I got that skein wound, and had another satisfactory evening of hat-knitting. There’s no project so swiftly-completed and so heartening as a simple hat.



(If all goes according to plan, this yarn will literally have been around the world. It is Chinese cashmere which I bought from Handknitting.com. I don’t remember where they are, but assume the yarn arrived there via the Pacific or perhaps the North Pole. Thence to CT, thence to Edinburgh, and now back to China via Europe and Russia.)

The skein was broken in several places. What could that be but m*ths? Oh horror! horror! horror!

I pinned the ASJ together and tried it on last night. Size is good. EZ is right that the sleeves in their present state hit the arm at a particularly hideous point. I need another eight inches or so. I’ve now got to figure out the amount to decrease, and the rate to do it at, all by myself. I don’t like thinking, especially in December.

(Kathy, the only thing that gets me through Christmas these days is on-line shopping and starting early. Yesterday, in recognition of the fact that December was about to move into double figures, I counted how many Christmas cards remain to be written and how many days remain to do them in – and found, to my surprise and pleasure, that I don’t have to up my game. The job will get done, as long as I maintain my present peaceful rate of progress.)

Thanks for help on the asymmetrical jacket front. I looked at the Melville pattern, and browsed Ravelry, and will get VK out and look at Gaughan. But I felt as I have felt before that a jacket whose pieces were actually of different lengths would look silly and/or incompetent on me. Ambermoggie, your suggestion of the Elsewhere jacket absolutely satisfied the mood I was in. I’ve bought and printed it.

Elsewhere jacket: that’s a Ravelry link. If you scroll through the pics by people who have knitted it, you’ll find lots of Ambermoggie’s work. I am particularly heartened to see that it can be worked in such different yarns.

Non-knit

We’re going to attempt the Coen Bros’ new film again today – we aimed for it last Thursday and bailed out because my husband was hypoglycaemic at lunch time and I was exhausted after a morning of running around town.

I had a brief phase some decades ago of reading books about wine. I never got very far with drinking it. But I think I remember – although I can’t persuade Google to confirm this – that the wines of Savigney-les-Beaune have been described as “nourrissant, philosophe, et morbifuge.” I love the phrase, and yesterday, at Waitrose, I finally bought a bottle. I hope soon to consume it with friends on the shores on Loch Fyne. It was expensive but not absurdly so, and I thought, why wait any longer?