Another reasonably productive day. If I can knit seven repeats of the edging pattern in a day – and, at the moment, I'm running slightly ahead of that target – I can finish one side of the shawl in a week. Seven sevens are 49, and there are 50 points in the edging on each side. I hate thinking of knitting like that, as I said yesterday, but once the idea has lodged it is impossible to get rid of it.

But today starts with a problem which I am sure one of you can solve. I logged on to Ravelry and wrote a message about the Unst Bridal Shawl in the Heirloom Knitting Group, designating it as a New Topic since there hasn't been anything recently. I have explained the whole story and have asked about whether or not I need to reverse the border patterns. I can't figure out how to post. There is my message. There are the formatting buttons – I can Preview it, and it looks rather well. It's been a long time since I contributed to a Ravelry forum, and maybe, even then, I was adding my voice to an already-established thread. Help is urgently needed. I have left the page open.

[It's OK. I figured it out. It was a matter of getting rid of some interesting side-ads Ravelry was offering, revealing the button which let me scroll the whole thing down a bit. There was the button I needed -- "Start Topic".]

I have made two little discoveries which speed the work on a bit – both so elementary that you may want to avert your eyes.

1. Every odd-numbered row begins slip 1 wyif, yo, k2tog. It creates a sort of one-sided column of faggoting on the edge where I will pick up stitches to knit the borders inwards. It took me an embarrassingly long time to grasp that, having slipped the first stitch, I needed to restrain my instinct to move the yarn to the back and just go ahead and k2tog – the yo would look after itself.
2. I am working, as I have mentioned, on nice wooden sock needles which show up the stitches beautifully. I have learned always to put the free needle down in the same place on the coffee table in front of me. That has saved much tedious rustling about on the table followed by crawling about on the floor as I search for it.

And that's about it, for knitting.

Weather

I am concerned about how cold you all are in the US. It sounds truly extraordinary.

I didn't grasp, until after the event, that that ship full of scientists and tourists which got stuck in the Antarctic ice over the New Year, was there to observe global warming in the form of the melting ice cap. It's still there, with its crew. The scientists and tourists have been removed by helicopter.

We in GB have been having a remarkably stormy winter which has, on the whole, passed Edinburgh by. It is – everywhere – unusually warm for the time of year.