A ragbag, this morning.

Sky scarf

Today the sky was uniform in texture, cloudless? Glowing opalescence to the east on my left, darkening across the dome. This is a fun project, not least for that moment of standing on the doorstep at 8:15 and looking. I have decided to allow myself one percentage point in the sidebar for every four garter stitch bumps, so I get another one today.

I am toying with the idea – if you can’t disguise it, make a feature of it – of knotting the ends and letting them form a fringe on one side of the scarf only. Too weird? Twisted in wear, perhaps it wouldn’t look so odd?

Anthracite socks

The hospital visit finished off the ribbing, as hoped. I did the last couple of rounds on the bus on the way home, and whizzed ahead with the leg later in the evening. Otherwise, not much. My husband put into words the sense of his decline in the last few weeks, since the night in a&e and the subsequent chesty cough. There is nothing they can do about it.

Sleeveless vest to come

Jimmy Bean wrote to say that the six skeins of Georgia O’Keefe in stock don’t match. Should they wait until the next delivery, or send something else? I told them to go ahead. They had similar anxieties when they were sending me the scarlet yarn some time ago, and I found that the differences between skeins disappeared into the delicious slight irregularities of the dye. I could of course wait and knit my Effortless (or Vitamin D) next after socks, but I’d prefer to press ahead.

Thots

I’ve been buying books (and scarcely looking at them). One is Meg’s & Amy Detjen’s “Knitting With Two Colours” which I would highly recommend. (I looked at it this morning. It’s full of useful tips.) I thought, as I did so, about the perhaps-forthcoming 2012 Calcutta Cup Victory Sweater. Top of the idea-pile had been something Norwegian, but I wonder if this would be the moment for the Prince of Wales joke: an all-over rotate-able design in two colours which would seem to flow unbroken down the sleeves, taking advantage of the fact that two-colour knitting tightens up the stitches into little squares.

The match is any moment now, in early February. It doesn’t belong there. In the very recent past, the Calcutta Cup was always contested on the last day of the Five Nations tournament (Six Nations, now, which spoils the symmetry). Now they slot it into the schedule any old where. The Loch Fyne family are coming over to Murrayfield for the occasion. Scotland has a reasonable chance of victory this year – surely a recipe for disaster. We only win when the odds are hopeless.