My hair looks much better, for the moment.

Knitting

I am nearly finished with the first Italian sock – a few more rounds of ribbing.

Candace recommends a tubular bind-off. I am perfectly happy with the Surprisingly Stretchy, which in addition I can now do without consulting a text. But the purpose of this project is to learn things, so perhaps I had better try. It sounds sort of like one-handed Kitchener stitch.

The drawback is that it is done on k1,p1 ribbing, not my style for a sock. My new “Cast On, Bind Off” book agrees. So I’ll have to do a round or two of k1,p1 at the top of the sock, on top of my usual k2,p2. How will that look?

And then the immediately-following excitement will be an attempt to do a provisional cast-on using the cord of a fine, short circular as the waste yarn. It will be a noteworthy achievement if I can master that.

If both of these procedures go smoothly, I should embark on the 2^nd sock today. I mustn’t try to rush it. I mustn’t settle for the tubular bind-off if the k1,p1 rib looks silly on top of k2,p2. There’s no hurry.

I think perhaps I had better cast on a plain-vanilla, top-down pair of socks to keep in the emergency bag. I wouldn’t like to spend the night in a&e trying to do a provisional cast-on.

I heard from Knit Purl this morning, as I do from time to time, singing the praises of Olgajazzy. I should have recognised the name – she’s been in IK, and the Twist Collective. Some very nice Japanese-y things, no one of which quite makes me want to fling away the current sock and start this afternoon.

Strathardle

I didn’t take any pictures for you. I'll do better next week.

We all went to a matinee of J.M. Barrie’s “Dear Brutus” at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre on Wednesday, and enjoyed it very much. We used to go often when our children were young – 40 years ago, indeed, we saw “Dear Brutus” which I remember fondly. In those days the theatre was in a tent, and of necessity simpler and smaller than it is now. The programme included more high-brow elements then, and the audience was younger and poorer than the third millennium crowd. 

Amazon let me download the text free, so I did, and was interested to see that Pitlochry had sweetened the ending. Or is it always played like that? Perhaps in 1917, when it was first produced, too many people had lost too many sons to believe in happy endings.