The big news is that Thomas-the-Elder and his Lucy plan to get married on November 1^st – next year. All Saints' Day, a good start. My husband says he can’t go. He’ll have to -- we’ll start worrying about that in May or June. A wheelchair would have to be involved, but such things are not unknown. My concern is that, just as this past year has taken its toll, so will the coming one.

A late 18^th-century country house in Yorkshire has been hired as the venue, so grand that I would be embarrassed to include the link.

Thomas and Lucy will be in Edinburgh sometime in November, this year. We’ll get the Princess shawl out and have a look. It will take me half a day to move all the books off the top of the chest where it is stored.

Knitting

This turned up on Zite – it purports to be a woman knitting for Scottish independence, not my scene nor would the activity be much endorsed in Shetland. I am puzzled as to what it shows – she’s knitting around on three long needles, apparently, without a knitting belt. But what are her hands actually doing? If you peer closely, there appears to be the tip of a fourth needle in her right hand. What happened to the rest of it? Has a knitting belt been photo-brushed out?

I had a less satisfactory time with my belt yesterday, but forged on. I am back with three needles. That’s better. I have determined on a new approach, for the moment –  instead of trying to issue executive orders from the brain, to let my hands get on with the job, constrained by the facts that they’ve got three needles to deal with and that one needle is held rigid in the belt.

I took a class with Annie Modesitt once. She knits weird, as she says on her blog page. I gather she was mostly self-taught, and sort of fell into a method she calls Combination Knitting which is incredibly fast. Alas, it didn’t work for me. But, given the belt, maybe my hands can figure something out.

I was very grateful for your comment yesterday, Maureen, about your own struggles with a knitting belt. Like you, I scoop the yarn from the left-hand needle in two-colour knitting. What was happening yesterday was that the rigid needle was making that slight movement, assisted by the right hand. I doubt if that’s the “right” approach. I must learn to flick the yarn over the needle with the left forefinger? That’s what I mean by an executive order which, for the moment, I am trying to avoid.

After half-an-hour of that sort of thing, picking up the Milano was like having the cat jump onto my lap after a long, hard day. And, a big bonus – there is one less skein to wind than I thought. There is another skein, and it’ll have to be wound one day – but it’s a second skein of the border colour. It doesn’t have to be done now. The final colour is wound and should be attached to the sweater today. Pic tomorrow, if so.