Gosia and I had a successful day yesterday, much helped by an excited cat as beds were stripped and mattresses turned. I must still do a bit more hoovering – my new, wonderful cordless vacuum cleaner has a relatively short attention span; it gave out on us. And I must iron some towels; buy some flowers; think what to feed them. That can all be managed.

Knitting consisted – again – only of progress with the Whiskey Barrel sock, but that went well. A nurse, seeing me at it, said that the Royal Infirmary always wants baby hats, in all baby sizes, not just for preemies. I suspect that such garments are treated as disposable like almost everything else in the NHS these days. Still, I thought I’d mention it, and might even do it.

The promised update on the Vintage Shetland Project turned up, and, sure enough, the book isn’t ready for the printer. We can wait – we’re used to it, by now.

Susan is worried, as she was well before the diagnosis, about the effort of sending out the books, and I am, again, a bit cross.

“Also from a personal perspective, if I time the publication correctly at the right point between treatments I will:

a)       physically be able to cope with preparing, packing and dispatching of so many books with becoming exhausted.”

She’s had our money for over a year now. Indeed, the long delay is largely our fault – we crowd-funded so much that she was able to delay publication (originally, November, 2015) and go back to Shetland several times and do more work on the book.  There are workarounds for this final problem – help can be recruited, hired, volunteered. Ill or not, she owes us, and grumbles are unseemly.

Something completely different

This fell out of a cupboard the other day, from my Fair Isle Period. I think it’s the one for which I collected bits of grass and heather in Strathardle one summer and then tipped them out on the counter in Art Needlework Industries in Ship Street in Oxford, and said, “I want to knit that”, and the assistant calmly brought me the yarn.

The colours are arranged on a system given as “the second type of Shetland design” in Odham’s Encyclopedia of Knitting, where the “background colours” and the “pattern colours” change regularly in relation to each other, while the stitch pattern marches to its own tune. I wonder if that makes any sense. I have never found evidence for such a system, other than that passage in Odham’s Enclycopedia. With a small stitch pattern, and plenty of colours, as here, it works well.

Such evidence might, of course, turn up in the Vintage Shetland Project. Or (more likely) Kate Davies might know – I trust everybody has seen the message about her and Tom’s new project.