The early morning radio says that Magnus Linklater has written about his fire in today’s Times, so I’ll buy that for today, instead of the Waffy, when I walk across the square to see Mr Ahmed.

Grace, thank you for your comment. I’ve followed the link, and the steamer looks very good. You have the travel version? Would they let it in with charging duty? One never knows. I’ve had two tee-shirts recently from CafePress (who issue Franklin's designs) without paying extra, and a wall-clock from Florida. I think I’ll try. I liked your homepage, too.

Knitting

The picture shows the current state of the First Holy Communion veil. I charted some initials yesterday. I need a background of 22 stitches for two initials plus two stitches in between. I think you can see from the picture how the plain triangles are forming as the lace patterns draw to separate points, but I haven’t got 22 stitches in any of them yet. One more row.

That means that the lacey initials will extend below the finish of the side panels, and even a row or two below the end of the central one. I faced three options: 1) fagedaboutit, lace-initial-wise. 2) have only one initial per granddaughter, so that I could start higher up 3) let them extend downwards. I’ve gone for option 3.

Charting was terrible. The initials have to be knit from the top down, obviously, and you can’t just turn a lace pattern upside down as you might a colour one. Plus, they’ve got to be done backwards, as right-side rows are knit from right to left. I’ve done this often enough before, but yesterday it proved a real struggle.

Previous lacey lettering, however, has all been done on shawls knit circularly. See Kirsty’s Christening gown and shawl – down at the bottom of the page – for an example. I knit shawls by what I think of as the Amedro System – edging first, pick up stitches, decrease towards the centre – so that that lettering, too, as in the present case, was done top-down. But the fact that I was knitting circularly meant – why? – that I could knit the lettering from left to right, which was much easier. I’m not quite sure I see why that should affect the difficulty of charting, though.

Other Knitting

Franklin and a friend are sponsoring a EZ Knitter’s Almanac Knitalong. He offers a button to add to one’s sidebar and I would do it if I knew how, but I am embarrassed to ask. However, I got the book out yesterday and fear I won’t be any use as a knitter-along, as I’ve got things on my mind to do, and there’s not much there I can use. Maybe I’ll be able to join in at some point.

Shall I utter out loud the ultimate heresy? As a writer, I vastly prefer her daughter Meg. EZ was a genius, no doubt, but there is an edge of arrogance in her writing that I don’t like. Goodness knows she had lots to be arrogant about. Meg is gentler.