KNITTING UP DULWICH ROAD

Time to give my little grey cells a break from all the complicated-for-me ideas, so I’ve made a couple of charts for easy knits using beads hooked into green yarn. I’ll probably use Felted Tweed, to avoid flat colour, and may vary the green shade across squares.

Here’s a suitable ditty to keep you company as you read. You’re welcome 😊

The first two green squares will represent the early summer flower border in the garden outside 39 Dulwich Road, and the flowering horse chestnuts in front of St Jude’s church and outside Brockwell Lido.

The border is an annual riot of pink sweet peas and Salvia ‘Hot Lips’, whose red flowers turn white from the tips as they mature. The border tumbles over the garden wall onto Dulwich Road and is a pleasure to walk past. Other blooms join these in the garden of number 39 through summer, but it’s this border I enjoy most. Here’s a close up.

On the right is one of the horse chestnuts outside St Jude’s, in full bloom towards the end of April. There are two others alongside and several outside Brockwell Lido, as I mentioned here. They all have the pale, pale yellow flowers, not the smudgy pink ones, so it’ll be fresh yellow all the way in the blanket.

Here are the two simple charts, made using Chart Minder. All the coloured squares set into the green will be 6mm beads, hooked in to the green yarn. The three dotted colours on a plain background is an approach that Debbie Abrahams uses to communicate bright spots of textured colour, and I see no reason not to replicate it.

I hope to get going on these before too long because – fanfare – the hand is getting better. I reckon another week of enforced stillness, or maybe two, if I can bear it. I am so bored in the evenings. I guess I could turn back to dressmaking for a while, but that was the Covid years. Or I could ‘read a book’, my mother’s unvarying solution for childhood boredom. But I use my brain all day at work. In the evening I want to use my hands. Thankfully, they’re very good at lifting a wine glass, which certainly gives me something to do, although I better get back to knitting soon or I’ll polish off my poor liver.

Other planned green squares are:

• BLM hedge – this will use garter stitch for the letters set within a standard stocking stitch background. I plan to use three shades of green beads dotted in the background area to give it the shimmer it deserves.
• Pink rose – outside number 19. I don’t want another simple colour-dot like the flower border above, but no other plan as yet.
• Monkey puzzle tree – I also don’t have ideas for how to make this one but I know I want to use the leaf shape for inspiration rather than the tree. I collected the brown fallen ends from the pavement beneath the tree some months ago. They’re beautiful and I’d love to do them justice.
• Brockwell Lido wisteria – this plant grows over the wall at the front of the Lido and across to the horse chestnut nearby. It is stunning when in flower. Rather than repeat the horse chestnut square, I could turn the ‘flowers’ on that chart upside-down and knit them in lilac.

Here they all are in life.

I will make another attempt at layout soon, to help me decide on how to balance the green so it isn’t over dominant, as there will be some in the corner park squares too. Green can be a bit brutal. The stucco and milder stone shades (ie not the Brockwell bricks) will create the main balance. I’m also thinking that the Poets Corner intarsia squares should be simple dark silhouettes on muted background shades rather than complex coloured images. That could leave me room to play with some ‘me, me, me’ colours for the shops and buses, but I will leave these until I have a better idea of how things are looking.

A drab note about the website. Two of my category links at the top of the site have stopped resolving to the intended web page. ‘FINAL squares + patterns’ is going to ‘page not found’ and the ‘Beginner’s fails’ isn’t working at all, although the link in the site’s introductory chat still works. If I’m taking baby steps with knitting design, I’m in the primordial soup with WordPress coding so it may take me a while to sort out – or more likely make worse. Perhaps I’ll be able to find someone who’s in the jet age on this stuff.