I’ve almost dispatched the Brownstone. I grafted the underarms last night – I do love grafting – and tidied the inevitable little holes left and right, and sewed the collar down. That leaves the dangling ends from the cast-ons, and the ones from the joining-in of new skeins.

It looks great, and I had sort of hoped that a pass with the steam iron might suffice at this point, but Jared writes so passionately about the need for full-scale, total-immersion blocking that I will go ahead and do it. Meg is keen, too. And that can’t be today, for today our friend from the NGofS is coming to have lunch and see the new picture by ???????, and the dining-room floor is where things get blocked.

(My husband says the thing to do with the new picture is give it to the Gallery, as a document. It’ll never merit wallspace. Well, perhaps, conceivably, as a curiosity, in an exhibition devoted to ???????. He’s right, I guess, but I’d still rather like to have it in the dining-room at Burnside. He rejoices in keeping Strathardle a ???????-free zone.)

This would be the moment to spend a couple of days on two-colour brioche-stitch, challenge-wise, but Christmas looms, so yesterday I did the arithmetic for the sleeves of Little Thomas’s Brownstone and cast on. The primary school sweatshirt I have been sent has raglan sleeves, like the Brownstone itself – a big plus. I can be confident, thus, that the top-of-sleeve measurement is right.

I was a bit taken aback to find how high a proportion of Big Thomas’s stitch numbers Little Thomas required. Have I got enough yarn? Yes, surely. The big sweater used six-and-three-quarters skeins. That leaves five-and-one-quarter for the little one.

 I took a designing-for-children class from Kristin Nicholas once (Stitches East ’02, I think) in which I remember her saying that children didn’t change much in circumference, they just got longer. Little Thomas is not nearly as tall as Big Thomas – the body section when I get there will use much less yarn this time.

I’d better begin the day. It’s Jamie Oliver’s salmon with beans, tomatoes, olives and anchovies again. Our friend has probably had it before; it’s my party-piece. Easy to cook, easy to eat.