Not much progress yesterday, but what there was, feels significant. I finished – or at least stopped knitting – the strap for the first sleeve, cast on the second, did the wrist ribbing and the increases, and set the patterns. If this one whizzes along like its fellow, I might finish it this week.

Then comes trouble. But it occurred to me yesterday that, although I have no memory of setting in the sleeves for the Grandson sweater pictured yesterday, I must have blogged about it. It, too, was knit as a tube to the shoulder, without steeks. The electronic date attached to that photograph will provide a terminus ad quem – a pompous but convenient historian’s term for a firm date before which something specific must have happened.

Inspired by the need to cast on a new pair of socks, and a lack of enthusiasm for anything much in stash, I have plans to have a hard look at the sock stash, send some of it off to Alyth for charity knitting – very good and durable stuff, sock yarn – and order some more for myself. Maybe today.

Comments

Annie, the yarn for the Japanese sweater is to be a madeleinetosh sock yarn, from Loop in London. Would I trust it for socks, being pure wool? However, that’s not the issue here. My plan for that project is to start it as soon as we get back to Strathardle, and keep it on the bubble there until I finish first the Aran sweater; then that endless pink Araucania which was previously in Strathardle -- it needs only a few more rows and the setting in of the sleeves; and finally the Mourning Shawl for our niece. That mustn’t be too long delayed.

But when all that is done, the Japanese shirt will come back here and something else – probably an electric red sweater for Joe’s brother Thomas-the-Elder – will take its place in Strathardle.

That’s the plan.

Angel, yours was an eloquent comment, about the anxieties facing young people who graduate with no jobs.

We have one more Big Moment this year, now that Joe’s degree is in the bag. His sister Lizzie is in the throes of her A-Levels, and will get results – including a university place, or not – in August. She had two or three offers. I don’t know whether she chose the preferred university with the higher offer, or the less-favoured, safer one, when it came to sending in the UCCA form. She is second from the right in the Grandchildren picture in the sidebar.

It’s a tough year, because everybody wants in before fees go up in a year’s time. Universities are not likely, this time, to take people whose A-Level results slip even one grade below the offer, as they used sometimes to do in the past.