Yesterday saw a virtual orgy of knitting, to make up for Thursday’s desert.

My husband went to bed in mid-morning, and one of the best of our carers was here, so I sequestered myself in the sitting room and knit for an hour. Knitting in the morning seems to me almost as wicked as watching television in the afternoon. I finished the central square of the Hansel hap, and picked up the stitches around it.

The system works beautifully – there are those large, obvious YO loops: and precisely the right number of them. The first round of actual knitting is slow, rather than difficult. I wanted to knit into the front of the picked-up stitches, to get that crossed-leg effect – and the way the stitches present themselves mean that the front is the more difficult leg to get hold of.

Next question: purling. I have decided to go on with it, rather than to wrap and turn so that every round is a knit round. Purling is all right, although not blissful. But the pattern is Old Shale which incorporates two plain-vanilla knit rounds in every six rounds of the pattern repeat. (The other four rounds are the lace round itself, and three purl rounds.) That should be enough bliss to keep me going.

There was trouble in the subsequent pre-pattern round, the one called, I think, the break round. I misread the instruction: *K1, (k2tog,yo) to 1 st before next marker; k1. I treated the initial “K1” as if it were inside the brackets, which it is not, and did K1, k2tog, yo all across the first side. The stitches didn’t come out right at the corner and I soon grasped my mistake.

I didn’t correct it. It will easily pass the galloping horse test, but there is no doubt that the other three sides look better.

I have now introduced the first coloured stripe and embarked on the Old Shale pattern itself. I had a brief moment of panic when doing the first purl round in the new colour, and seeing those wrong-side colour bumps on the other side. It took me a moment (during which I came close to ripping out half a round of perfectly good knitting) before I realised that, even though I was purling, I was working on the right side.

I’m having a grand time, and would be glad to go on knitting basic haps forever. Bring on the babies!

Other

The Feral Knitter is about to bring out a book, “The Joy of Colour”, based on the workshops she teaches on designing your own colour patterns and sweaters. I’m tempted, although there’s no room for more books around here.