United

Once upon a time, long long ago, there was a very talented man named Lawrence Johnston, and he built a garden.

Not so long ago there was a very talented knitting designer named Miriam Felton, and she designed a shawl.

And very recently, yesterday in fact, it was time to reunite the two.

My Hidcote shawl, blocked and beautiful, went to meet Mr Johnston's garden. Or should we say gardens? Hidcote is set out as almost 30 separate mini gardens, from the very formal to the wilderness with a theatre lawn, a rose garden and an alpine rockery in between.


It would be the perfect place to knit-blog any finished piece, but being the right side of the pond and only a few miles from Hidcote, it seemed only fitting.

The pattern is divided for the fields of flowers:


the geometric formal beds (you can see the White Garden as the centre picture of the mosaic above and Mrs Winthrop's garden - a vision of lime and purple - in the bottom left hand corner)



and last but not least, the famous Hidcote Lavender.

I mentioned in my last post that this shawl is wonderfully huge - I'm 6' tall, and although my wingspan is a little shorter, this as you can see falls off my fingertips.


It's size is part of the charm, this is a shawl to wrap up in,


to swirl around in, letting the points float away in the breeze.

The yarn is Jaggerspun Zephyr and the colour is Basil, the dark rich green of the inside of a forest or a bamboo grove, and the 50% silk gives it the soft sheen of a waxy leaf.



Gossamer thread, rippling and floating through the air.



It's safe to say that I cannot begin to describe how much I love this shawl, and how much I enjoyed knitting it. Suffice to say that I have cast on another shawl - it seems the addiction may have kicked in.

And is the shawl is pretty special, the garden is something else:


I took well over 200 photos yesterday and had to spend serious quality time today sorting through them, and then mosaic-ing them, just to show you a tiny flavour of the garden. Every time you turn a corner there is something new, or something to see close up that you otherwise might miss.

The yellow flowers in the bottom left hand corner look to be just yellow until you look closely and see the fuzzy puce stamen with bright orange tips; the petals had dropped from the flower at the top right, but the leftovers were structurally stunning; to say nothing of the blue green ocean of hostas and the silver blue grey tree bark.

The pergolas had hidden treasures - a croquet set and a wall of sepia tiles;



these two are mirror images of each other, set at the bottom of pillars drawn through tile pictures - a quirky combination of ducks and boats, clearly very relevant in Gloucestershire, which although slightly closer to the sea than Warwickshire, is not abundant in coastline.

And more, and more, and more


a never-ending parade of floral abundance. We spent all day wandering around the gardens, making sure we'd been down every path and through every gap in the hedges to make sure we didn't miss a thing, and finished up on a bench by the lily pond, three pairs of long legs stretched out in the afternoon sunshine - you just can't beat that for food for the soul.

I leave you with the moment that I wish I'd captured on video; H, deciding that some alternative modelling shots were needed and that really, it wasn't so much a delicate lace shawl, as Superman's cape:

One ...

Two...

Three... Lift Off

Garden of Dreams

In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful. ~Abram L. Urban

My shawl is finished - and it's huge! I started knitting the day after my birthday last year, and finished a week and a bit after my birthday this year so perhaps this is a shawl of almost birthdays.

After a gargantuan marathon of knitting last weekend, aided and abetted by my MIL who sat and stitched and chatted and played along to Millionaire with me, I cast off the final row to the accompaniment of Andy Murray's success on Monday. And here it is



Pre-blocking; my Hidcote Garden; portable and requiring very little in the way of weeding (that reminds me I only deadheaded half the Pinks this evening - it's going to look rather unusual in the morning)

If the Murray match on Monday was tense, it was nothing to the ebb and flow of my confidence in the remaining yarn. I would be convinced that I'd make it, then berating myself for going to look at the tapestry yarn in lunchtime to find a match and not actually buying any.

In the end ...


