Here we are, with Repeat No. Six finished. There will be 13.7 repeats altogether. I’m not anything like half-way there, knitting-wise, because there are still literally hundreds of stitches waiting to be added to the centre one by one. But I think I have progressed nearly half-way along the border. Although I’m using a very long needle, pretty soon it won’t be possible to smooth the whole thing flat for photographic purposes.

I’m still suffering from that dog-leg in the column of faggoting, although I still have great hopes for the blocking process. My current theory is that knitting like this, with tens of thousands of stitches in all, can put up with a mistake here and there whereas those cosy, elegant shawls in heavier yarn have to be near-perfect.

Shan, (Ruby is winsome indeed, and) your idea of basing a sweater on Vermeer’s Milkmaid (comment yesterday) is so good I’ll go with it for Ketki, unless something leaps off the wall at me, so to speak, while we’re in London. We’re going tomorrow, blogging to resume in the middle of next week.

Mel, it’s hard to explain about the two-colour restriction. As I said, I didn’t figure it out myself until I was half-way to the armpits of Alexander’s sweater, pictured yesterday.

The idea is to take advantage of the tendency of Fair Isle knitting to pull the stitches in so that they become little squares instead of rectangles. That should allow one to pick up stitches for the sleeves (drop-shoulder), one per row of the body knitting, rotate the pattern so that rows become stitches, and knit down the sleeve creating the effect of a single piece of fabric. Meg does it in a fairly recent Woolgathering.

In any one row of Fair Isle, only two colours are employed. If the body knitting has more than two, it might be theoretically possible to perform the trick anyway but the sleeve knitting would be so complicated as to boggle the mind.

Miscellaneous

Don’t miss Franklin in the latest issue of Knitty. I had expected no more than to be astonished with delight as at each of his blog entries, but what he has done for Knitty is to decipher and re-create a gentleman’s night cap from a knitting book of 1840. The man is a genius.

I sent my application for an absentee ballot to the County Clerk of Monmouth County, NJ, yesterday. I had almost decided not to bother – dreadful confession. Previous attempts to find out exactly what to do had got bogged down in confusion.

But yesterday I stumbled upon a wonderful website called the Overseas Vote Foundation. I told them my name and some things such as my last address in NJ – 54 years ago! – and my Social Security number, they provided me with a wonderfully American-looking form to print, all filled out. I just had to sign it and send it to Monmouth County: they provided the address. So it’s done.

Here is the bear, in that box in that carrier bag, ready to get on the train.