I’ve started row 18 of the Mourning Shawl border – slightly more difficult than its predecessors. The great fun of border knitting is that every row is different but proceeds so naturally from the one before that chart-peering is largely eliminated. This was true even of the vastly intricate border of the Princess.

I’m getting on a bit faster than I anticipated, even without the bonus of stitches reduced at the corners. That doesn’t happen until row 39 – and even then, only 10 stitches per side disappear whereas the standard system – one stitch each end of each border every other row – would have got through twice that number by that time.

But I can’t count on continuing at this pace, what with the most delicious months of the year beckoning us to Strathardle. And this isn’t a project to take along – not at all the thing for grubby, rough hands to attempt after a day in the fields.

I will not worry about the calendar. At least, not too much.

Non-knit

Enid, thank you for the crib to the royal wedding video (comment yesterday). I’ve watched it again, and it all seems perfectly obvious now that you’ve explained it. I think I was confused by that scene just before the bride appears, when the minor royals reassemble and I felt that they couldn’t all be Beatrice and Eugenie. The Camilla lookalike is so good it’s hard to believe it’s not her. I didn’t recognise Princess Anne, on the other hand – I’m a great fan of hers.

And I’ve watched Jill and Kevin. A real wedding, I gather. It’s delightful.

27 Wives

Meg, thank you for your expression of interest. I finished scanning the second wife yesterday. My plan is to start publishing right away – I’ve now got two wives, and my mother’s substantial introduction. I figure I can re-edit the early chapters as life unfolds if I feel the need, as well as adding more. Doing it that way should be a valuable incentive to me to keep going.

So we’ll see what Alexander advises at the weekend. And I’ll have to write a brief introduction of my own.

My current printer will let me scan a set of pages into a single document, which speeds things along. (Maybe the old one did that too, but if so I never grasped the fact.) Every so often, a page comes out as complete gibberish, without a single recognisable word. Attempts to re-scan just that one produce the same result. This has happened twice. In both cases, the page in question was a nice clean one, not full of writings-in and crossings-out. Baffling. I gave up and typed them in.

Blogger

Page breaks continue to disappear when I post. I’m getting used to calling the text back and re-inserting them, but I find this baffling too.

I have an early hair appt this morning – Look Tidy for Easter – so not much time here.

I’ve advanced to row 10 of the mourning shawl border. A bit of stitch-count trouble yesterday, nothing serious. I hope to have pictures soon, including the Fleegle part which is currently somewhat untidy. In all the anxiety at the very beginning I wasn’t as careful as I might have been about tugging the ends when I introduced the new ball and subsequently changed yarns. There was every danger, too, in those first few rows, of introducing a Moebius twist even if there wasn’t one in the first place.

Comments

Angel, I can’t get your T-mobile video to load [comment yesterday]. It seems to be trying, but doesn't get anywhere. I’ll try again later. It sounds to me, in general, as if the USofA is keener on the forthcoming wedding than we are, at least we here in Scotland. St Andrews, understandably, is full of it.

I had a good session with “27 Wives” yesterday. I have nearly finished scanning the second wife. The first one died young, leaving a couple of children who passed to the care of her capable successor, a formidable pioneer woman named Mary Ann Angell. I am nearly up to the page on which, “on June 15, 1842, aged 39, again big with child, she stood before Joseph Smith and placed in her husband’s hand the hand of a girl of 20, saying clearly and steadily that she freely gave this woman to be married to her husband”.

I looked at publishing options a bit, and rescued your valuable comment from Google’s spam collection, Gail: they do make mistakes sometimes. Kristie, my browser turns out to be too primitive for publishing in Kindle format (or even finding out much about doing it that way). I’ll keep that one in mind. And talk it over with Alexander at the weekend.

Jenny, thanks for the early tip-off yesterday that my links weren’t working – and just when I thought Blogger had given me an easy ride, for once. I went in and fixed them right away, but when I called yesterday’s post back for editing, it came without most of the last two paragraphs – it broke off in mid-sentence. Something’s wrong at Blogger. (I had, as usual, already saved the thing here on my desktop, so that was no problem.)

A good day with the shawl yesterday. I picked up all the stitches, knit back, and did the first pattern row. It was so easy that it was fiendishly difficult – an endless series of k1, YO, k2tog. Except of course that it wasn’t endless, it was interspersed with occasional k3tog’s and the special treatment of the corners. But I got it, after an agony of stitch-counting and marker-placing, and all seems to be well. I’m now halfway back across Row 2, on which virtually nothing happens. It’ll get easier yet as the pattern begins to be visible. When I finish this row, I’ll attach a second ball of yarn and start Fleegle’ing.

For a while, I couldn’t think how the work would ever be connected into a circle. In Fleegle’s demonstration, she uses a tiny shawl knit centre-outwards, so she is already knitting in the round when she starts her wonder-working. The answer is (I think), that when I get to the end of the row I’m going to knit with the second ball of yarn, I’ll need to reach across to the beginning to get the other ball to knit back with. Fleegle herself will join the thing into a circle.

This is such an exciting juncture that I hate to abandon it, but we’re off to St Andrews today, there’s no help for it. Back here Sunday, DV.

I’m worrying about time. Now that I have taken this major step forward, it seems safe to estimate that the borders will take the better part of two months. I can’t possibly finish the whole thing in time to knit an Aran sweater in time for the Games (4th Saturday in August, as always). I hate knitting against the calendar. What to do? If I lay the shawl aside to knit the sweater, will it then languish like poor Kaffe whose jacket suffered the same fate last year? And never be resumed? Surely not.

Non-knit

I have resumed work on a project mentioned here long, long ago – scanning the yellowed pages of an unpublished manuscript of my mother’s so that I can publish it on-line. My new printer seems better at character recognition than the old one, and I am moving forward steadily. The book is called “27 Wives” and is about Brigham Young, the early Mormon leader who married that many. My mother started work on the book when we lived in Salt Lake City in the ‘30’s. She had a successful career as an academic and writer of both fiction and non-fiction, but she never found a publisher for that one.

I’ve never read it before, and am finding it rather interesting – not so much for religious history or Women’s History as for an unvarnished account of settling the west, so familiar from so many preposterous movies.

The original plan was to use some space on Alexander’s server, and I may go with that. But free or near-free webspace seems to abound these days. Can anyone recommend a site? I don’t want to profit from this enterprise in any way, just to make the book available.

Something completely different….

As we watch the waxing – at last! – of the Paschal Moon, here’s a tip I recently acquired for determining which direction any given moon is headed in. I’ve learned various ways of remembering that in my lifetime, and have forgotten all of them. I think this one is a keeper.

Hold your right hand out in front of you, palm forward, thumb extended, rather as if you were trying to stop traffic. If the moon fits roughly into the shape between your index-finger and thumb, it’s waxing. Do the same with your left hand. The moon that fits there, is waning.