Politics
And to finish, the current theme song of the UK House of Commons -

Just a Quick Shag

Knitting
I bought a couple of balls of Rowan's Tapestry some time ago, and could never decide what to do with it. Too fine for this, too thick for that. Then I was wandering round Ravelry last week when I came across this (hi, Judith!), the wonderful Shag pattern from Knitting New Scarves, knitted in that very yarn. It's not stealing if you steal from the best, so I cast on right away.


I'm nearly half-way through the second skein now and this time I'm managing without a row counter thingy and am counting the purl ridges instead. It's got three of my favourite colours - light grey, mid grey and dark grey - and I love it. I think it's the sixth of these I've knitted.

I did another little coat for my new friend, in Debbie Bliss Pure Cashmere - before you faint, it was the leftovers from my Felicity Hat.

I've picked up Lara again and she's looking beautiful. All the colours have settled the way I wanted them in the collar, no huge swathes of loud green near my face, which was entirely down to good luck. I did change the order of the colours one night when I was knitting in a bad light, but I ripped it the next morning and put it back the way it would have been if I hadn't interfered. The Noro colour master, he knows best.


I've made a jigsaw of this - lots of stripes in the floor and in the colours - see the sidebar.

It occurs to me that everything I've got on the needles just now is something I've knitted before - Shag, Lara and a Forest Canopy Shawl. I must do something about this soon.

Graham Norton Show
If you follow the Yarn Harlot, you'll know that she (or at least her voice) was on the Graham Norton Show recently, when Greg Kinnear was a guest. Then last week, or it might have been the week before - I record it and watch it later - Graham was talking about the German knitting grannies at NetGranny (they're Swiss, but I think he said they were German) and he spoke to one of them, this one. And, I remember a while ago he had Carol Meldrum on the show - not as a guest, but in the front row of the audience. It was when her Knitted Icons book came out and she showed some of them. So, and sorry if I've been a long time getting here, there must be a researcher on the show who's really into knitting. Who will we see next, I wonder?

Photo Blogs
When I'm not peering at other people's knitting, I sometimes peer at their photographs. I discovered the Big Picture earlier this year and have been stunned at regular intervals since. Click on this one to see it full size.

A U.S. Marine patrols with an opium poppy flower on his helmet on March 19, 2009 near Baqwa in Farah province of southwest Afghanistan. (John Moore/Getty Images)

This is from a recent selection on Signs of Spring, and have a look at these for Earth Hour: you can turn the lights on and off in the photos. Cool.

Fuzzarelly, who has a fibre blog, also has a photo blog called Back Roads of Harrison County. All her pictures can be embiggened and some of them have a lovely, lost quality, sort of Andrew Wyeth-y.

Ospreys
The osprey mum is back at the nest. You can see her on the webcam. No, really, you can sometimes. I saw her yesterday, honest. They don't seem to have the sound turned on; I used to like listening to the wind, but maybe they'll turn it on if and when there are chicks to listen to.

Noro Lara

I allowed myself to buy another couple of balls of Silk Garden and have done a bit more of my second Lara. I love the colours and the stripes are intensifying now that I'm past the sleeves and am on the sides: it is done in one piece, so I'm at the bit which goes from to hem over the shoulder. The straight needle which is rammed up the side isn't anything to do with the construction; I just put it in for the photo so that you can see more stripes. I've made the increases in the sides straighter this time, so that it's less fitting.

In theory, this should be last-resort knitting and I should be doing other things first, but I've had a spell of needing something mindless because I had subtitles to read, so this has come to the front. I have two more l-o-n-g Chinese films to watch (Film Four had a season), so knitting which requires counting or looking will slip to the back of the queue again.

A friend asked me to knit her something for last Christmas after she saw some Noro yarn, and I agreed. She settled on a pattern quite soon, Mavis from 'Naturally Noro', but has been quite incapable of choosing a shade, a problem that any of us can sympathise with. And unless one is enormously fortunate, it's difficult to find a shop which has a very wide range of colours; even if they stock Noro, they'll probably only have a few shades of each yarn, so a lot of her failing-to-choose has been done online. We ended up sitting at our computers last night, a few hundred miles apart, wrangling over the possibilities in Jannette's Silk Garden selection. I have had to warn her that if she doesn't choose soon, I may be tired of the project before I've started, something which has happened to me before when I've taken ages poring over a pattern and possible yarns. I hope this doesn't sound too mean, but I don't want to hate the project while I'm knitting it, or even worse, not knitting it and feeling guilty because I should be knitting it. I hope I will receive a parcel of Silk Garden soon. I'll let you know what colour she finally settles on.

More stripes

I'm very naughty. I've started another Noro Lara, which means another sleeve-to-sleeve stripy cardigan and I haven't even done the finishing on the stripy Mably.

Lara is from Debbie Bliss's Alpaca Silk collection and the largest size is a little bit small for me, so I made it first in Noro Kureyon, which just sized it up nicely. I made this last year. It's shade 150.



The colours have a lovely misty Hebridean look, and the stripes remind me of the endless horizons you see up there. The turquoise is the sea, and the grey and lavender are the mists and mountains. I took up knitting in my twenties, having not been a great success with it at school, after a holiday in South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. I was living in London at the time, a city which seemed no have no horizons at all, and when I went back there I was obsessed with reproducing those watery horizontals, shading endlessly between blue and green and grey and brown.

Since I can't draw or paint, it occurred to me that one way of achieving the effect I was after, was with the lines of knitting. I got some wool from somewhere and started knitting a Hebridean landscape which turned into, I think, a cushion; when I got to the top, I couldn't remember how to cast off and had to look it up in a book. Then I made a bag, and then a sweater, all with sea and sand and sheep and little white cottages. I did them all in a mixture of colour stranding techniques which I made up as I went along. I think I must have started looking at patterns while I was making the sweater, but only for the shaping. If I had been able to buy shade 150 of Noro Kureyon at that time, I maybe wouldn't have learnt how to do all of that.

This year's Lara is in Silk Garden, shade 8. I bought a couple of balls to make a curly scarf for a friend, and I was lost. With the leftovers I cast on at one cuff, and the next time I was in my LYS, I bought another ball. I have this idea that if I buy the yarn one or two balls at a time, the cost will be more bearable, rather than facing up to the cost of a dozen balls of Silk Garden, eek.



This is more like a Caribbean landscape. The colours are quite dull here because I took the photo on Sunday morning before I had opened the blinds; in reality they sing and dazzle. The first green is a little harsh. I'm toying with the idea of taking it out in the rest of the cardi, but I don't really believe in messing about with the colours in variegated yarn and perhaps the blues need it. It will have to stay like this until next pay day when I can get the next instalment.

Meanwhile I shall return to the Kauni and some baby hats that I haven't told you about.