Cat, I’d love to have Franklin’s “Ten Knitters You Meet in Hell”. How prudent of you to save it! I’ll print it and keep it in one of his books. I think it would be possible (and easy) to attach it to this blog as a permanent page, like Queer Joe’s “100 Things About Me”  -- but that, of course, would be a violation of copyright. I email Franklin every year to ask him to come and be a teacher at the EYF but he never answers, so is unlikely to respond to a request for a waiver of copyright.

Anyway, he seems to be in Paris at the moment. But isn’t he just back from Rome? Wouldn’t it have been easier to go directly from one to the other?

I’m nearly finished (one more bump) with the edging for my mini-hap in Donna Smith’s class at the Shetland Wool Adventure. It has imperfections. I would almost say it is too easy to knit accurately. I used lace-weight yarn. I am seriously tempted to try again in Shetland jumper-weight. The instructions leave the question open. Jumper-weight is common enough for haps.

Maureen, I was terribly encouraged to learn that yours, too, wasn’t very bumpy on the outside edge.

I also got the yarn out, and a skein of it wound, for Thomas’ Calcutta Cup scarf. I think I’ll even knit a swatch. My plan is to use Pattern No. 100 in Gaughan’s Knitted Cable Sourcebook. It’s one of the ones she recommends for looking good on both sides. It’s fascinating to compare the photograph with the chart. The former looks as if you’d be struggling to twist every stitch. The latter looks easy-peasy.

Anybody who has the book: what would you guess is the edging she uses on the samples? I thought I’d try knitting the first stitch, and then doing three stitches in seed stitch, but I doubt if that’s right.

Reading

I finished Ruth Rendell’s “Portobello”. It’s far from her best – but awfully good, compared to almost anybody else. I have sunk down gratefully with Trollope’s “Cousin Henry” which I already had in Kindle format.

I got an ad today from Amazon for Wilkie Collins. I haven’t read him for many, many years – and maybe, even then, nothing but “Woman in White”. It’s not a bad idea, and he’s very cheap, being classic. He was named after the artist David Wilkie, but I don’t know why – was his father a mate of the artist’s?