Well, I've resumed Rams & Yowes, and am enormously grateful for your help, although not without thinking again of the Miller, His Son, and the Donkey. Did I ever thank you properly for locating that story for me?

Gerri, you're right that a single-thickness border would be inconsistent with the essential doubleness of the centre, which is, at the moment, stiff as a board. I hadn't thought of that. I very much like your thought, Ellen, that a doubled border could be st st instead of garter. Why not? It would even be a little bit lighter, certainly pleasanter to knit without all those alternate purl rounds.

Pattie in Genesco, I like your idea of doing the hem by picking up in advance on a fine, long needle, the stitches one is going to attach to. Perhaps counting them off in tens or twenties and placing markers, to ensure that the numbers match the stitches on the main needle. The tendency for this operation to come out squint, in my hands, must mean that stitches are being missed somewhere. I've got plenty of fine, long needles, too, because of all this lace.

Willow, I read your comment only after I had posted this. Many thanks. I'll address it tomorrow.

I have laid out the nine colours on the sofa, in what I hope is the right order – that is, the order in which they are listed in Kate Davies' key. I was much helped by the pictures on your stash page, Mrs. A. Now it is to be hoped that no one will come to see us for a while who needs to be invited to sit on the sofa. [Follow the link to Mrs. A's blog for an account of Rams-and-Yowes-knitting even more adventure-fraught than mine.]

There's an additional dimension to my identification of the colours – I don't just need to match them up with Jamieson & Smith and Kate Davies, I also need to have them match the choices I made when knitting the first third of the pattern. And I started off yesterday by discovering an old mistake.

This part of the pattern consists of four ranks of yowes' heads. The background shade changes halfway through each yowe. I found that when I laid the work aside, I was nearly finished with the first rank of yowes in the final section of the pattern. [I can see your eyes glazing over. You need a picture – there's a link yesterday to the Ravelry page, or you could click on the link above, to Mrs. A.]

And the background colour was wrong – wrong, that is, in that it doesn't match the background I used for the equivalent yowe in the first section of the pattern. This time (if I've identified the colours correctly) I seem to be using mooskit where I should have gaulmogot. I must have done it in the dark days towards the end of 2013, but that's not much of an excuse.

I don't think it's a fatal error. In any event, I'm plunging on. But the sequence of background colour-shifts will be a bit awry in this section. And if I use mooskit again where it is really specified, I may run short of it in the border. But if I use gaulmogot there, the sequence will be even more awry. Decisions, decisions.

(Ah, but if I go ahead, as adumbrated above, and knit the border double, there is room for a certain amount of fudge, gaulmogot-for-mooskit, on the return half.)

I must have said when I got back from my glorious long weekend in Shetland last year, that Shetland sheep were not as easy to spot as one might expect. Shetland ponies were everywhere. There were plenty of sheep-sheep, but not many flocks like the one in my signature picture above. We were told that the Shetland breed is rather small, and even on Shetland, sheep are primarily reared for meat these days so other breeds are more profitable.