Sunday 16th July - Broad beans for supper

 The crimson flowered broad beans are ready now, and we had some with supper tonight. They do taste good, nothing like the horrid sullen grey slabs that we were served at school. The convent prep school I went to had an extensive kitchen garden beyond the playing fields. This produced a seemingly never-ending supply of spinach (served slimy and sandy), red cabbage (boiled to a repellent grey colour) and the aforementioned broad beans. 

Luckily I was a day girl, and my mother was an excellent cook or I would never have eaten any of these vegetables again. Pity the boarders...

When I boarded (at a different school) much later on, I pitied us boarders too then. I think the supper dish called, if I remember rightly, 'kidney turbago' went back untouched. The smell, as of a public lavatory, was enough to stop us in our tracks.

Nowadays I'm a grownup (in years anyway) and eat what I like. I even leave the crusts from my sandwiches if I don't feel like eating them!

The mitred square blanket continues...

I had a mega 'sewing in the ends' session yesterday evening while watching television; sewing about 30 ends was no great hardship with various programmes to distracted Mr.

I completed the missing corner today, and will carry on until the current double knitting stash runs out. It's the sort of thing that one can always add to. At this width it us more of a wrap than a blanket.

This time round I've experimented with using patterned and self-striping yarns, and mixing and matching two sizes of squares. 

I found the pattern and concept here at Loiuse Tilbrook designs, but have modified it slightly to suit my less than meticulous nature. The main difference is that I found it was too much of a fuss to remember whether I was knitting a right-side, decreasing row, or a an ordinary wrong-side row. So I knit to the central marker, slip the marker, and then k2tog on every row. That makes it easier to knit and watch TV at the same time.

I'm also not that bothered the my diagonal lines caused by the central decreases go in different directions.

Unlike when I am cross-stitching; 

I managed to do 45 mins cross stitching today so I've reached where I hoped to be yesterday.  Never mind. Tomorrow is another day. Progress was slowed at one point as I became totally confused when I changed the direction of a line from vertical to horizontal and couldn't work out which stitch was the criss (lying underneath) and which was the cross. I think I got there in the end!