57 Pink

Peonies, parrot tulips, white stocks and sweet peas, those are the blooms I can never resist. So why did I buy antirrhinums and hollyhocks for the garden today? Truth is I can't explain the antirrhinums without resorting to words like 'whim' and 'fancy' but the (biennial) hollyhocks came home with me because their deep red flowers are destined for the dye pot next year. The peonies I already had, the very first of the season ... it almost feels like summer, particularly as the evening's events included the mixing of 2013's first jug of Pimms!

I don't generally 'do' pink flowers, with the exception of the above - if you're looking for pink parrot tulips try Tulipa 'Silver Parrot', they're exquisite - but the more I think about that the more I realise how much I've been missing. Hellebores, hyacinths, hydrangeas, geraniums ... why do I almost always buy white varieties? Even those antirrhinums are white. And to pose an equally pressing question, why do I so rarely buy pink yarn?

Are you a Pimm's drinker? Do you have a favourite flower colour? And would you wear pink knitwear? I need to know these things!

Linking with Lou's Nature in the Home.

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Today began with the joyous news of a birth, a good friend's second son, and ended with the news of a death. The tragic loss of Kathreen Ricketson of whipup.net and her partner Rob has touched so many in the crafting community. My thoughts are with their family and most particularly their children.

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69 Dandelions

Sadly I'm not making dandelion wine - 'summer on the tongue', to borrow from Ray Bradbury - but I am hoping to have dandelion-yellow silks and wools for a spot of summer stitching*. At the moment I'm boiling up the dandelion flowers in one pan while the threads are being mordanted in another. Without a mordant, in this case alum, the fugitive dandelion dye wouldn't 'bite' and would quickly fade.

Mordants are used in such tiny quantities when working with small amounts of fibre ... 3/16 of a teaspoon of alum (aluminium potassium sulphate) is sufficient for the six skeins of silk thread I intend to dye. So I've bought myself a handy set of itty-bitty spoons that measure a dash, a pinch, a smidgen, and a nip. Or 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and 1/64 of a teaspoon, should you wish to get technical about it. And I've fallen down something of an etymological rabbit hole.

Convinced that the words 'dash', 'pinch', 'smidgen' and 'nip' all pre-dated 'tea-spoon' I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary. And they do. Tea drinking became fashionable during the 1600s when tea was pricey stuff and was measured using small 'tea-spoons' equivalent in size to an apothecaries' dram. Yet pinch denoted the much smaller, 'amount taken up between finger and thumb', at least a century earlier, and Shakespeare wrote about dashes and doses of this and that. So who decided that a pinch was half a dash, a smidgen half a pinch, and a nip half a smidgen? I'm guessing either Fannie Farmer or an early measuring spoon manufacturer, but does anyone know different?

Back in the kitchen the thread and dye liquor have been united. I'll let you know how I get on! And meanwhile ... know any dialect names for dandelions? They were 'piss-a-beds' in Somerset where I grew up, or 'one o'clocks'.

* Dandelion roots are reputed to yield a magenta dye, but I've yet to hear of a dyer who has achieved anything more exciting than a mucky fawn.

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54 The Shetland shawl that wasn't

Knitting. Okay, so the other day, when I said I'd cast on a Shetland Triangle .. I didn't get very far. In fact I got just far enough to fall out majorly with the yarn I'd chosen. I prefer yarns that can be tugged gently without breaking ... this isn't that yarn! Bottom line, it's spun from fibres with a short staple length - merino lambswool and cotton - hence its tensile strength is on the low side. So, not the optimum yarn for lace ... ever tried knitting a nup* without tugging? But all I did was cast on - kinda' necessary, whatever I'm making - and the darn stuff broke twice! Truly, I'm loath to diss something I know others love, but Holst Garn's 'Coast' clearly needs careful handling!

Nature. Also rather fragile are the dried hydrangea heads I've been admiring all winter. This one's tucked into a tiny old perfume bottle, along with a cluster or two of alder cones. It's lost all its colour now and is starting to crumble, and I wanted to photograph it before it disintegrated any further. To archive its fading beauty ... Sabi, 'the bloom of time' **. Of course the fact that I've reduced it to pixels rather undermines the exercise, I need an actual print.

Reading. Dear Sweet Home, which is at first glance a Japanese book about storage solutions - wooden boxes, linen bags, glass jars - but which, to borrow from Leonard Koren, is also about 'materiality, pared down to essence, with the poetry intact' ... Wabi-sabi again, and inspiration for my studio, which is almost ready for the big reveal ! When I get a moment I'll scan some of the page spreads for you. And Ron McMillan's Between Weathers: Travels in 21st Century Shetland, which I mentioned previously. It ties in with another Japanese aesthetic concept, Ma, a consciousness of place.

