Lots of miscellany today, if I can remember it all.

I solved the stitch-count problem on the Relax – pretty simple, really. Both front and back lacked two stitches. That must mean I didn’t finish the underarm dolman increases properly. I have restored the missing stitches to the back – too late to go where they should be, but at least, in selecting their random positions, I put one on each side of the center mark.

I am now shaping the shoulders – lots of short-row’ery. It is not entirely unlikely that I will finish the back today. I don’t think it will be possible to have a serious consideration of size and fit until the front is also done.

Stephen West has posted a blog entry with wonderful pictures (taken by Jared?) of a photo shoot in Iceland for his new ebook, “Westy’s Besties”.

Here’s a picture Alexander took on Saturday morning. Ketki’s jumper is of some antiquity now – it looks very fresh, and is perhaps saved for wearing to rugby matches on particularly unpleasant days. The yarn is the real Guernsey thing from Frangipani and the pattern, if I remember aright, “Mrs Laidlaw’s pattern” (Seahouses I) from Gladys Thompson’s seminal “Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys and Arans”. (I think that book deserves that portentous adjective.) The actual sweater was constructed with the help of Beth Brown-Reinsel’s “Knitting Ganseys”.

Non-knit

Much snow has gone from Drummond Place, but much remains, and it is savagely cold. I haven’t been in touch with anyone in Strathardle yet to find out how much snow is lying there. There will be a lot. There’s not much point in our going while it is so extremely cold, anyway. Too cold for gardening. Wait and see.

The big news is that Virgin say they will come and install our cable next Tuesday, a week today. At the moment I am actually looking forward to mastering the TiVo box. We wanted to watch three things at 9 p.m. yesterday and in the end managed it by finding repeats for two of them. That sort of thing is child’s play to the TiVo, I gather. (“Broadchurch” and the history of Syria were the other two.)

BBC1 stuttered and coughed all the way through the early evening news yesterday, but pulled itself together, mericifully, for “Shetland”. On that subject, don’t fail to read Knitlass’ comment yesterday. (The link is to her blog, but the comment, of course, is here.) I never entirely mastered the story but it didn’t entirely matter. If they weren’t going to film in January I think they might have cut Up Helly Aa out altogether – it wasn’t really essential to the plot and felt discordant all the way through.

There is a scheme afoot – I won’t say more at this point – which might get me there in September, with Helen and Rachel both lined up to move in with my husband for the weekend. I was a bit taken aback to see how very small the airplane was.