Look what turned up in the mail yesterday, just as hoped:

It’s delicious, and pretty boring. The two ZephyrSpuns (one of them appears in ball-form in the picture above) seem to be settling in nicely amongst the Kidsilk Hazes. The current plan is to float forward in a Kidsilk haze until we go to London next week, and then come back and cast on Theo’s gansey, reverting to the Earth Stripe on weekends, perhaps.

There’s a big birthday looming in November which it would be nice to have Earth Stripes finished in time for, but they won’t be, and I never let myself stress about knitting to a deadline, so that’s that. It would be nice to have Theo’s gansey done while there’s still ’07-’08 snow in them thar hills, too. (See Theo's Family Blog, in my sidebar.) We shall see, on that one.

An hour will have to be found in the next few days to swatch the Araucania and feed the proper figures into Garment Styler.

Here’s the Shawlette, being blocked. I’m happy with it. Lest you think it looks a bit sloppy, Judy Pascale says not to finish off the loose ends until after blocking.

And as for the rest of the cashmere Koigu (one skein and a bit): Will my subscription to IK bring me the “Holiday Gifts Issue”? I never had such a thing in the past. But I’ve got to have Jared's hat pattern. That’s all there is to it.

Comments

Mary Lou and Shan: At the funeral, C’s daughter read the passage where the Mock Turtle tells Alice about his education, concluding with the Classical Master, an old crab, who taught Laughing and Grief. During the war, C. had been one of the brilliant young men who broke German codes at the now-semi-legendary Bletchley Hill. He loved word-play all his life. [There were brilliant people of both sexes at Bletchley Hill, and some may even have been middle-aged, but C. was a brilliant young man.]

And yes, Mary Lou, those KF socks would have been perfect mindless knitting on Monday evening, but I have got so in the way of regarding socks as things to knit when I’m not under one or the other of my own roofs, that it wouldn’t have Felt Right.

LibraryThing

I’m pressing on, up to 250 books with not many to go. Not all are strictly knitting. There are some on natural dyes, for example, and others on mosaics. This is the bookcase I’m currently dealing with, working across that bottom shelf. The entire bookcase, and the cupboards below, are full of knitting, but the rest is magazines and loose patterns and my own notes and I’m not going to try to catalogue that. Those three box files (you can only see two, but there are three) standing on the floor hold my beloved collection of Vogue Knitting Books.

It’s slow going now, because I’m down to the books I have to enter manually and also because this bookcase is a long way from the computer, unlike the other one, and books are remarkably heavy.