We have this - about a span's worth of yarn, too light for my scales to register any weight. The rest of the yarn has been tangled into a beautiful cobweb of lavender beds and rustling leaves.

I blocked it out on Tuesday with water, Eucalan (the lavender flavour!) and just a wee bit of perspiration as the shawl grew beyond my wildest imagination, my towels and the length of my sewing room. It ended up with one end pinned up against the bookcases and the other tucked under the desk pinned into a towel that was hastily covering up all of the computer wiring!

I could show it to you now, but this magnum opus deserves a proper showcase and my garden is currently home to an avocado bath (worn), an avocado basin (of a different hue to the bath) and an avocado loo (also slightly different). Reams of avocado tiles have been transported to the tip.

Whilst my MIL suggests that we sink the bath into the garden and arrange the basin as the water fountain into it I think I may be able to do better for a backdrop. The shawl and I are going on a picnic tomorrow come rain or shine and the camera (and two photographers) are coming too.

Those in the area might just be able to guess where I'm going - but shhh - I'll show you tomorrow, just keep your fingers crossed that it's sunny!

Growing Gardens

WARNING: This blog post may contain actual knitting content!

Yes, I know, it's been a bit of a while since this knitting blog mentioned actual knitting. Part of the problem is that some projects are just not that photogenic. Lace is notoriously unphotogenic, and when you're making lace with Basil green 2ply, it does look like I let a kitten loose with the garden twine.



This particular amorphous blob is half of the Hidcote Shawl by Miriam Felton. It is, or rather it will be, absolutely beautiful when it's finished, and the parts of the pattern that I can see starting to form have the promise of things to come.



I'm now part way through the second section, representing the formal flower beds of Hidcote, and I've got about another half chart before I start the lavender patterning. I'm actually desperately hoping that this is half the shawl because I've just started the second ball of yarn. According to the shawl progress calculator (here) I'm 49.9% complete - I'm hoping for a miracle or for a smidge more yardage in the second ball - we'll have to wait and see which (if either) I get.

My chief photography assistant (reassigned that crucial position now that his finger is getting better) decided that my shawl in progress looks like a fishing keep net:


So he found me some shrimp



Of the very pinkest, entirely artificial type - well we are a long way from the sea!

And while one garden grows, the other one hasn't been doing too badly either. We had a little garden centre splurge the other week and bought a new hebe (now covered in flowers) and a blue hydrangea (my favourites) that is just starting to turn lilac at the edges.



The rest of the flowers have survived our slightly haphazard approach to gardening and are thriving despite rather than because of our green thumbs - I love them equally but I think I'm better at shawls than plants!

With apologies for recent inattention

We just had 'summer'. I had to go and see it while it lasted. 'Summer' apparently is a weather phenomenon in which it gets warm and sunny and stays that way for many days. I am reliably informed by Google that in some places in the world, this constancy of solar attention may even last for weeks (actually, Google even said months, but that can't be right surely?)

Happily, summer mostly looks like this:


With some knitting thrown in - it was good.

Anyway, now that we are back to torrential downpours interspersed with twinkles of sunshine, I can show you what has been on the needles during the Pimms season:



I fell victim to the craze for Baby Tulip jackets a while back and ordered a kit from Socktopus but never got around to knitting it - mainly because all the babies kept being boys. The horizon is now mercifully baby free for a little while but I knit this just because I wanted to - it's going in the drawer for later.

It's impossible to fault this pattern or yarn, as I knit through each colour change I decided then and there that I just had to have a sweater out of that colour - I think I may be planning a lot of sweaters!



The great thing is that the kit has plenty of leftovers - I contemplated a matching baby hat but as my one regret is that I will never wear this jacket, I think the leftovers might just become a hot water bottle cover (and yes that is a staple requirement of the English summer) so that I get to snuggle up with them.

For a big project I've picked up the Hidcote Garden Shawl that I started last summer and I'm gently cruising through in the evenings. As it resembles nothing so much as the remnants of the interaction between a tap dancing spider and a ball of garden twine at present there is no picture.

