Thanks so much to everyone who has been part of the conversation about trees. It is always good not to be alone.
One of the things I am doing in an effort to build a greener neighbourhood at present is sprouting saltbush from seed to plant around here: sharing it with friends who want to plant native plants and planting it in the public spaces where the earth is bare or weedy. They have gone from tiny baby plants a couple of weeks ago:
To the five or six leaf stage when I think I might start planting out. I’ve scoped out the River Red (E Camaldulensis) that is still standing in our street and it looks like traffic beneath it has subsided and weeds have begun to fill the bare space. The time might be right this weekend.
It has been a low knitting week. Just the same, a hat managed to reach completion and the intended recipient agreed to be photographed after we went running one morning. He turned out to like the hat enough to have it… especially good in view of his recent birthday! This is Jared Flood’s Turn a Square, a very spare and elegant pattern for just the kind of hat my beloved friend likes to wear. The wool is handspun–from memory it was a merino/silk blend from Pigeonroof Studios that I acquired when someone else on Ravelry was destashing–the photo of the braid is years old! It is an especially lush fibre, beautifully dyed–I held onto it for years before I felt I could do it justice as a spinner.
Meetings have been my knitting time this week. I am one of those brazen hussies who knit in meetings. I usually ask if people mind. In big meetings, I ask the people nearby who are most likely to be troubled by my knitting, and they often tell stories of knitters they have known and/or loved. I aim to have read the papers prior to going to meetings (if it’s that kind of meeting), choose knitting I can do without counting or pattern checking, and always let the knitting take second place to paying attention, contributing and note taking. I attend a lot of meetings where I sit beside people who are following their email on a tablet or phone, so personally I think knitting is fast becoming less distracting by comparison with other things that routinely happen in meetings I attend!
Local & Bespoke 