Time to take the Christmas tree down. We've come through again!

All well here, progressing towards health. My husband has recovered some appetite.

Helen is whirlwinding about, cooking wild boar at the moment so that we can store it as frozen ready-meals, a much more welcome prospect than my having to tackle it from scratch. She has also done the ironing and secured the services of a Polish cleaning woman. Maybe 2013 will be the year in which I do, in fact, get a grip.

The Gardening Sweater continues well. Going round and round the sleeve is utterly satisfying, like a big sock. I’m knitting it on five needles so far, and I’m about 7” along what will eventually be a 16” or !7” sleeve.

Thank you for the enthusiastic comments about the Boxy. It’s a very popular pattern – there are project reports on Ravelry in German and French and what I take to be Norwegian and Japanese. I am still slightly worried about the bulk of fabric under the arms, but all the reports are enthusiastic. And some of them are even knit in madelinetosh sock yarn, which is what I’ve got.

I think I’ll at least buy-and-print.

Odds and ends:

There’s a knitting cartoon in the current New Yorker.

There seems to be an exhibition of Loes Veenstra’s work in Rotterdam at the moment. She is the Dutch woman who has knitted more than 500 sweaters and kept them unworn in boxes at home. I suspect they are largely if not entirely of her own design -- colour seems to be her thing. One of the great advantages of her eccentric system is that she wouldn’t have had to worry much about fit.

The link in the paragraph above (from Zite, of course) is to a blog posting by Stephen West, a designer new to me. He seems to concentrate on accessories. There is much of interest.