Suffice to say it used to be this big and now it's this big. See - I knew that would help.

My train knitting has taken a little variation too - of the Mason Dixon variety:


This is the first of I suspect several tab topped hand towels from the second Mason Dixon book - knit out of Sugar & Cream dishcloth cotton in colours Hot Blue and Summer Splash. It usually lives buttoned onto my oven door, which was not clean enough to permit photos, and is in frequent use. The chief advantage of having the towel buttoned to the oven seems to be that no-one uses it 'accidentally' to dry the plates, pull something out of the oven, or wipe down the surfaces - genius!

The surfaces have been in need of wiping, because I've been baking:






And then icing!







Flowers and butterflies to match the flowers and butterflies outside - and delicious into the bargain!

Summer this, summer that

Are you feeling Olympian today? The first few events have kicked off in Beijing but the games don't open officially until 20.08.08 Beijing time on Friday - just after 1pm here.

11,468* top athletes are lined up to take part and with them are 4,283 Ravelers ready for the Ravelympics (not to be confused with the Knitting Olympics which run with the winter games but similar).

I am a proud member of both Team GB and Team Socktopus - it's a bit like being Devonian, English and British (and if we're being very technical and want to include NI, a citizen of the United Kingdom) all at once.

My ravelympic project is Ether from Rowan 43 with the Damask I bought to make a terribly similar top in Rowan 41. I am reliably informed that the one in Rowan 43 has better shaping so Ether it is. And I'm all lined up ready to go.

I've done my swatch - it produces the gauge I need (to my great surprise) and at 1pm on Friday I will stop what I am doing and cast on over my lunchbreak. All I have to do now is persuade H to record the opening ceremony so I can watch it later.

H by the way is following the Ravelympians' lead and is going to do an Olympic Painting - he can start at the opening ceremony and it must be finished before the closing ceremony ends. He doesn't have to have an Olympic theme though and I've said he can do his sketching as Olympic training - it'll be interesting to see what he comes up with and I promise to post photos of both our progress.

In the meantime I'm flitting between projects. I've finished the first Frenchmans Creek sock as you know and a temporary break in our 100% natural garden watering system allowed me to take a quick picture:

If you look carefully you can see the links into the story. Starting from the top we have the cream lace (which still needs blocking) which Dona wears for important dressing up events and the rubies and pearls which she wagers to her Frenchman and which he gives her back, then on the cuff we have the outline of gulls and a mock cable to represent either ropes or waves, all of which points to La Mouette. And finally, the foot is covered in a carpet of bluebell rib:

Can you see them?

I've started the second sock and worked a little of the cuff but I've also picked up the Hidcote Garden shawl which has been sadly neglected in favour of socks - it isn't much further along but a little bit here and there will soon add up.

So, if you fancy being a fellow Olympian (even if a dreaded rival), you can sign up by following the instructions on the Ravelympics Group page - I'll see you in the arena at the start of the sweater sprint!

* according to Wiki answers

In my garden

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.
~Rudyard Kipling, "The Glory of the Garden"

I can't say that I've been giving the garden much attention this year but we did have a weed-and-plant session a few weeks ago and it seems to be bearing bloom - the lavender that matches so nicely with my new socks being a case in point.

Our roses are in bloom





And I've been playing with the camera settings as you see!

But perhaps the best comes from the wild - a cascade of wild scented honeysuckle in the tall hedge - reminds me of home





And what else should I knit in a flower garden, but a shawl named for a flower garden - this is the Hidcote Shawl:


Or at least, chart 1 of many (10 I think) by Miriam Felton (who also designed Icarus) in Basil coloured Zephyr which H gave me for Christmas. It is beautiful yarn for the pattern but I didn't quite think through the photo issues - maybe I'll wrap it round a teddy next time - it's about that big!