Marcella in the Netherlands has joined our SuDoku-along, and anyone else interested is more than welcome. Write to me: jeanatmilesandmiles.demon.co.uk. So far, all that is happening is that we are contemplating the puzzle posted yesterday without making any progress at all. The idea is that if anyone can place a number, s/he will share it with the others with the reason so that we can all move forward together.

I'm not entirely stupid. I did the one labelled "Tough" in yesterday's Telegraph before breakfast. But this one utterly defeats me.

On another matter, my son Alexander has provided me with some HTML code for my Blogger template which provides me with a hit-count, i.e., a tally of how many people visit this Blog. Most of them of course are me, having a look during the day to see if there are any comments. Putting the new code in has for some reason removed the Haloscan comment facility. Until Alexander tells me how to get that back, we are reduced to Blogger's own comments.

Back to our Knitting

Thank you for your very helpful comments yesterday, Mar, about vest-designing. I saw them before Haloscan disappeared. I should have remembered myself that I could get a good idea of the yardage needed by regarding sleeves as 1/3 of the total of a sweater. I think for the moment I will move the idea to a back burner until I can re-unite myself with Vicky Square's Knitting Great Basics, an invaluable resource. I'm pretty sure I don't have enough yarn. I could buy some more and stripe it!

Joe (www.queerjoe.blogspot.com) said yesterday that he had had coffee recently with my friend Selma, lucky man, and they talked about the new IK. They liked the Kate Gilbert pattern which I recently mentioned being tempted by myself. Having my taste vindicated in such an august circle greatly increases the chances that I'll one day knit it.

On my way home from Sainsbury's yesterday, I suddenly realised why I was having trouble with the stitch count at one repeating point in the Communion veil. The picture is not so much to show progress, although there's been a bit, as to illustrate the point.

Kinzel has a four-stitch selvedge at either edge. I have substituted a two-stitch edge (yo, k2tog at the beginning of every row, and k2tog at the end, to create a picot edge to which a lace edging will eventually be attached. I have tried to arrange this picture so that you can see a few of the loops.)

So I pay no attention to Kinzel's four stitches.

But what suddenly struck me was that on that one row only, the selvedge edge must be taking one stitch from the side panel, and at the other side (of the side panel) the centre panel must be eating a stitch as well. Sure enough, that's it.

I have fudged the earlier occurances well enough that the mistakes are invisible, I think, but from here on out, I'll do it right. Alexander is a brilliant cook-- one of his maxims is: read the recipe all the way through before you start. The same might well be said to apply to knitting.