Ce l’ho fatta!

I think that means, I did it! in Italian. If it doesn’t, it’ll have to suffice for today. I have launched my new website. It’s there in the sidebar. Not much yet – no knitting. But the difficult and stressful part has been done. The rest is just a matter of sprucing up the old pages and squirting them into the ether.

For some reason, the process of connecting my little FTP program (a freebie called “Terrapin” of which I've become very fond) to a distant server aroused serious anxieties. It all went very smoothly, in fact. Yesterday’s difficulty, as I suspected, was that the name of my main page was “index.htm” whereas this time it had to be “index.html”. The nearer you get to the engine room of a computer, the more it behaves as it would have 30 years ago.

I’m looking around for a cheap or free editing program to improve the appearance of things. I need a navigation bar, to begin with.

Comments

Thank you, Jean and Fiona, for the help you gave my correspondent from Dieppe. She said she couldn’t find a list of abbreviations in Thompson. So I am interested to learn that you could, Jean. I can’t wait to get back to Strathardle and look again at the book myself.

Knitting

I still didn’t feel very well yesterday (better this morning, I think) so extended the period of privilege and have nearly reached the heel of Rachel’s first Yarn Yard sock. I’ll hope to turn the heel today in the solid-coloured yarn and offer a picture tomorrow.

I’m in something of a quandary here. I love sock-knitting and have finished very few recently, because I knit them only when we travel, and we hug home more and more. Since my mother died nearly four years ago, I haven’t been to America and have no immediate prospect of going again. (Although nephew Theo pointed out once, when I was conducting a gloomy conversation on these lines, that I’ll have to come for his wedding.)

Set aside one day a week for socks, here in Edinburgh?

The other problem is that I can easily foresee that I am not going to be able to keep up with knitting my Yarn Yard subscription yarns, and equally not going to be able to give them up. We will eventually be overwhelmed with beautiful yarn.

Magazines

They’ve been flowing in. The Winter Knitter’s has been here since before we went to London.
Has Kaffe ever designed for Knitter’s before? The result is fairly pedestrian, for him. In fact, I fear he has said all he has to say in knitting. I’d love to be proved wrong.

The only pattern that tempts me is the vest by his protégé Brandon Mably. It’s a very successful simplification of one he did for Rowan’s “Vintage Style” which I bought recently on eBay. Do I want his new book? I wish it would turn up in a bookstore so that I could have a look and decide.