A comment yesterday from Rabbitch herself! I am honoured.

Lorna sent me that picture of a nudibranch, Cat. She says on the pattern itself that you can go to Google and tell it that you want images and type in “nudibranch” and you’ll get no end of colour combinations.

We’re going to Kirkmichael today. The weather isn’t bad, outside the window; and the forecast is reasonable, if chilly. We should be back by the weekend. Blogging will resume maybe Saturday, maybe Sunday. I think it’s probably too cold to plant potatoes, and I’m worried about taking them up – they’re currently chitting on the dining room floor – if I’m then going to have to leave them behind for the mice to eat.

It’ll be good to get away from computer and TV. I’m getting square-eyed with all those endnotes. I knocked off 26 files yesterday, including some lavishly-noted ones devoted to the artist’s own magnum opus. The pons asinorum of the job, I feel, but there’s still a long way to go.

I had a good evening, too, getting to grips with the two lace patterns in my sister’s shawl. Sharon has graded the one in the wings, I notice, at four stars, and the centre-panel one at five, which is flattering. All goes well. It’ll get more complicated when I finish the first passage through one or the other, because they don’t have the same number of rows in a repeat. If it gets tough, I can always photocopy the pages and cross rows off.

The centre panel remains intact throughout, while the ones which form the wings decrease rapidly, one stitch at either end of each (therefore, four stitches in all) on every right-side row. At first one knits along without noticing or thinking about it, and then one discovers quite suddenly that the decreases have added up and are making themselves felt – rather like the years of one’s life.

Angel, that’s an interesting question about lace yarns. I think my first choice is merino wool. The best I ever used was some I bought in Beijing three years ago and used for Hellie's shawl. I’m knitting my sister’s shawl at the moment – and, indeed, the Princess itself – with two different merino yarns from Heirloom Knitting.

But I’ve never used a fine luxury yarn. The experience must be wonderful – did you enjoy it? And how is the result? I knit a sweater with alpaca once, and it stretched to my knees after a couple of wearings. But lace-weight, obviously, isn't as heavy and shouldn’t have that problem. I bought some completely unlabelled lace-weight yarn in Beijing, four different colours, and I wonder now whether it could even be cashmere. I keep trying to think of some good projects for it.

I’ve used lace-weight Shetland yarn, from Jamieson and Smith’s, and I liked that too. What I didn’t like was Shetland cobweb yarn. That’s what Amedro specifies for her “cobweb lace wrap”, the pattern which provides the shape for my sister’s shawl, and that’s what I used the first time I knit it. The result was perfectly successful, but the yarn is unplyed and tends to break. There are plenty of much stronger, plyed yarns out there – including the ones from Heirloom Knitting.

The Italians seem to be thinking about re-introducing the death penalty. They have had a couple of nasty murders lately. Their present sentence – which I hope they’ll stick with – is ergastolo, a pure Latin word.