It’s been another lovely autumn day. No doubt the weather will turn tomorrow, when Rachel and Ed get here from London and we are forbidden to sit together indoors.

 

I made some progress with finishing the EPS. The underarm grafting is done, and the inevitable corner holes closed. The grafting has produced a line of purl bumps. That’s something to do, I think, with not having both sets of stitches at the same stage of their life cycle before grafting. In this case, there’s no difficulty in calling it a design feature. Here we are:

 

I’m terribly pleased with it, not least because I have actually used a pack of gradient yarns, and used them, if I do say so, rather well. I still have all the ends to tidy up. It’s time to start thinking about hat design. And I’ve been slightly wondering whether I could knit Carol Sunday’s Machu Picchu sweater (I’ve got the yarn, remember) as, essentially, an EPS design. I have arranged things rather badly, to have all this thinking come at the same time, with nothing soothing to pick up in the meantime.

 

Shandy, I agree that managing a whole sweater while knitting the sleeves would not be a pleasant experience. But the EPS system has one knit the sleeves separately. Twirling the whole sweater around while knitting the yoke is fun. I do agree with you and Karen, that this sort of thing is inappropriate for Aran. I've never been much enamoured of top-down. Indeed, have I ever done it?

 

Politics

 

This is a picture Helen took of me yesterday, outside the post office where I had just dispatched my ballot. The miserable expression is because she made me put the mask back on for the photograph. I find it hideously uncomfortable. Would an expensive cloth mask be better? A reluctance to wear one for 13 hours – a reluctance to spend 13 hours in a church basement, with or without a mask – seem to me excellent reasons not to be an election judge this year, Mary Lou. As long as somebody does the job properly:

 

I sort of hope I will have the oomph to get up and watch at least some of the debate tonight. It starts at 2 a.m., here. I watched them live last time. Somehow streaming on YouTube tomorrow doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

 

Reading

 

I continue to flounder there, too (as well as with knitting projects) although forging ahead with “I Malavoglia”. I thought I had mentioned it here before – Verga, 19^th century Italian, Sicily. I’ve read it before. My Italian doesn't seem to have improved much in 35 years despite all this one-to-one tuition.