Onwards – as somebody once said.

Last night, progressing peacefully through row 6 of the 10th repeat of the Princess centre, I came to a pretty horrendous hole, all my own making, much worse and in a more conspicuous place than the moth damage I may or may not have discovered yesterday. I think it was a k3tog from which one stitch had escaped, a few rows down.

I secured the stitches and put the work aside. Today I’ll have to try to fix it, and to finish the row, and then that’s, I think, that, for now. The package at the Post Office yesterday was Ketki’s Araucania yarn (from The Craft Cottage – excellent service). While my sister is here, I’ll knit Alexander’s socks, if at all. Then the sweater.

I’ve obviously bought far too much yarn (no wonder it seemed expensive) – I could tell that from the weight of the package, as I walked home from the sorting office. I will certainly need to do a swatch cap, because I want to retain as far as possible the lovely drape I’m getting on my Araucania sweater in Strathardle, and that could mean trying different needle sizes.

Odds and ends

Chronic Knitting Syndrome and I are going to a Habu trunk show and workshop at K1 Yarns towards the end of November; should be fun.

If you follow the link, you can see CKS’s pinwheel shawl/blanket, which is enough to make us all drop what we’re doing and knit that.

My order of Franklin’s Guys With Yarn calendar has arrived. I guess I could wish that it were spiral-bound, but it’s pretty wonderful anyway.

The new Knitting magazine(the UK mag) has turned up, too – it gets better and better without ever quite becoming compulsive. There’s an attractive big cabled scarf in the Christmas supplement.

Comments

Judith, the Palin as President page is delicious; many thanks for that. Although to do the woman justice, I gather she got cross at all the fuss about her Neiman Marcus clothes, stopped wearing them, and now appears in jeans. In which, it has to be admitted, she looks good.

Angel, it is interesting what you say about the free-range farm on the outskirts of Oberlin which butchers its own animals. The European Union made rules about abattoirs some years ago which meant that many small ones (including an excellent pork butcher in Blairgowrie) were forced to close, and that animals, therefore, often now have to travel much further to be slaughtered.

Mr Dorward’s chickens were very good, like everything he sold. They weren’t labelled “free range” or “organic” or “corn-fed” or anything, but they tasted wonderful and the juices jelled. I complimented him on them once. He had been getting them from the same supplier for many years, he said, and he thought a lot of the difference lay in the way they were killed.