I think we’re making real progress on the swallowtail coat front, thanks to helpful commenters.

I am going to run with Helen's comforting notion that anything goes, as long as it has split tails in back. She provides a delicious link in her comment yesterday to Ruskin in court dress. No wonder his wife ran off with Millais.

I had thought like you at one point, Karen, that a swallowtail coat had to be cut off abruptly at the waist in front – the costume, in fact, when rendered in red, of a circus ringmaster. That was the stage I had reached when I decided the Poet’s Coat wouldn’t do – it would have to be changed too radically.

But further research suggests at least that the term can also be applied to a coat which looks, in front, much like the Poet’s Coat, but which “swoops from the waist button to the center back in an arc”, in Fuzzarelly's most helpful words. Beatrix Potter’s Jeremy Fisher wears one at home, as Helen pointed out yesterday. Johnny Townmouse’s friends and relations do too, when they dress for dinner, but the pictures of Jeremy Fisher are more helpful.

So the swoop of the Poet’s Coat will have to be altered, so that it doesn’t finish until a point near the centre back. I think I would divide the tails in back somewhere near the waist, but only slope them very slightly on the inside, perhaps an inch or an inch and a half for each tail.

The next thing is to find some yarn – it must be of a beautiful blue. (I wonder if any of you will see where this is going.) I agree with you, Tamar – comment a few days ago – that alpaca, as prescribed in the book, is not what’s wanted. I should think a good honest DK weight in good honest wool. What one needs is a good honest LYS. Then a swatch. Then a plan actually done on knitter’s graph paper.

Miscellany and Politics

Dawn, I read and enjoyed Go Knit in Your Hat’s venture into politics. Manic Knitter, I had begun to hear rumbles of the idea of an Obama-Clinton ticket. Trouble is, if Clinton goes top, the VP (unelected) will be named Bill: would Obama settle for that? My sister pooh-pooh’d the idea recently, on the very sound grounds that Clinton and Obama really don’t seem to like each other. I don’t understand why Edwards couldn’t run as VP again, but apparently not.

Here are the KF socks. I use slightly more than 100 grams to knit a pair of gent's socks, and have learned to save on yarn-buying (!) by finishing the toes from the odd-ball bag. In this case, the odd ball is the same KF colorway, in the stripy version.

And here the gansey: