I didn’t knit much yesterday – scared to finish the Princess? – but I find that the back of the cardigan is only ½” short of the desired length this morning, so today should see one of the fronts well advanced. It’s cider-on-Sunday again (with a good weigh-in this morning) so I’ll leave the Princess altogether alone.

Janet, what I meant was that my husband deserves a knitter-wife with a thoroughly scholarly and inquiring approach to the subject, not one prepared to bash ahead with designing and knitting a jabot without even considering the historical dimension. Tamar, I think that anybody who marries anybody is going to learn a whole lot by experience. Enthusiasm sweeps us along or we’d none of us dare embark upon it.

The piper at yesterday’s Drummond Place Garden Party used to wear a jabot, he said, but he found it uncomfortable and gave up. His wife, an efficient and reliable woman, is going to set about looking for it and failing that, make enquiries among friends. She is sceptical about whether knitting can produce a suitable fabric, and said it would have to be something of wedding-ring-shawl fineness. Precisely. And I don’t believe that Cashsilk would be uncomfortable.

I went back to Christine Duchrow and find that, with Judy Gibson’s help, I think I could make a stab at one of her jabot patterns if I tried. The English introduction to the books says that it’s going to be tough, and that you have to be prepared to rip – mentioning the additional hazard of mistakes in the patterns themselves. The editor then says cheerfully that unravelling knitting is easy – unlike weaving. Another example of life’s interesting tendency to converge, for this echoes your interesting comment on Penelope’s tapestry, Tamar.

Helen C.K.S. mentions that the forthcoming “Reversible Knitting” book, of which I had been dimly aware, is by Lynn Barr who wrote “Knitting New Scarves”. That I hadn’t grasped, and it puts the new book in the must-have class.