This is my Calcutta Cup design. I think it’s rather sweet. The idea at present is to repeat it around the sweater, just above the ribbing. I wound another skein yesterday, too. So today’s job is to design the sweater again, shouldn’t take long, and then I’m ready to cast on when the current watchcap is finished. That shouldn’t take long either. You see why I've got to get started -- this much at least must be knit before '06 comes to an end. The Cup itself will almost certainly migrate to its more usual home in London on February 1, when the '07 Calcutta Cup match is played. It would be nice (but unlikely) to have finished the sweater by then.



Last Sunday, as I have mentioned, was my husband’s 81st birthday, and we all went out to lunch down there in London. He and I shot away from the table to take in the last day of the British Art exhibition at the Hayward. When we got home in the evening, I was a little afraid that it was going to be one of those we’ve-had-lots-to-eat-and-don’t-want-any-more situations: my husband never skips a meal; I would have had to make an omelet.

But no: there they all were, or most of them, anyway, planning on pizza.

Theo of course was still wearing his striped Koigu, and as we were all standing around in the kitchen, someone said that I had been unusually successful with the neckline. It's the Seamless Hybrid from EZ's Knitting Without Tears. I've always admired it, but only succeeded when Meg herself told me not to knit it the way her mother specifies, but to take into account the fact that stitch-gauge and row-gauge are different, and occasionally k2 body stitches tog as you progress from sleeve-hole to neck.



Flattery will get you everywhere, and in this case it got me wondering whether I could do that neckline on Alexander's Fair Isle, compounding the joke of having the pattern flow in all directions. Of course knitting 2tog would spoil a Fair Isle pattern -- but the point here is that Fair Isle knitting is inevitably rather tight, and the stitches are pulled into something much more like a square than a rectangle. So maybe it would work. In any event, it is one decision that doesn't have to be made now.