Our niece phoned yesterday to say that C. is moving into the hospice today. She is too weak to be left alone. It might not be permanent – or was that just comforting talk? – but clearly we will need to find and hire nurses if she is to come home again. I hope we will go out to see her tomorrow. She is having some abdominal pain, so far controlled with paracetemol. I left that bit out when reporting to my husband.

Yesterday had bits of good weather when I felt wimpish for not having gone to Strathardle, and lots of stormy bits when I was glad to be here, and bitter cold throughout. It is just as well we didn’t go, I think, and I was very glad that we were at home to receive our niece’s phone call instead of wandering around the countryside as we would have been at that hour. The plan is to go on Monday, hell or high water.

It fits in well with the knitting. I am getting on fine with i-cording. Tomorrow I’ll lay it aside and start making (a) a substantial swatch and (b) measurements for the Japanese shirt, so that my kind friend can start pattern-writing. Swatch-knitting will be just the thing to accompany the Calcutta Cup on Sunday. Then I’ll bring the Strathardle sweater back with me at the end of next week and finish it off here as soon as RtB is done, clearing space up there for the new project. It’s all go.

If you want to make God laugh, tell Him what you’re going to do tomorrow.

I finished i-cording the two halves of RtB together and am now nearly half-way around the perifery.

I was dissatisfied last night, and nearly ripped it out. I am working from the inside (as instructed) which means that the green bumps – clearly a feature of i-cord -- are inside but also means that the outside looks a bit inside-out. Camera batteries have failed at this interesting moment, so illustration will have to wait until tomorrow.

I have just been looking at the i-cord sections of the Knitting Glossary DVD. I’ve had it for a while but have made little use of it. I learned that I should have been slipping the first st of every row throughout – it might have prevented the inside-out look I just mentioned. And that there is a way to abolish the green bumps with a strategic yo: that will be useful next time.

The DVD illustrates what I call intrinsic i-cord – the one I’ve recently been doing in Strathardle as I knit i-cord onto both edges of a garter-st collar as I went along. It doesn’t discuss the problem I encountered there of the different appearance of the i-cord at the two edges, one facing in and the other out.

I-cord is surely a Zimmermann invention (not unvention) – not the stuff itself, “French knitting”, which we’ve all been doing since childhood, but the discovery that you don’t need a cotton reel with nails, you can do it on two needles, and the subsequent discoveries of all the uses to which it can be put. Wonderful stuff, indeed, and uniquely EZ as far as I know.

My copy of “Knit Your Own Royal Wedding” turned up yesterday. I would recommend it strongly if you are even remotely interested in knitting a royal wedding. It even includes a cardboard cut-out balcony for you to arrange your knitted figures on. There are patterns for the Archbishop of Canterbury and corgis and everything. I was proud to discover that mine is the first copy to be entered on LibraryThing.