It has turned rather emphatically cold here -- not even December yet.

As hoped -- the first half-brioche sleeve is finished and bound off, the poor thing laid aside once again, ¾’s finished. And I've started the stripey hat.

It's great. It's going to knit itself. Winding the mini-skeins is delicious, as compared to yarn-winding in real life. Each one is capable of four rounds (I think), but the pattern requires attention because any particular stripe can be one or two or three rounds wide. Picture soon.

I've spent some more time with Norah Gaughan's cable book, although the prospect of a new great-grandchild has pushed the prospect of a crunchy cabled sweater rather far down my already over-long HALFPINT list. Every cable design in the book is assigned its SSE -- stocking-stitch equivalent. That doesn't relieve you of the need to swatch, perish the thought -- but it does mean that if you're designing something and have a rough idea of how many st st stitches you'll need (as is usually the case), you have a starting point for adding cables.

It's a wonderful book.

I've signed up for Kate Davies' Inspired by Islay club, and am about to order her and Tom's new book about Shetland wool. She does keep busy. My resolution for the next few weeks is to get to grips with "worsted spun" and the other one. I've never really understood. Part of the trouble is that I am not immediately sure, looking at a length of yarn or anything else, which way "s" goes and which way "z". I sometimes have the same difficulty with left and right.

Life

We're getting on, one step at a time. Helen is a great source of strength, and Perdita helps too.

Thanksgiving must be the only American holiday which has not yet made its way across the pond -- but, oddly, Black Friday has recently done so. I'm sure we didn't have Black Friday even in the US, when I was young. I suppose the success of Black Friday here is because it has commercial possibilities which Thanksgiving, touchingly, doesn't.