Today’s knitting news is in Fleegle’s blog. A most remarkable project, a most remarkable achievement. I hope she – they -- will consider putting it in journalistic form. A knitting magazine should publish it – maybe the British “Knitting”, if IK isn’t interested -- and so should the Scotsman and/or the Shetland Times.

I found I didn’t even know what continent Fleegle lives on. She’s just a Super Knitter in my mental address book. I’ve trawled back a bit: she’s American.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....

A good day of hat-knitting here. I should start the crown decreases today.

Thinking of the future: James and Cathy gave me some yarn for Christmas last year. It’s pretty fine, lace-weight. It’s called “Gold skin soft cashmere” – “Lightness, Softness, Comfort, Conservation”. (No goats were harmed in the making of this yarn? Or what?) Cathy said it isn’t, in fact, cashmere. It's pretty darn soft, whatever.

Until yesterday I thought half of the box was red, the other black. Yesterday, suddenly, in the horizontal winter sunlight, I saw that the dark balls are a deep brown-y purple. Wow.

I spent some time with the books, and I think I have chosen VLT’s romantically-named “Large Rectangle” as a scarf for myself. I’ll also offer the yarn to Greek Helen when she’s here in the summer – I think this has to be done in person – and we can discuss her lace shawl with stash spread around us.

I have some other Chinese lace-weight – unlabelled; I have wondered whether cashmere was involved. I bought it myself in a little shop. I think I thought, that day, that it was jumper-weight and I could meld it into my Shetland stash for future Fair Isles. But it’s not. The greenery-yallery shade seems utterly Chinese. I’d like to use it.



The colours are totally bleached out by the flash, even on the doorstep in what passes for natural light around here in late November. Interesting, though, that the dark yarn in the box is patently not black when photographed. I suspect there’s a year’s knitting right there, without venturing back into the house.

I was in the shop in Beijing that day with James – we had just happened to pass it, somewhere – buying black lace yarn to knit an Amedro-Cobweb-Evening-Wrap for Hellie. She had asked for one like the one I knit for her mother Rachel’s 40th birthday (how long ago!) and was completely unimpressed with what I could offer from stash. Black was clearly the new black, that year, for London’s teenagers.

I think I have enough left over of the (wonderful, as it proved) yarn I bought for that project to knit another one. The other skeins I threw in, as one does, because I wasn’t likely to pass that way again.

Non-knit

My next job, now that the income tax is filed, is to get started on the Christmas cards. It’s already late. Yesterday I got the 2008 pile out and sorted them into USA/Strathardle/rest of world/never-heard-of-him. But I didn’t get as far as actually writing one myself. Today I must.