Wednesday, October 17, 2012


Thank you for the link, Anonymous, to those brilliant Harvard people reading both the Latin and then Dryden’s English of the passage from the Aeneid I mentioned the other day [comment, Monday]. What a wonderful start to my day!

A busy one it will be. We have a routine diabetes app't at the Royal Infirmary which will in effect take all day, by the time we get there and get back and slot in lunch and sit about for quite a while in the diabetes dep’t itself. Back to the Zauberball sock – I have forgotten almost everything I learned from those months of sock-knitting earlier in the year. In this case, I’m not very far past the first toe (it’s toe-up) of the first sock. It is destined to have a Strong-Fleegle heel but I will have to remind myself how to do that.

In the early evening, a gem of a Kirkmichael postcard is coming up on eBay. Most of the charm of old Kirkmichael postcards lies in the fact that the village looked just the same as it does now, 100 years ago. But this one shows a corner of the village, with people and picturesquely  squalid business premises, which has entirely vanished.

Twice recently we have been outbid in the last few seconds by someone willing to pay serious money for old Kirkmichael postcards. This time, I’m going to bid very serious money.

As for actual knitting, I did finish the second sleeve of the mitered jacket yesterday, and started its garter stitch border. The provisional cast-on was a struggle. For the border of the first sleeve, I used the one I think of as “cat’s cradle”. Last night, I couldn’t get anywhere with the instructions in my new “Cast On Bind Off” book. The back pages of “Knit One Knit All” came to the rescue – and interestingly, the instructions were different. COBO has you hold the two yarns in your left hand in the slingshot position with the waste yarn below, over your thumb, and the working yarn above.

KOKA reverses the positions of the yarns, and it was only that way that I succeeded in doing it. I think I’ll revert to the crochet cast-on next time.

And THEN I discovered that I had entirely overlooked a W when I was doing the border on the first sleeve – “Join to WS of sleeve by working k2tog tbl", it clearly states.  I don’t think it’s what we call in computing a Fatal Error. I am, of course, attaching this second border to the right side, as I did the first one, pictured below. It doesn’t look too bad, does it? The join is smoother on the reverse side and this explains my puzzlement, mentioned earlier, about how to slip the first stitch of the return row, purlwise or knitwise. But I think the chain on the right side can be claimed as a "feature".


General non-knit

My hair looks very nice, thank you, and I feel five pounds lighter.

We heard much of the debate, in the night. The President seems to have woken up. It all seemed awfully predictable.

I have much else to say, about Archie and the Aeneid and your kind encouragement to buy knitting books. But I think it’s time to move forward with Wednesday.

2 comments:

  1. Ruth in Ottawa1:48 PM

    The chain on the right side is definitely a feature! Positively a design element, in fact.

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  2. The chain is a very nice feature, IMHO.

    It's funny how quickly the gained knowledge fades away. I'm glad you were able to find a way to do the "cat's cradle" provisional cast on.

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