A good day.

The Eye Man said that my Bad Eye – the one that had the retinal vein occlusion – has improved considerably in the last year, and now even reaches the minimum standard for driving all by itself, although I wouldn’t care to attempt it without help from the Good Eye.

I got the first sleeve facing hemmed, and the second sleeve unpicked and reattached. The seam can’t be pressed towards the sleeve, as EZ would have me do, because the facing is in the way. So it is pressed towards the body, and seems to me to make a nice neat seam that way. I sewed the facing down with thread, for unobtrusiveness. I don’t know whether you’re supposed to do that.

So the Grandson Sweater is now in one piece, and I’m very pleased with it. That bottom ribbing doesn't curl any more either, or at least, not so badly.


Today I must press the new seam, and tonight sew it down and begin putting in rows of restraining stitching to secure the neck opening. Hey! tomorrow I may actually be knitting again!

Random Knit-Related

On Monday I ordered the sock needles Kate is keen on. I’d been meaning to do so for a while. No need to go all the way to Australia -- I ordered them from P2tog. That’s a link to a page describing the needles. They arrived yesterday – one could scarcely have better service unless she had brought them round herself on Monday afternoon. And they’re as wonderful as Kate says.

Using them, I thought I had reached the heel flap of Ketki’s KF socks last night, but I see, on consulting my notes this morning, that I have another 20 rounds of leg to go. It will be a pleasure.

I continue to think about Koigu stripes – and by now, swatching couldn’t be that far away. Theresa has posted pictures of a store-boughten sweater (only she didn’t buy it) with short row stripes, interesting but not I think as beautiful as the one she’s knitting.

I think I have at last pinned down the floating memory that has been plaguing me – and it wasn’t short-row stripes at all, but one of those things where you reach down and grab a stitch from four or five rows back and pull it up to join the ones on the needle. There’s an interesting gent’s sweater in the new IK which uses that sort of technique to create a lattice effect, but I’m thinking of colour.

The same IK has an article about Kitchener stitch in which it is said, “British Army general Lord Kitchener was concerned that sock seams maimed the toes of his soldiers. A smooth grafting technique solved the problem.”

Finding the source of the phrase “Kitchener stitch”, so that I can write to the Oxford English dictionary about it, has been a project of mine for more than a decade. (You must have heard this before.) I have asked Bishop Rutt about it, and Lord Kitchener himself. (The latter, engagingly, had never heard of it.) I’ll follow this one up, but I’m willing to take bets on the side, right now, that the author can’t substantiate that statement.