I spoke to our niece last night, and booked us in for another hospital visit next week. C. continues to improve, and we are even beginning to talk of arrangements for coming home. No test results yet: that’s the big one. I’ve known about lymph nodes for years from assiduous newspaper-reading, but had no idea it took so long to interrogate them.

Edinburgh remains dry, although bitterly cold, but there is plenty of snow in the rest of the country and we no longer feel foolish for staying put. We couldn’t possibly be in for the second savage winter in a row, in these days of global warming, could we?

Knitting

I finished wurm-ing that hat, and am now decreasing for the crown. I have simply reverted to the slouch hat pattern and am doing all the decreases in st st. I thought of putting in some purl ridges and decided against it. It looks fine. I might even finish today – surely tomorrow, at the latest. Still time to knock off the scarf before we go to London on the 6th.

So I have been thinking of What Next? And circling around my idea of throwing sock yarn and Koigu at the Round-the-Bend jacket. I don’t think Round-the-Bend has the built-in symmetry of the Surprise jackets. Some care will be needed to avoid its looking like a dog’s dinner.

The two sides are mirror images of each other, knit separately and somehow joined up the back without sewing. It occurred to me that I could have both sides on the go at once as an aid to matching the colour and size of stripes. I don’t have much dark yarn for hold-it-all-together emphasis, but I do have some -- to be carefully deployed.

The pattern is in Meg's "Handknitting" book. There doesn't seem to be a Schoolhouse leaflet devoted to it, but there is a DVD in which I may indulge if this idea goes any further.

This is the Trellis Jacket from Jamieson's Shetland Knitting Book 3. Son of Adult Surprise, sort of. I have long admired it:



It suggests that one needs to take some care, selecting the pile of colours. Most of the yarns I am thinking of are hand-painted. Is that going to complicate the issue?

Fuzzarelly, you suggested a couple of days ago that I bin that dusty pink yarn in Strathardle (=find a good home for it). I have been toying with the thought ever since. I do like the yarn. It’s one of those not-quite-solid dyes that I am particularly fond of these days. And it’s all the same, in a life full of colourful single skeins and odd balls, so a single harmonious garment could be made from it.

Is that enough? Maybe not. I think you may be right. (And I hope you get that house in Montgomery City.)