Not far into row 122. So when I finish it, there will be only 98 rows (of the border) remaining to do. As Churchill might have said of the battle of El Alamein, I'm somewhere near the end of the beginning. The next little landmark will be row 138, when I finish page two and turn to the third and final page of the border chart. Not this week, though.



All this thinking about VKB’s set me to poking around in the cupboard. I came up with a Vogue Children’s book from 1969 (there’s actually a copyright date, in teeny tiny print). This pattern was a turning point in my knitting career. I had recently got hold of Mary Thomas’ Knitting Book in some library, and learned from it to knit two-handed and weave in the yarn-not-in-use without letting go.



I knit this pattern for Rachel, who was 11 in 1969. I knit it twice, as I remember. I can’t remember the process of translating book-larnin’ to my actual fingers, but as I knit that yoke, it happened. Like learning to ride a bicycle. My Fair Isle knitting career started there.

Marni (comment yesterday), no, I’m not aiming to knit the more famous Prince of Wales sweater, which as I remember is a conventional Fair Isle with bands of different patterning. I want to reproduce the trick in the portrait-sweater I illustrated day before yesterday, Wednesday, where the all-over pattern seems to flow without a break over the entire garment.

I thought for a while yesterday about changing an Argyle pattern until it was vertically and horizontally symmetrical – that is, until it had as many rows as stitches in a pattern repeat. Then after a while I abandoned that notion, and returned to my original choice, the bottom pattern on page 62 of Starmore’s “Fair Isle Knitting Handbook”. It will suit the purpose well, and has the advantage of having an even number of stitches/rows in the repeats which will facilitate the handling of cruces like the underarm problem I was fretting about yesterday.

So it’s getting on for time to get the Shetland yarn boxes out and start thinking about colour. I'm thinking of basing the scheme on this portrait by Giovanni Bellini which we saw in London earlier this year. But nothing has been settled yet.



Odds and Ends

No serious bidding yet on any of the five VKB’s that I and Helen as my agent are going to bid on, on Saturday afternoon. No bidding at all, on three of them.

In a happy exchange for my suggestion yesterday that everybody visit The McVlog, Helen sent me this link: http://www.jacksonpollock.org/ Don’t miss. You’ve got to click on it.

Did you see the comment from Daniel McVicar yesterday? I’m sure he’s clever enough to have generated it automatically as soon as one of my readers followed the link to his Blog, and I know that at least one did. But I feel as if I’ve been noticed by the captain of the football team.