Mostly Comments, today

Stash Haus, I don’t at a glance see how to search the IWOOT website by personality, just by price. There are enough miserable gits on my list that I’d like to try. So far, as is my wont with Xmas shopping, I’ve been working with the paper catalogue, turning down the corners of pages. I’ll order on-line in the end.

Jane-Beth, it is more than slightly unnerving to learn that you passed us as we were setting forth on our afternoon expedition yesterday. Two worlds colliding. I wish you had spoken, although my husband would have been disconcerted.

It was certainly us – the man in the anorak said he was from the media dept of Belfast University, maybe he even said he was a professor. He was trying to identify the locations in which the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was made. He had all of them except one, in which a little girl leaves a house – Miss Brodie’s house? – and runs along a road towards some park-like greenery. He showed us the clip on a digital camera. We couldn’t help. The whole episode was so improbable that he must have been genuine.

Donice, I love the Claudia hat. The Ravelry link is to your projects page, because your photograph of it is brilliant, but it is easy enough from there to find the free pattern. It reminds me slightly of a hat pattern in Vibeke Lind’s “Knitting in the Nordic Tradition” (love that book) which I knit once for my sister, where stripes of colour swirl and merge as the ribs do in Claudia.

I’m not absolutely sure that one repeat a day is quite enough for the Mysterious Christmas Project. I may step it up a bit, for the sake of moving on to other delights. I’m keeping its progress bar up to date.

One of my Christmas problems is unexpected, and rather disconcerting. I keep an Xmas spreadsheet of presents. It goes back many years now, and can spare me embarrassing repetitions. Last year, I have Ketki down for “slouch hat?”, Kirsty Miles of Beijing for “Meg’s hat” (what was that?), and Greek Helen for a watchcap. I don’t remember knitting any of those things, and suspect that they were supplanted and that the list was never brought up to date. But can I be sure?

There is other knitting recorded, which I do remember: The Rowan Earth Stripe stole in ’07 for Hellie Ogden (that’s when I resolved never to touch KidSilk Haze again), the Lynne Barr “Ribbed Links” scarf from “Knitting New Scarves” that same year for her sister Lizzie. I clearly remember knitting both of those.

Stash Haus, I like your stash-limiting rules. I think my stash largely grows from the feeling that I-may-not-be-able-to-get-it-later. (How long will Regia go on marketing KF sock yarn? Merely phrasing the question tempts me to order a few more colourways.) And from buying-too-much-to-be-on-the-safe-side.

As for the ASJ, it inches forward. Scarcely that, but it’s moving. I now have only 9 more increase rows – 18 rows of knitting – before I have as many stitches on the needle as I started with. But there will still be another 25 increase rows – 50 rows of knitting, on lots of stitches – before the mitering is finished. Pic soon.