A rest from knitting, today. This is the picture which Alexander sent out recently to mark Thomas's six-month-ness. That is the way Thomas looks the instant before he realises that it's YOU, the very person he was waiting to see, and breaks out into a smile which will take him far in life.

The Clapotis advances. I'm supposed to do 13 repeats of the 12-row pattern for the centre section, and I've polished off nine of them, all but one row. Picture tomorrow, probably. It's comical how reluctant a stitch is to unravel, when you want it to, given the enthusiasm with which it bounds away when it escapes unnoticed. I keep picking away at the ladders, aiming to have each one done before it's time to drop the next stitch.

I also began thinking of future design yesterday, a pleasant mental exercise. I don't really mind thinking, I've decided,  except where it slows down actual knitting. The Merging Color sweater will be an EPS-type raglan. I've done that sort of thing in Fair Isle -- before ever I heard of EPS, indeed -- and what I would do there is calculate the sleeve length, after knitting the body to the armpits, and start the sleeve pattern so that it would be on the same row as the body, pattern-wise and colour-wise, when they got joined up.

Would I do it that way for MC? Or take the sleeve through the whole color sequence, speeded up if need be? (I'm assuming for the mo that sleeves are shorter than bodies -- maybe they aren't.) The former, I think, but it does need thought. Meanwhile I didn't get much Pioneer wound (see yesterday).

Non-knit

I spent yesterday afternoon dealing with the pile of mail which accumulated while we were away recently. How on earth does anyone manage the details of life if they've got anything else to do, such as children or a job or both? By not justifying bank statements, is one way. I had spent the morning, similarly, preparing an armload of mail for dispatch -- including the Fair Isle jacket, now on its way to Rachel in London. They've closed our local; post office, a great loss, so whenever anything needs over-the-counter attention it's worth worth wrapping up everything in sight and making one trip up the hill for everything.

Rachel doesn't have a digital camera, so we'll have to wait awhile to see how bad the neckline looks on her.