I don’t care much for football (as you will have surmised) – but this is something special. Go, Hibs!

Well, the yarn arrived – the Buachaille for “Miss Rachel’s Yoke” -- and it’s wonderful so everything is all right. At least on that front.

Kate Davies’ “Moder Dy” hap is indeed enormous. I think the reason is that Buachaille is really a bit too large a yarn for a traditional hap pattern. I suspect the pattern could be knit very successfully in jumper-weight yarn (as KD herself suggests in yesterday’s blog).

It would be fun to try “Moder Dy” with Jamieson & Smith’s “Shetland Heritage” yarn, and indeed that may be the path I will go down. But I am thinking of this, not as something to huddle under myself, but as a blankie for the Next Baby – there’s bound to be one, sooner or later. So I may stick with Buachaille.

(It turns out that that word is no harder to spell than many another, if one puts one’s mind to it. Pronunciation is another matter.)

And while we’re thinking about Shetland – the Shetland Textile Museum, at the Bod of Gremista on the edge of Lerwick, has just opened for the season with an exhibition called “Fair Isle Makes Its Mark”; by “Fair Isle” meaning the island of that name, not just the style of colour-work. The exhibition traces the history of knitting on Fair Isle. All this and Whalsay too!

I have knit on, as hoped, and finished the (enormous) centre section of the Neap Tide shawl, and begun the decreases on the far side. They are achieved with K3tog’s, always a difficult stitch. I am being very careful. It’s the middle stitch which tends, with me, to lurk quietly while I knit the next few rows and then make a sudden and disastrous bid for freedom.

I think I have spotted the place where there are two repeats in which the decreases will have to slow down. Soon the decreases will begin to make themselves felt, and the work will seem to go faster. When I reach those two repeats, I’ll count stitches and calculate.