I decided while we were at Mass yesterday, that when the little bit of Jade Sapphire cashmere-and-silk laceweight that Karin is sending me, arrives, I will use it to swatch the Calcutta Cup which I have decided after all to knit into the Princess Shawl, when I finally get back to it. Thus killing two birds with one stone. Religion has its uses.

Janet, thank you for the link (in yesterday’s comment) to Jody’s enthusiasm for this yarn. I can hardly wait.

Here is the current state of the current shawl. The centre pattern is the Antique Centre Pattern, page 148 of "Heirloom Knitting". On the sides you see the Bead Lozenge Centre Pattern from page 88, and you can also see how it is being eaten away by the decreases. And that double scallop in the middle of the edging actually seems to coincide with the middle of the pattern. So all is well. There will be three more complete repeats of the centre pattern before I’m finished.







I fired up Stitch and Motif Maker yesterday and charted Mrs Laidlaw’s pattern, from Gladys Thompson’s “Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys and Arans”, for the sweater for Ketki that I’ve started to knit in Strathardle. Here is the swatch again, for reference. I discovered, making the chart, what should have been clear from knitting the swatch, that the elements of the pattern don’t coincide. The broken rib bar repeats over 4 rows, the diamonds over 12, the tree over 32, so that even when I have charted/knit all 46 rows as provided by Thompson, they haven’t lined themselves up as they were at the beginning.

I own both Sweater Wizard and Stitch and Motif Maker, use them rarely, love them when I do. Maybe I should upgrade.

Non-knit

I made a new start yesterday at scanning my mother’s yellowing mss about Mormons. I did just what I had done a couple of weeks ago, and the printer/ scanner went through all the motions and then produced a message saying, “An OCR application is provided for you on your CD in the OCR directory. Select OK to cancel this scan operation, install your OCR software, and try the scan again.” What CD? What has happened? I tried reinstalling the printer software, to no avail.

However, there is a happy ending. I wandered disconsolately around the computer for a while and discovered that Bill Gates will scan text for me, even if Mr Dell is no longer willing to. Click on the picture of the scanner-printer in the “Scanners and Cameras” section of the “My Computer” screen, and follow instructions. What’s more, the Gates way of doing it is perhaps more accurate, and produces an actual MS Word document, not the Rich Text Format stuff which was making me so cross before. So now I’ll start again – no great loss; not much has been done.