No, still no yarn. I begin to be a teensy bit worried. But the website says they post Royal Mail second class.

Today’s teaser for the Hap Book is a design by Kate herself – “Moder Dy”. A pretty traditional hap, pretty wonderful. I can see it elbowing its way to the top of my queue as soon as available. Yesterday’s teaser hap from Carol Feller can be purchased right away, as an individual pattern; for this one, you have to wait for the book. I deduce that the contributors have retained their own copyrights from the beginning.

I spent some happy time yesterday clicking on links from Kate Davies’ post about the book, leading me soon to Ella Gordon and her blog post (May 8) about the exhibition of “Fair Isle Knitting Through the Decades” at the Whalsay Heritage Centre. It is enough to decide one to abandon one’s responsibilities forthwith and go to Whalsay next week. Kristie, what about it?

Ella has posted lots of good pictures. Some of the designs are extremely interesting. There is a vest on which the patterns appear to be diagonal – knit on the bias? The two fronts don’t seem to match all that well. The back, viewed in reverse through the v-neck, seems to have horizontal patterning. An interesting idea, less than perfectly worked out?

Quite a few – not a majority, but more than one might have expected – have patterns arranged vertically.

For actual knitting here in Edinburgh, on with the Neap Tide. No more unpicking of the Sous Sous – my little knitting scissors have been tidied away somewhere; I’m sure they’ll re-emerge soon. I should finish the long, long straight section of the Neap Tide shawl today, and begin the descent on the other side. On the way up, I knit almost all of the repeats with increases on every right-side row. But for two of them, the increases were only every fourth row, as specified in the pattern – I soon realised that if I went on like that, it would be a dreadfully long time before I achieved the desired width. And I didn’t grasp that, since I was also falling far short on row gauge, I might as well go on with the gentle increase.

So now my task is to find those two, so that I can balance them as I go downhill.

I am rather inclined at the moment to carry on with this shawl until I finish it, rather than trying to fit it into a scheme with other projects.