And that's me, disappointed by yarn, delighted by decay, and distracted by Japanese aesthetics. What's happening with you just now? Do tell!

Linking with Lou's Nature in the Home, and Ginny's Yarn Along.

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* A traditional textural element of Estonian Lace knitting, akin to an elongated bobble.

** As in the Japanese Wabi-sabi.
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48 Hung with bloom along the bough *

Did you know that the cherry tree is a relative of the rose? Every spring this red leaved beauty reminds me of that. Used in the dye pot its bark should give the same antique pink you see in the flowers. But the tree's not ours. It grows by the farm gate and its bark will be hard to come by ... 'stone fruit hates the knife' and cherry trees are rarely pruned. Thankfully when it is tidied up the task will fall to the Farmer Boy, who seems to have abandoned all thoughts of returning to university, and who is becoming well accustomed to hauling home bags of vegetation for his colour-mad mother. Just yesterday he pitched up with a sack of carrot tops*!

My great-grandpa was a farmer-boy too, but only in his later years, he'd been a typesetter when younger. He died when I was three and is in memory no more than the scent of wool, soil and the tobacco he smoked in his cherrywood pipe. My mother still has that pipe, and a grainy old photograph of him smoking it. He looks like my son, or rather my son looks like him. Can a penchant for digging be inherited do you think? And how is it that our preferences and our passions can seem to echo down the generations? I wonder if there's a crazy-knitter great-grandkid in my future somewhere!

Do you see such patterns in your own family or is it just mine?

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You've probably noticed the changes I made to my post footer recently ... I added this reminder: "Google Reader users, don't forget to transfer your subscription before July 1st." And I've received a fair few requests for clarification, all worded similarly to June's: "I don't understand what's happening ... what do I need to do to stay in the loop?"

The simple answer is that you don't need to do anything unless you do use Google Reader, which is being 'retired'. And if you do use it, you don't need to do anything too complicated, just switch to an alternative - I'd recommend Bloglovin if you want something simple - and import the feeds of all the blogs you've been following to it - there's a handy 'Import' button on the Bloglovin site. Of course Bloglovin isn't your only option - Feedly's another, as is Bloglines.

If you're using the Reading List within the Blogger dashboard, don't worry, it's not going anywhere and the blogs you've followed using Google's Friend Connect will still be listed there. And the other options for keeping abreast of bloggy goings on will also be unaffected ... Twitter, Facebook, Ravelry - notifications of new knitsofacto posts are sent to all three - email subscriptions, even the humble blog roll, all will be just as before (although not HelloCotton, which closed last month). Truth is it's not blog readers but blog writers who are most likely to be affected by the change ... those readers who don't switch may well stop reading altogether come July. Don't be one of them, please, I'd miss you!

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* "Lovliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bow." A.E. Housman

** Fresh carrot tops will give bright greeny-yellows on alum mordanted wool and silk ... guess who didn't have any alum mordanted silk or wool to hand, or for that matter any alum. A lesson learned!

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72 Four go adventuring *

"... the knitters began to feel rather excited. It would be fun to go to a place they had never been to before. 'I just feel as if it's the right place somehow', cried Kristie. 'It sounds sort of adventurous.' 'Oh, isn't it an exciting feeling to go away for a holiday!', said Jean." *

Spotted where we're off to? Hint: the map 'jigsaw' is a whopping clue!

Kristie had a plan, a decidedly Blytonesque plan, involving a cousin and a couple of online chums, an island**, some woolly treasure, and quite probably ginger beer. First came the flurry of emails and then, just this week, the booking of flights. And the deed was done! We four - that's me, Kristie, her cousin Kath, and Jean - will be adventuring all the way to Shetland come September!!

I'm ridiculously thrilled to be sallying forth with a bunch of folk I've never met! But three of the four of us are knitters who blog, that's how we 'know' each other, and that's how I know it will all work out just fine. There are details still to be decided, of the exactly what to see variety, but we seem to be falling in quite happily with one another's preferences for wool brokers, brochs, and bright billed puffins. And meanwhile I've cast on a Shetland Triangle, just because, and am reading Ron McMillan's Between Weathers: Travels in 21st Century Shetland to counter any romantic notions I might have.

If you've any Shetland related recommendations - for further books (fiction or non-fiction), or for things we might do there - I'd really like to hear them. Or you could tell me where you're planning to travel to next, she types nosily. Or for that matter if, as a kid, you loved or loathed 'The Famous Five'. Me, I just longed to own a dog like Timmy!

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* With apologies to Enid Blyton. Five Go Adventuring Again was the second of the 'Famous Five' books. I've taken the lines I've paraphrased above from the first few pages of the first book, Five on a Treasure Island.

** I suppose properly it's an archipelago, but that wouldn't be Blytonesque at all!

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