I am sorry for my moment of gloom yesterday, and deeply touched by all your messages. Even if there were only ten of us, that was enough to save Sodom. In fact, there are still slightly more than 200. It may not equal Franklin’s readership, or Joe’s, but it would fill the sitting room.

I’ve been casting around for new blogs to read, and have added this one, which you pointed me to, Tricia. More medical than knitting at the moment, but knitting is there, and she writes well.

Angel, that is a good question, what will I do when the Princess is finished? I love this kind of knitting with a great love. I sneak into the sitting room and knock off a few pattern repeats mid-morning as I might sneak in for a chocolate. There are two other tempting Sharon Miller patterns: the Unst wedding shawl, and the Wedding Ring. And she’s got a super-fine cashmere/silk yarn which I ache to wind around my fingers.

But why? I can’t knit just for the fun of it, like doing a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle. (Perhaps that’s why I don’t like swatching, useful though it often proves to be.) The Princess has a goal, however theoretical: to serve as a wedding veil for granddaughters and granddaughters-in-law. The Unst or the Wedding Ring in Bordeaux or gold…too big for any occasion or any person I can think of.

But a future without complicated Shetland lace is bleak.

(Angel, congratulations on finishing the dissertation. And thanks for the by-the-way news that there is a Noro-stocking LYS in Oberlin. My four years there, and the one in Northampton, MA, six years later, were the only ones in my adult life when I didn’t knit.)

I’m presently cantering along row 28 (of 46) of the 12th centre repeat of the Princess. Even with a week out for London, and a near-week for Strathardle, finishing (the repeat, not the shawl) in March seems plausible.

Our friends left at the crack of dawn this morning without even orange juice, to take their son to a bicycle event of some sort, so I am all set for Fyberspates to be followed by the Farmer’s Market. My pattern idea for a child’s cardigan was one of those triangle affairs. A kind woman gave me this pattern when I was at Camp Stitches on Lake George in ’99. I knit it for Helen, here seen with me in Strathardle when I was the shape to which I now aspire to return.



I devised a triangle pattern of my own (not a cardigan, though) – here it is on Alistair Miles of Beijing. There are a couple of such patterns in the Jamieson books.



But I decided that that’s too much trouble, and currently fancy an Aran. A nice pattern by Melinda Goodfellow comes up if you search Ravelry for “child’s cardigan”. Yankee Knitter #19. But there’s no hint of how to buy it (LYS, perhaps?) and I could perfectly well devise an Aran for myself, as the Curmudgeon is doing for her sweetie. (Her blog is down this morning. I hope it comes back.) (It has.)