Big day today.

The picture that might be an early effort by ??????? (but the auctioneer doesn’t believe it) comes up for sale this morning. We’ve left a bid. Some auctioneers update their on-line catalogues with the hammer price as the sale proceeds. Not this one. We’ll have to ring up.

And Kristie gets to Edinburgh. I hope we’ll make contact this evening and meet tomorrow.

Knitting

I’ve finished Thomas’s first sleeve, and made good initial progress with the second. I’m reasonably satisfied with the upper circumference of the first. Gauge seems to have settled down at 5.5 sts to the inch (not 5 as in the swatch) and the body will be calculated on that basis.

Ron – is the move to Canada permanent? – it’s funny about that yarn. Regia could perfectly well have achieved the colour-effects with their usual firm-twisted sock yarn. Why didn’t they?

Can anyone help? I first heard of KF “Hand-dye effect” in a pattern in VK, within the last two years I should hope, towards the back of the magazine, quite plain, I think using two different shades of the yarn in stripes, perhaps with a boat neck. Does anyone know where it is exactly? I looked up the yarn on Ravelry yesterday and browsed the projects. Lots of wonderful socks and some stunning shawls, but I saw no sweaters at all.

Stash

I am very grateful indeed for your offers of help. It would be wonderful if you would take some of it to the p/hop yarn swap, Fishwife. You could take some of the lace – plenty of hop’s for relatively little space in the car. And somewhere I have a bag of Candace Strick’s Merging Colors which she ran off for me specially, a sweater’s worth, but I know I’ll never knit it now.

I looked at the p/hop site but they seemed more interested in having you knit than in having you contribute stash. Everybody’s got stash. I’ll look again. Wren, I don’t think I’m organised enough yet to be photographed, but I am extremely grateful for the offer. I spent ten minutes in there this morning, looking for the Merging Colors without success. (Have I already given it away?) And came out depressed, as usual, and determined to put things into better order.

Is this a factor of advancing age? At some unnoticed moment, a tipping point was passed. I can’t knit all that stuff. There isn’t time.

Non-knit

I assume that what happened was that the Latin word for “weigh” – pendo – segued into meaning “think” (reasonably enough) in Italian and other Romance languages. I love your idea, Tamar, that there might be a different word for trivial, frivolous thinking.