The Communion veil is moving along. I've done 29 rows of 182, and it's one of those patterns with plain rows in between the fancy ones. Yarn and needles are getting on well together. It's not entirely easy, but it's not terribly hard either.

The dark yarn, of course, is to hold the stitches until I'm ready to put the edging on. I learned how to do a proper temporary cast-on with a crochet hook when I was knitting Candace Strick's Harmony pattern last year. Her patterns are brilliantly lucid, and that one included a number of useful techniques. But this time I didn't bother. It'll be a bit harder to un-pick.

We're all right on the stitch count. I cast on 47 stitches for each of the side panels, and now I have 59 -- but that's what's supposed to happen. I either hadn't noticed, the last time I did it, or had completely forgotton. I can now "read" lace well enough that when I'm a stitch out here or there, either too many or too few, I can compensate in the right place. I was pretty old before I acquired that skill.

I emailed my four children with the link to Franklin's latest cartoon. Alexander said rather bitterly on the telephone the other day, when we had finished the Daddy's-birthday conversation, that it didn't apply to him because I hadn't knit anything for him since Late Forty-eight. I'll have to give that one some thought for the 2006 wish-list. Maybe those yarns I bought recently from ebay for KF's "Magyar" pattern...

Non-knit

The Mytob virus followed its familiar weekend routine again -- I had all Saturday off, and much of Sunday, and they began coming in thick and fast in the early evening yesterday. Presumably it's a virus which manages not to trouble its host too much.

We had the Jamie Oliver sausage thing (see yesterday) last night -- I froze the extra sausages, meant for James and Kirsty. It was good, but slightly too complicated for an evening where everyone is tired and happy and excited. I'll have to think again for Thursday, when they should really be here.