Pam Alison Knits

I’ve decided that August is going to be all about clearing the decks, finishing things up, getting everything spick and span ready to head into the cosier days of autumn and winter. I’m in a looking back/looking forward mood: a Janus frame of mind. The boundaries are fragile between what was, what is, and what will be.

July, already known as “the past”, was a very successful month with my Quite Cross pens and inks; I loved all four of the combinations and I was confident that they were going to see me a fair way into August. Yet here we are, less than a week in, and three of the pens have already run dry. I have great plans for another themed month in September, so I’m loath to start filling something new. Instead, I will refill two of the July pens with the same inks, and that should see me through. One of the two survivor pens is the Cross Bailey Light which I’ve already refilled with Pilot Iroshizuku Yu-Yake ink – a perky, mood-lifting combination which simply works. The second option is rather more difficult, in that I yearn for another month with the Montblanc William Shakespeare Velvet Red, but I want to clean out the Waterman Allure which held the ink. My solution is to clean the Cross Beverley and put a half-fill of Velvet Red in that, which may or may not turn out to be sufficient for my needs. I’m finding this to be quite a “dry” ink, not in any derogatory way – there is nothing wrong with the flow, and I am enamoured with the colour on the page. In fact, I’ve come to realise that this ink is exactly the colour I wanted, and didn’t get, from Diamine’s Writers’ Blood. However, I’ve got a feeling that it would temper the tendency of slightly broader nibs, such as the Medium one on the Cross Beverley, to lay down more ink than I am comfortable with. One day I will try it out in the Waterman Exception which has an “exceptionally” broad, wet nib for a medium-nibbed pen (please forgive me the play on words).

I want to make finishing the pink cardigan a priority this month because I’m beginning to dream about starting on that big, blue slouch of a jacket. The only trouble is that the pink cardi is crawling. I’ve turned it into a project where I can work out some of my ongoing frustrations with garment knitting and I think that is the root of the problem. It’s making me focus more on what is wrong than what is right. I’m very close to completing the body, but I find myself fed up with the bulky, janky shoulder shaping, although I’ve been doing this the same way pretty much all of my life. Casting off the shoulder of each piece as a “staircase” works fine with thinner yarns which knit up into a fairly delicate fabric anyway. The bulkier the yarn, the less pleasing the result, and even with a DK weight yarn, I’m not happy with this traditional execution. I know that answer is to work short row shaping for the shoulders and then do a 3-needle cast-off – I’ve done it before very successfully. Yet I haven’t done it on this garment and now I’m ready to stitch the shoulders together I’m suddenly unhappy. Am I going to unpick all three pieces (2 fronts and the back) to the beginning of the shoulder shaping and change my method, or am I just going to live with janky seams on this garment and make sure I work short-row shaping from now on? Part of me wants the cardi done, the other part wants the cardi done well. For now, the gods alone know who is going to win out.

As you can see, I’ve already completed a swatch of the blue wool for my jacket, though I haven’t washed it yet. So long as it doesn’t shrink to an alarming extent, it should be spot-on for gauge, meaning I can knit the smallest size of the garment and end up with a sufficiently roomy jacket. If it shrinks, I can knit the next size up because, technically speaking, either size would work for me.

I am just a few days away from completing my current journal and a new one is waiting in the wings – it’s the rather gaudy sunburst/starfield one in my photos. It’s from the same range, but the paper in this one is perhaps closer to the perpetual planner and, like that, can be prone to some creep-through from certain fountain pen inks. My current journal has lasted about two and a half months, so I’m going to think now about how I want to proceed after the new one is finished. The good things about these books are: I can buy them locally, they are very pretty, they are a reasonable price. Not so good: the paper quality is quite variable, I gallop through them rather quickly. The decision here is about whether I tailor my nibs and inks to suit my paper, or tailor my paper purchasing to suit the widest variety of nibs and inks. There is a whole other layer of complexity on this decision-making which needs to wait for a later date, but which means that I’ve been pondering this conundrum for weeks and haven’t yet come to a firm decision.

Knowing that I would be moving into a new journal in the first week or so of August, I wrote out my monthly horoscope on a loose sheet of paper which has hung around in my current journal, but will be stuck into the new one. One final thing needs doing to make the book ready for me to move in, and that is to find a quote that speaks to me to act as the frontispiece. I find myself in the unusual position of having no petty obsessions at the present time to provide me with a suitable quote; no TV programme that is haunting my every waking thought, no music hammering in my head. In this regard, I am sitting firmly in the now, done with the past and waiting for the future to deliver my next enthusiasm. Or, perhaps, waiting to see which version of the past I want to revisit. In the meantime, I can’t escape the feeling that the right quote might point me towards a path which would be amusing to follow for a while.