I might as well say it out loud and get it over with: I found three dropped stitches this morning in the right-hand Princess border. Not the border where disaster struck yesterday, the other one. The left-hand side looks perfect.

The border ends with six rows of garter stitch, so it’s not as if the strays are running back into the insertion. First I thought I’d rip – it would take out almost all of what I’ve done so far of the centre. Then I thought I wouldn’t. I’ll secure the three stitches, and I’ll do three (separated) rows of not picking up a stitch from that edge, and I’ll see what I’ve got at that stage.

This is what I’ve been afraid of all along: getting to the end and finding that I had more stitches on one side than the other.

Otherwise – otherwise! – all is well. I’ve done about 100 rows, and have about 100 centre stitches on the needle. I’m just about to reach the point where Sharon stops charting.

The idea is that we’re meant to proceed as before, working the simple pattern into the expanding triangle. I fear I am going to be the class dunce: the one who can’t do it. The essential difficulty is that the utterly important thing is to keep the centre stitch in the centre, whereas when one is actually knitting a row of lace, one needs to know precisely where to start. Even at this stage, the centre stitch is too far away to count conveniently out from it.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, here are some more August07 pictures. First, this year’s rabbit. I didn’t achieve my ambition of having James shoot some for the kitchen, but as you can see, the one he got proved tasty on the barbeque.

And here is Alistair, knitting on the prize-winning shawl, and his sister Rachel, who’s pretty good too, making use of some spare Noro Kuryon of mine.