So, here are the WIPs, as promised.  Maybe I should take the Craftsy class on photography.

Relax2:

The Pakokku socks, now within hailing distance of the first heel. The diabetic appt earlier this week moved things forward a bit, and the dentist yesterday contributed a round or two. You see why I want to abandon all else and spend all day knitting Pakokku socks.

It will be interesting to discover, when I move on to my recent purchases from the Loopy Ewe, whether I have to stick to 64 stitches to get results like this. I cast these socks on on 56, you will remember, and soon saw that nothing worth having was happening.

The Stephen West shawl:

The good thing about starting from nothing, is that one makes great progress at the beginning. The bad thing, is that it gets slower and slower. Every right-side row adds four stitches, and the wrong side contributes another two. They add up fast.

The darker yarn is one of the skeins from my recent purchase of Rowan Art Yarn. Unfortunately, they don’t have colour-names on the ball band. The lighter yarn is madelinetosh sock.

Oddly, and irritatingly, the photographed prototype is different: it starts with a dark triangle, like the printed pattern, but then inserts about ¾ of an inch of a stripe in the lighter yarn, with the result that the slipped stitches across the striped part I’m doing at the moment -- you can just see them --  are light rather than dark. It doesn’t matter a bit. I’m happy with the way it looks. But the discrepancy irritates.

The answer to the question I never got around to posting to Craftsy, is that the slipped stitches are moved by being cabled.

Sue, I’m sure you will hugely enjoy your class with SW. Hug him for me. And he won’t make you sit in the corner if you haven’t mastered K1L and K1R. At least you are aware that the distinction exists. I have found his mnemonic – I’m sure you’ll hear it from the man himself – enormously useful: I LEFT the FRONT door open; I’ll be RIGHT BACK. That is, for a M1L, insert the left-hand needle under the loop from front-to-back, and vice versa for M1R.

Linda, I enjoyed your comment on last Tuesday’s post, and almost envy you, starting out on the adventure of knitting. I have become a tremendous Craftsy enthusiast – consider the Knit Lab course with Stephanie Japel?

They could hire me as a publicist.

That leaves a certain amount to be said about chilli-growing, and if I run out of material in the next few days, I will write about Balnakilly. What you see, if you follow the link, is the surviving wing – presumably, servants’ quarters – of Kirkmichael’s Great House. It burnt down perhaps 10 years ago. I went and had a look last week – a real last-night-I-drempt-I-went-to-Manderley experience.