Merging Colors

That's what the package was, all right -- and there's a (washed-out) pic of the contents. The Adagio shawl on Candace' website will provide an idea of the effect (www.strickwear.com), but I want to do a sweater. That's going to involve -- as well as a lot of ball-winding -- working out pretty closely in advance how many rows there will be in the finished item. But I've done that in my day for Fair Isle patterns; it's not impossible, and will indeed impose a certain attention to detail before I start.

That won't be until I've done the Clapotis (we're roughly half-way), the hat for my Games entry, and the negative-image striped Koigu for grandson Thomas-the-Younger's first birthday. All relatively quick projects.

The sweater will be for me, unless my husband deems it Unsuitable. He has become very adroit recently at whisking away FO's which he deems to fall into that category. I did the Round Trip jacket (Knitters', Fall '03) for example, for the simple love of the pattern and of Noro Kureyon. Just the thing for Cathy, he said, and off it went to Beijing. That would have been too small for me anyway. Then there was the Striped Fringe scarf from IK -- I don't have a note of the issue to hand -- where the vertical stripes disconnected from each other to form a fringe at either end. That went to a neice.

Non-Knit

I've been re-reading my mother's thrillers. The first, A Talent for Murder, is really rather good, even after all these years. The second,. Murderer's Choice, begins with a brilliant McGuffin -- I hope I'm using that technical term correctly -- but is rather dull thereafter, and the ending, which turns on a confusion between woody nightshade and deadly nightshade, is simply bad botany. Mother was fully as confused on the subject as her characters. (The McGuffin is this: the book begins with a meeting between two cousins, who hate each other. The rich one tells the poor one that he has made him his heir, and also taken out a huge insurance policy on his life with his cousin as beneficiary. He means to commit suicide, he says, in a way that will look as if his poor cousin had murdered him. So far so good, but the real brilliance is to follow: when the serious action of the book begins, the rich cousin has been dead for six months, apparently of natural causes, and not the slightest suspicion falls on the poor cousin. He can't stand the suspense, and consults a private detective.)

I've gone on to the third, Sin of Angels, which starts reasonably well. My mother's name was Anna Mary Wells, and her books are available on Abebooks.