Global Warming

My husband, wearing the cover sweater from Alice Starmore's "Sweaters for Men."  I knitted this about five years ago, but it has seen minimal wear since then.  This is because I made it after a particularly bitter walk around Buttermere at Christmas, and it is intended to be worn over another smaller jumper.  It has taken this year's inclement weather to bring it out of the cupboard. 

It has a lovely soft handle and drape, but it does look as if it belongs to someone bigger than my husband.

In 2000, we got married after many years together.  We both dislike hot weather so we booked a holiday in Shetland, after our August wedding.  We knew to pack warm clothes, but had reckoned without the wind-chill factor.  We each had a summer jumper and a heavier walking jumper with us.  On the first morning, which was bright and sunny, we found ourselves needing both jumpers at once, as layers.  Starmore seems to have that climate in mind in this sweter.

I have been very pleased with the comments on my Celtic Throw.   It is knit in strips, with the blue ones measuring seven inches and the cream ones five and a half inches.  This makes it abour five foot by forty-eight inches.  Knitting it in strips made it ideal for long journeys in the car and for traffic jams in particular.  Family commitments have meant that we have seen a lot of these this year.

Last week. we were able to plant our onions and two rows of early potatoes. We were pleased to find the soil light to work and friable.  Whether this is the result of frost and snow on autumn-dug  earth, or of worm action in response to the FYM we spread on it, is hard to tell.  Whichever, it is certainly more enjoyable than our first year on this plot when it was so waterlogged and heavy the soil would not drop off the spade when dug, then baked into bricks before it could be worked.