I am about to have my hair done, so as to look sane and collected during all next week’s excitements. The man from the Tate on Monday is only the beginning. So I shall have to be brisk and un-collected here. No time for links.

I had an email last night from someone who had found me by Googling “shawl knitter Edinburgh”. Golly! Me! She wants a shawl for a forthcoming grandchild and I realised (since I have no intention of producing one for her myself) that the best bet was to send her on to that place on Castle Street which we Mileses call the Indignant Gentlewomen.

How to find the address? But I underestimated Google. It’s the Royal Edinburgh Repository and Self-Aid Society. For those furth of Edinburgh: it is a simple and brilliant Victorian charity still in operation in pleasantly old-fashioned premises in the city centre. The idea is that the charitable trust pays all the overheads, and the craftspeople who display and sell their goods there take home the whole purchase price.

I’ve seen quite reasonable shawls in their window, and there might still be time for one to be commissioned. Although not from me.

Brownstone

Anna, I read your comment as an email, and didn’t recognise the few initial words of the blog you attached it to. No time to search. If you were asking about my current knitting, it’s Jared Flood’s “Brownstone” pattern available from his website which is something like brooklyntweed.net. An excellent, detailed and accurate pattern.

Thanks for the comments on it. Big Thomas’s mother Rachel said once – being brave about something I had produced, I think – that there’s no such thing as a too-big sweater. Well, maybe. In this case, it’s not a Christmas present. Rachel and Ed will be here next week (see “excitements”, above) for my husband’s 86^th birthday, and they can take it south to Big Thomas.

So that by the time we see it on him on the shores of Loch Fyne, he and it will have had a couple of weeks to adjust to each other.

Mary Lou, furthering Tamar’s comment, have at look at Eunny’s video about lengthening and shortening. It must be somewhere on the Interweave website. Even if your sleeve is patterned, you could calculate the spot where you want the cuff to begin, apply Eunny’s technique, cut off the rest, and knit the cuff downwards. The sleeve might wind up somewhat more bloused than it is at present, but that is a small price to pay for not having to re-knit the whole thing. That’s essentially what I plan to do with the Brownstone sleeves if they really are too long.

All well here, knitting-wise. Which is more than can be said for the state of the world. When they told Churchill that Coventry had been obliterated, he said “Well, let’s have lunch. Everything looks better after lunch”. That’s how I feel about the winter solstice. The Second Great Depression may not seem so bad when the snowdrops are out.