This is yet another

This is yet another attempt to improve formatting. I’ve downloaded a little program from Blogger which works as an add-on to Microsoft Word and may enable me both to embed photographs and to have real, grown-up hyperlinks.

Let’s try a photograph. (image placeholder) All right, up to a point. The next thing to figure out, is how to move it left or right, but we’ll leave it here for the moment. This is a picture of Alistair Miles (some years ago), James’s son, wearing a sweater I sort of designed, called an “Archie”. You’ll find the pattern on my website – hey, that seems to work. The beauty of it is, you don’t have to swatch or indeed to have any idea at all how many stitches you’re going to need. You just start, and knit diagonally until it’s big enough.

I never did knit one for Archie (Helen’s son).

Hit-counting

I had 110 hits yesterday (fewer than the incomplete count on Friday – maybe lots of people log-on from work). That’s more than I expected. I would have been satisfied with 30, delighted by 50. Many of them are blood relatives, of course. I have tried to resist the temptation of having a look myself, several times a day, just to see if there are any comments.

I think Joe is wrong, however, to make number-of-hits and number-of-links important criteria in his new Knitting Blog Awards. Part of the point should be to find and reward blogs that blush unseen.

Knitting

The veil advances. I’ll photograph it again before we go on London on Thursday. I’m now doing the penultimate repeat of the side-panel pattern and may, therefore, have finished the main body of the thing before we leave. It will still have to be edged, of course. I live in a constant state of anxiety about mis-counting the mesh in the central part and thus mis-aligning the big motif, but so far all is well. I’m now pretty sure that two balls of Sharon Miller's Merino Lace are going to be enough, so I went ahead and ordered one more.

In the side panels, the decreases and the increases are not adjacent to each other, for the most part, and that makes it unusually hard to figure out what has gone wrong, when something has. It can be difficult enough, in lace, because of the increases and decreases, to figure out exactly which stitches of the row below you ought to be knitting now, and when they are separate, the difficulty increases.

There was an article in the Waffy yesterday which said that “little jackets make even women who are quite small look as if they have rhino flanks for bottoms.” I think she was thinking more of a bolero-shape than something like the boxy Kate Gilbert jacket in IK, but it’s another strike against it, in addition to the curling-edge-problem mentioned yesterday. I’ve been reading about facings in my books and it all sounds rather difficult.

Now, let’s see if I can publish this right here from Word….