Today is our daughter Rachel's 47th birthday. She was born in a Glasgow hospital and when they came round with the newspapers I bought an Express. I have it still. I looked up the horoscrope of my new baby and it said, "Not a day you will remember." That's worthy of the Delphic Oracle.

THREE kind people left comments about the tammy. Many, many thanks. Normally, as faithful readers will know, I don't log on when we are in the country. The computer there is for my husband's work, and never connecting to the internet seems to me the surest way to keep it virus-free.  But on the Fourth Saturday of August the house will be full of people with high-powered portables and wi-fi and bluetooth and God knows what, and I will make use of one of them to log on to Blogger and tell you the fate of the tammy.

And Daisy wrote directly (jean@jeanmile.demon.co.uk) to suggest coloured Boye circulars for the Princess shawl, because of the way the stitches will show up against the colours. I am very grateful for the suggestion, and am earnestly pursuing a source. I will order long circulars in both 2mm and 2.25 sizes.

Striped Koigu for Thomas-the-Younger

I didn't get much done yesterday. I must at least finish the ribbing before my cataract is done on Saturday.

Princess Shawl

That, on the other hand, moves forward nicely in the gossamer yarn. I've done three repeats but won't dress it yet because I can't bear to give it up, even for a few hours.

After the first two repeats, I decided that the result really was going to be slightly smaller than Sharon's prototype, so I thought I'd do the third repeat on a 2.25mm needle just to see. Well, that needle is dull grey and not as sharp as my nice shiny Chinese 2mm so things progressed not quite as well, but I stuck at it and suddenly, inexplicably found myself in the middle of a major disaster. I still can't understand what went wrong. It was not easy to recover any sort of locus standi. Apart from the obvious problems, the yarn sort of sticks to itself and is hard to unravel.

You'll be able to see the faulty bit clearly when I finally dress and photograph it. Meanwhile I went back to the nice Chinese needle and all is going well again. Maybe it doesn't really matter if my shawl is only eight feet across the top instead of nine.