A day of progress, yesterday. I’m doing row 59 of the Princess Shawl border – we’ll have a photograph when I lay it aside, which will be soon. I bought a serviceable-looking brown corduroy skirt at John Lewis, much needed. I hate shopping for clothes. My husband cleaned the bathroom, also much needed. I got back to grips with the Palm Pilot, and emailed the Documents to Go people about footnotes. I should have done that a long time ago.

The pleasant task looms of choosing lace patterns for my sister’s forthcoming shawl. I’m going to knit Amedro’s “cobweb lace wrap” from her book “Shetland Lace”, as far as shape and edging go, but I’ll choose different patterns from Sharon’s “Heirloom Knitting” for the major panels. I did that for Hellie's shawl three years ago, with great success.

The happy thing that time was that the two patterns I chose appeared on facing pages of the book. At that time my long hair was not far in the past – it went when I broke my arm in late ’02 – and there were still kirby grips (bobby pins) hither and yon about the house which served splendidly, as Amedro recommends, to keep my places in the two charts. This time I’ll have to go out and buy some.

Alexander was puzzled at the time, I remember, about why breaking your arm means you have to get your hair cut.

So I must start browsing through HK, pleasantest of tasks. It is sort of depressing, looking at the finished photograph of the Princess, to see what little progress I have made. The book uses a portion of the Princess border on the cover, and measured by that, I’m getting along rather well – nearly up to that inset blue panel with title and author and a full picture of a different shawl.

I re-read the introduction to the Princess just now. The original on which Sharon has based this pattern, was much finer. Presumably not much larger, but knit of finer yarn on more stitches. The mind boggles.

We hope to go to Strathardle for two nights this week if the weather allows and if we can get our plumber back to solve a problem which he failed to crack on Friday. But more snow is forecast. I’ll have to ring some neighbours to find out how much is lying – one thing the best of weather forecasts never mention. Our house is in something of a frost pocket, down by the burn. If there’s any snow in the village at all, we’ll have quite a bit.

Next week we’re going to London, and we’ll need all our strength for that.

Daisy (and probably others), the Waffy is the Telegraph, a newspaper indeed. I use the word as a quite unnecessary obfuscation. Googlers who search on knitting topics, or on “President Bush”, are welcome here: I’d like to keep others away.