Nice, innit? Even in this somewhat fuzzy picture.

Yesterday I took the first three repeats of the Princess shawl edging pattern off the needles and blocked them. I am delighted with the result. I really like this yarn. I like this fabric. Yesterday, too, I broke through some sort of pain barrier, and I like the knitting more and more. Which is not to say that I have become any less slow and clumsy.

Trouble is, Sharon is right of course -- if I go on knitting the pattern as written in this yarn, I'll wind up with something that would cover the Millenium Dome. How many n's in "millenium"?

I think the thing to do is to forge on, however. It is easy enough to calculate that if I knit a mere 70 or 71 repeats of the edging, I will have a strip as long as Sharon got with 85. If I then pick up stitches along the straight edge, I will have enough stitches for nine "feathers" in the beautiful border, instead of Sharon's eleven. So far so good. I can't see any way to take any rows out of the border without desecration, so I'll wind up with a rectangular piece -- there doesn't seem to be any shaping in the border -- rather deeper than designed, but not grotesquely so. As I suspected, most of the discrepancy in the gauge between this yarn and the original, is in the stitch count. The row count is off too, but not nearly as much.

Then the border is ingeniously gathered, and attached to a triangular centre which starts effectively with a single stitch in the absolute centre of the central feather, and widens out. The re-sizing of that might take care of itself -- famous last words -- since I will start with fewer stitches. Finally there's a border across the top.

I will have years to read and re-read the pattern and think about these things as I go along, but go along is what I think I'll do. At least that's what I think this morning. I'll write a post for the Heirloomknitting group to which I belong, and which Sharon reads, so that she can cry out in horror if need be.

Meanwhile the ribbing for the tammy is finished, the crown increases done, and after a few more boring plain rows I should get to start some simple colour stuff today. Picture soon.

Vivat! Senator Biden

...who thinks the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay should be closed down.

What the EU needs, incidentally, is a body like the American Senate -- two or three people elected from each member state, and meeting in open session. At the moment we are run by the Commission which has members appointed by each member state, and which meets in camera.