Patches

Our Fourth of July holiday was cool and variously included overcast skies, thick fog, tempestuous wind and rain, and great peals of low-frequency thunder so powerful they shook the house (I've been in smaller earthquakes). Puny human fireworks were no match for the elements!

The bad weather kept me indoors, re-reading Order of the Phoenix and knitting swatches. For the Tour de France KAL I swatched Uptown Toffee, another Norah Gaughan pattern, published in Knitter's K61 Winter 2000 and also anthologized in Jackets for Work and Play.



I like the Nantucket Jacket swatch better, but prefer the Uptown Toffee silhouette. What I really really want is Nan with long sleeves and no hip-enhancing gores. Hm. [Ponders posting limericks, thinks better of it] More swatches to come.



One of my pastors is getting married at Church of the Improv. It's not every day one has a pastor get married, so I knit up the intertwined trees motif from the Enchanted Aran Forest cardigan to decorate her wedding card. After a bit of fiddling, I settled on No. 30 crochet cotton and U.S. 4/0 (1.25 mm) needles (pictured with Jersey quarter for scale, click to view larger).

My prediction that my first tomato would be ripe this week would seem to be another casualty of the unseasonable weather – the patio tomato is not merely not ripe, it's also got greenback (= patchy color, particularly noticeable on the shoulders, indicative of woody spots).



Greenback sometimes can be corrected in the garden by heavy mulching and by burying banana peels and Epsom salts in the tomato patch. A bucket or two of clean wood ash would be great too (but I don't have any handy). I'm not sure what to do for a container plant – erm, mebbe foliar feeding? Suggestions welcome. Heheheh, mad tomato science ahead.