Another blameless week has brought me to the dawn of another Sunday of cider and cashmere. Today I should get the rib-to-body increases done on Theo’s gansey, start on the initials, and be at, or close to, the point where I can see what gauge I’m reeely getting – and rip if need be.

I-cording didn’t go quite as far, yesterday, as I might have hoped, but I’m more than half-way there, moving along the second short edge. MaryJoO, miles of i-cord isn’t as bad as miles of crochet, as far as I’m concerned – and notice that we are expected to do two laps of that. Your experience mirrors mine precisely, as to yarn. I started out with two balls of ZephyrSpun, and soon abandoned them (although they’re still to be seen in the early stripes) in favour of buying more KidSilk Haze.


The sun shone for a while again yesterday. The i-cord edge is grey, and can be dimly discerned along the bottom in this picture.



And Knititch, you’re absolutely right – dealing with ends is never as bad as you think it’s going to be, and I speak as one who has done quite a few full-scale Kaffe’s. I don’t entirely count the Earth Stripes, since they’re only stripes.

Comments

Thank you for what you say about “Creative Knitting”, Tamar. I’m still hesitating. It turns out to be one of those knitting books whose price has taken off into the stratosphere. Added to which, the only two copies on Abebooks are ex-library which always produces a depressing and shabby specimen, and anyway, what are the libraries thinking of, de-accessioning a book like that? I’ve got Debbie New’s “Unexpected Knitting” and although I’ve never used it, I can’t imagine anyone taking Creative Knitting any farther.

Jean from Cornwall, thank you, for that information about spray bottles from Boots. I will get one the next time we are there – which is often. And to think that day before yesterday, I wouldn’t have known what the word “spritzing” meant.

I can think of only two domestic skills I learned from my rather incompetent mother: one of them is how to sprinkle items for ironing (in those days before steam irons) with one’s bare hand. I still do it on the rare occasions when I iron linen table napkins – and then roll them up tight and leave them for half an hour to get uniformly damp. The other is how to turn a tough slab of beef into “Swiss steak” by laying it on seasoned flour and indenting it in a criss-cross pattern with the edge of a small plate. I still do that, too, sometimes.

And thank you, everybody, for not finding Jerry Lewis funny either. The hell of adolescence is thinking you’re all alone. I have a sharp memory of a huge cinema in Asbury Park (in those days before movie houses were divided up into small compartments) with everybody laughing except me. The consolation of old age is the knowledge that however bizarre one’s opinions, there are others out there who share them. And the great thing about the Internet is that we’re in touch with each other.