I’ve finished the garter stitch strip. Today’s job is to graft it to the beginning and start picking up stitches for the fill-in.

That covers that topic, but fortunately for today there’s more to say.

Thrilled by your comment, Gretchen, I got out my old Vogue Knitting Books and tried to find the pattern that Kate Gilbert’s Kirigami had stirred memories of. Here it is, I think, from Book No. 49, autumn 1956:

(The scan isn't all that clear. Like Kirigami, it consists of one-row stripes. The stripes are vertical on both body and sleeves, knit sideways.)

Is that the UFO you have left over from 56 years ago? The gauge is 19 stitches to 2 inches – wow! No wonder you didn’t finish. The yarn specified is Penguin Alpen 3-ply, which is no reason for you not to knit it in Munrospun.

I also bought and printed the Kirigami pattern itself (Ravelry link again).  And downloaded a pic from the Twist Collective. Again, they gave me only half of it but fortunately this time the sweater is in the middle of the fragment I was allowed:

And I had a look at what Mary Thomas says. I was egregiously wrong yesterday – to begin with, the passage I was thinking of is in Mary Thomas’s Book of Knitting Patterns, not her Knitting Book. (That doesn’t mean “knitting patterns” as we would use the phrase – the books is effectively a stitch dictionary.) And what she says is that “front fabric” has width-wise elasticity, and tends to take-in and cling, whereas the elasticity for “reversed fabric” is depth-wise so the fabric tends to take up.

So if you put on an ordinary sweater inside-out, she says, it will be wider and shorter than before “because the stitches take the opposite bend when encircling the body”.

I’m not sure I entirely understand that, but I’m willing to take her word for it. And it should mean that it would be possible to knit the Kirigami without negative ease. Madelinetosh sock yarn?

I pursued the Bergere de France pattern mentioned in Saturday’s blog at least as far as their website. The yarn is 90% cashmere, 10% wool, and costs a lot. The pattern is in a book that costs $20 and that rules it out altogether. I am willing to contemplate extraordinary extravangance in yarn-purchase – but $20 on top for the pattern, no.

Non-knit

My credit card doesn’t work – not for lack of funds, unless a bad man has been in there. This happened yesterday afternoon, and again this morning, the clincher, when I tried to pay for Kirigami with PayPal. They recently sent me, unexpectedly, a debit card to use on the account. I’ve got to activate it by telephone and keep putting off doing so. I thought it was in-addition-to the credit card (which has more than a year to run) but maybe it is instead-of.

So I must spend some time on the telephone this morning straightening that out.