Whew – 51 all out!

I’ve done 12 ½ rows of Princess since I resumed work on her, and am feeling a bit bogged down. I think there are about 200 rows to go, in the centre (followed by the top edging). The lack of a solid count is depressing. When I was doing the initial edging, I knew I had to do 85 repeats. However slow the work, I knew exactly where I was. Similarly with the border – there are 220 rows (or whatever), and I knew which one I had just done and which came next.

Now, I am swimming stoutly towards the shore, but I have little or no idea how far away it is.

At the end of every repeat, it is my practice to

1) count the stitches I’ve got on the needle; figure out how many there should be, and compare the figures. It’s never quite right.
2) Apply Cynthia’s Formula, to see what percentage of the centre I’ve done;
3) Eyeball the progress of the centre vis a vis the border, to see if the two sides look roughly even.

When I finish the current repeat – the 10th -- I think I will also try to count the stitches remaining to be picked up and work out how many of them there should be. I tried to count them yesterday – they’re on waste yarn, and it’s not entirely easy – and got rather alarmingly different answers for the two sides.

Onward!

Travel

Janet, I hope you get away on your journey all right. I see from your blog that there’s been snow in Dublin. We didn’t have any here yesterday after all.

I can’t entirely comfort myself with the thought that there will be no such difficulty in July, remembering the summer’s day 18 months ago when Rachel’s younger son Joe was flying to Washington for what proved a very happy holiday with Theo; and Alistair Miles of Beijing was flying from Boston to London alone, at the end of a holiday with my sister.

And London and the south of England were hit with torrential rain, a veritable monsoon.

Rachel and Joe abandoned their car at Clapham Junction and got to Heathrow by train, late but not too late. Meanwhile Alistair’s mother Cathy couldn’t get there, starting from Cornwall, so phoned Rachel who, being at Heathrow anyway, was able to meet Alistair. All was well that ended well, but an anxious time was had by all.