All well. The hat lacks but a round or two before the crown shaping. I should be well able to finish this evening. Then – swatch Georgia O’Keefe? (That’s the madelinetosh shade for my husband’s sleeveless v-neck.)  Or have I kept adequate gauge notes from all that Brownstone knitting before Christmas? I have a feeling that the Effortless pattern – written for madelinetosh – uses a larger needle size than I employed on the Brownstones. Maybe kill two birds with one stone by swatching with that.

Miscellaneous

Zite found an interview with Franklin for us. He is wildly enthusiastic about the designs of Laura Grutzeck. She doesn’t quite hack it for me. Franklin’s is a trim figure, and he’s brilliant at fit – look at his recent lopapeysa (his blog post for January 20) if you haven’t already. I prefer to snuggle into something more  form-concealing. I think his admiration for Grutzeck is sort of like the way IK was full of patterns that would look good on Eunny, when she first took over the editorship.

She has relaxed since and included stuff for the rest of us.

Here is some brilliantly-knit weirdness.

There’s lots about yarn-bombing on Zite these days. And my brother-in-law sent me this one this morning, from Dallas. Alas, I’ve never seen any myself. Edinburgh is full of statues which might benefit.

Mary Lou, thank you for the sock-shaping tip (comment yesterday). What happens when you get to the heel? Specifically, how many stitches for the foot? My memorised Patternworks pattern decreases gusset stitches until you get down to the number you thought of first, and then you proceed to knit the foot on exactly the same number as the leg. All this will become clearer to me when I get to grips with Gibson-Roberts and start measuring feet.

I am desperately sorry about your horse. 

Non-knit

I was thinking specifically yesterday of dates which are referred to, in normal speech, by the date only. “9/11”, “Ides of March”, “Quatorze juillet”, as you say, Mary Lou. I think the French – and the Italians? – go in for it more than we do, and name streets after dates. One might have to add the Glorious Twelfth, here in Britain, to our little list  – August 12, when the grouse-shooting season opens.

There are lots of other important dates which we all remember – Christmas and Groundhog Day and, yes, Pearl Harbor. But we don’t normally refer to them just by number. “Armistice Day” used to puzzle me, as a child – was it not odd to remember a former armistice when the world was convulsed by war?