I’m now on row 26 of the Princess shawl. How on earth did I sustain the dramatic interest of this blog last summer, when I was knitting 85 repeats of the edging pattern at the rate of less-than-a-repeat per day?

The Curmudgeon is about to embark on Sharon's Wedding Ring shawl, with some trepidation, which she need not feel. She shows a ball of the Gossamer yarn supplied: it’s the same stuff I’m using. I noticed from her photograph that one 50gram ball of it contains substantially more metres of yarn than all of the Merino Lace yarn I bought the other day for my sister’s shawl -- Merino Lace being slightly finer than Shetland cobweb.

Or put it another way: my gossamer yarn is put up in 20 gram balls, each one of which is more than 1/3 longer than a 50gram ball of Merino Lace. It’s an amazing yarn, strong and easy to use. You’ll remember that the night before I resumed knitting on the Princess, I had been knitting a hat with Noro Silk Garden, yet there was no difficulty.in the transition.

Miscellaneous

The new Knitting magazine turned up yesterday. The feeling intensifies, that it’s getting better and better and will soon teach me something, or provide a pattern I’m interested in. But not yet.

And I got my new tee-shirt from CafePress. The rest of my wardrobe scarcely deserves the name, but I now have an enviable range of tee-shirts for tending my vegetables in, including my Kerry-for-President one and a Chinese one with a poem by Mao about the Great Wall. I think perhaps I’ll save Franklin's “Knitting: the New Yoga” to wear spanking new on Games Day.

This blog is now equipped with a hidden hit-counter. Readership is very slowly increasing, and hits now run at about 200 a day (most of which are from me, looking to see if there are any comments yet) on weekdays, fewer at weekends. But on Friday I had more than 300 – that was because Franklin mentioned me, and included a link.