Swapna has gone over to the new-style Blogger, too. This is all a bit like the Stepford Wives, or maybe I mean Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. I like the family pictures she’s now got in her sidebar, so yesterday I put in some of my own.

Knitting

I finished, perhaps, the body of the Calcutta Cup sweater as far as the armholes yesterday, and started the first sleeve.

That means I looked out sets of DP needles, a tedious chore. (I don’t like the two-circular solution. I keep finding that I’m knitting with the wrong end of the wrong needle, and it all gets into a tangle.) A few years ago, I bought this device for circulars in Cambridge, MA – from the very shop, I think, where Sean now works. It has saved me an immeasurable amount of both tedium and time. I need a similar solution for DP’s. It was a topic often discussed on the Knitlist, but none of the ideas really grabbed me.

There is a review in the current Economist (where else?) of a book called “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder”. Procrastination is praised, as well as physical disorder, and we are told that the US Marines “never make detailed plans in advance. Leaving important things to the last minute reduces the risk of wasting time on things that may ultimately prove not important at all.”

Yes, but – as the reviewer says. It doesn’t work for surgery, or doing one’s income tax. But it nicely expresses my approach to life. I gave some thought yesterday to how many stitches I needed to cast on for the sleeve, consulting the Sweater Wizard and EPS. But I haven’t decided how to shape the sleeve increases, nor have I worked out – and it will have to be done very precisely – how long I want the sleeve to be, and therefore at what point in the pattern I must begin, to have it come out even with the body at the armholes.

Dear Spinning Fishwife, it is sad indeed that I didn’t know you had the Calcutta Cup last summer. I emailed the SRU after the Famous Victory, and learned that the Cup was going to travel around. I have paid at least some attention since, and logged in occasionally to their fairly useless website. (We’ve got the mug commemorating the victory in 2000, and hoped for another one.) I heard that the Cup had visited an Edinburgh Tesco’s – perhaps, who knows? it was my local one – and not only the Cup, but Chris Paterson with it. But I heard that after the event, too.

I should be brave and just ring them up and ask if I could go see it. In less than a month, now, it will almost certainly be transferred to Twickenham, and it may not return in my lifetime. And I am surely the only person in the universe who has knit it twice. (The other time was in granddaughter Kirsty’s Christening shawl – you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page.)

Other

Thanks for all the leads on luscious bedsocks. I mean to follow them up today.

Catriona, I’m awfully glad you’re going to knit that shawl. I must warn you that the first is the worst – Amedro begins, as with all her designs, by having you knit the entire edging. It’s not difficult, but it’s definitely tedious. When I did it for Archie Drake, I consciously thought of myself as helping him and my daughter through those early awful weeks of pregnancy, while God is knitting the baby. After that, you’re flying, and it feels as if the work is going faster and faster as you decrease towards the centre of the shawl, and the baby gets fatter and stronger.