Half-way along the third side of the shawl edging. A quarter of a side – a bit over five scallops – seems to be the most I can hope for in a day. So, six more knitting days of edging. Then it gets fun.

I’m at the stage where the real danger now is that thoughts will wander and I’ll re-surface with no knowledge of what I’m doing or where I am in the pattern. So far, OK, and the pattern may be just demanding enough that that is unlikely to happen.

I’ve just bought Jared’s “Brownstone” pattern; the printer is working on it. At first glance, I would agree with you utterly, Kristie – it looks the very model of what a pattern should be. (My new printer reads through the assignment and prints the last page first, so that when the job is finished the pages are in order. Perhaps they all do that these days. What fun!)

Kristie says in her latest blog entry (follow link) that there are two things she hates about knitting: sleeves, and sewing. That set me considering my own chest of horrors, but I find it close to empty. I don’t like doing all that ribbing at the start of a sock – I do a full 50 rounds for men’s socks. But ribbing is the only way to get to the fun bit, so it gets done. I don’t like making-up – who does? – but it’s the only way to get to the FO, so it usually gets done. I never thought about sleeves. The Brownstone is a true son-of-EZ, with no seams. The more I look, the more I like. It’s the depth of the neck opening that makes the difference.

I hate bobbles and solve that problem by never doing them.

FiberQat, Dale of Norway is a splendid idea for an electric red yarn. I would trust them sight-unseen. It’s just possible that Boots will have a prescription for us this afternoon (I email the request to the dr, he sends the paper document to the chemist by post – so far, Britian requires that a prescription be on a physical piece of paper.) If so, I can drop in to John Lewis and see if they carry “Kiss” in any Rowan quality. I was startled yesterday to find how many different yarns Rowan do.

Non-knit

Today, at long last, my husband will keep the podiatry appt which has nailed us to Edinburgh all week. Tomorrow, Strathardle. Our niece and Little C. will join us next week and probably stay on after we leave. I am keenly looking forward to it, although I fear my vegetable plot when seen tomorrow will look as if it had gone out of cultivation some years ago, and I doubt the limits of my strength. Also I have lost the address and telephone number of the man who now cuts our grass and does the heavy work – my first job will be to track him down.

Bereavement (or something) is now a great leaden weight at the pit of my stomach although at the same time death remains hard to believe in. C. must be here somewhere, ready to tell me to spread compost, and that earthworms are beneficial. My husband seems to have aged five years, slower-witted and worse-tempered.

In today’s attempt to outwit Blogger, I have composed a Web page in Word. The shape and appearance of the screen is disconcerting. In the old system, I knew that when my Word document started a second page, I had said enough and should stop.Now the screen is a different size and shape, and holds more.

And it worked, up to a point: Blogger has preserved my paragraph breaks but continues to strip out the hyperlinks. So henceforth I'll insert them in situ as I do illustrations. But why should the system have changed? Cui bono?