Woolly Bits, thank you for the YesAsia link. I tried to buy something from them once before – knit-related, no doubt. They asked me to fax them an image of my credit card. I didn’t at all fancy the idea, and cancelled the order.

This time, ordering the Setsuko Torii book, I saw early on that they now take PayPal. I use PayPal a lot and like and trust them. So I got all the way through the ordering process, logged on to PayPal successfully, got to the final screen – “You’re almost done”, it said – and clicked on “Confirm”. The screen went blank – and then returned to the same screen as before.

It was a confirm-your-details screen. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. There was certainly no message about anything I had done wrong. I tried twice more with the same result, terrified of course that I would wind up with three copies. I don’t think I could have ordered anything, because there have been no confirming emails from YesAsia or from PayPal. I’m baffled.

But thank you for the link.

And Tamar, for the one to Meg’s newsletter. I must have read it before, but read it anew with delight. Especially the reference to “Jo W*tson's wonderfully organized UK Ravelry”. Jo is the one who made such a spectacular balls-up of last year’s Knit Camp in Stirling – oh, dear, is that libelous?

As for RtB, I had an Insight yesterday as I was walking up Broughton Street to my fishmonger.

The sleeve begins with a few rows of plain-vanilla garter stitch. That means there is a small seam to be dealt with at the end. Meg does it with i-cord and likes the result so much that she suggests putting the open end on top of the sleeve. Whether you do that or not, the sleeve has a back and a front from the beginning, depending on where you put that little opening. Mercifully, I remembered this in time when I was doing the second sleeve.

So – when you’ve finished the sleeve you leave the back half behind and proceed on the front half of the stitches. You then immediately start a mitred square, starting from the top of the sleeve. That means, of course, knitting all but one of the stitches, turning, knitting back, knitting out again taking all but two of the stitches, turning, knitting back, etc.

My insight was that on the second half, which I was now doing, the outward-knitting rows would be on the wrong side of the jacket and the return rows on the right side. And so it has proved.

I think that’s the key to the whole mirror-image problem. And it probably also lies behind the question of why the corners will be slightly different to the first half. I’ll tell you when I get there. I feel much more confident.

I can’t really take a picture now, because I’m half-way through the first half of the first square and that means that there are always stitches on both ends of the needle. So to speak. We’ll see, soon.

As I’ve often said before, this is a lot of fun.