This morning, Blogger consents to load the pictures. So here they are.

The shawl:

You see what I mean -- it doesn't look like half of a square.

The bag:

At present writing, the shawl lacks four rows of the completion of the tenth repeat, and I didn't get Milano out yesterday.

Two little bits of excitement, however. I have mentioned that one end of the Inox needle I am using has been bent into a curve, as Sharon Miller recommends somewhere. And, if nothing else, it means I can always tell which side I'm knitting on. Curved needle = right-side row. Except that last night I looked down at my hands and saw that the position was reversed. I was knitting a right-side row with the straight end of the needle.

The pattern is an 18-row repeat. The first 12 rows alternate lace and plain garter stitch, the last six are lace only. I think I must have left out a garter stitch row somewhere. The other hypothesis – two successive garter-stitch rows – seems very unlikely. I can't see anything wrong, looking at the knitting, but the evidence of that needle is irrefutable. And it means I must be careful when I get to the borders and try Fleegle'ing them. I was relying on those needle-ends to keep me in order, but it clearly won't work if I don't pay attention.

The other bit of excitement concerns the pattern itself. The chart for the centre, as one would expect, shows the repeat with a few extra rows to put it in context. Sharon's charts are brilliant. But it was only the other day that I finally noticed that Row 19 – the next one after the box delimiting the repeat – is slightly different from Row 1. And it shouldn't be.

The difference is at the edges, and is just a question of which side of a k2tog to put the YO on. But nothing is entirely trivial in an enterprise of such pith and moment. Row 19 makes more sense, and I'll do it that way henceforth.

Reading

Shandy, I hope Barbara vine doesn't disappoint. It's not great. And, yes, I've read The Stranger's Child, and enjoyed. It sounded familiar but I couldn't remember and looked it up on Amazon where |I was told that I had bought it in 2011. They would double their profits if they didn't include such useful warnings for Silly Old Fools like me, but I was grateful. I found it in the Cloud and remembered as soon as I had re-read the first sentence.

Other Comments

Susan, that is exciting about your trip to Scotland. St Andrews is a great place, and picturesque. Glasgow is good too, and relatively tourist-free unless you coincide with the Commonwealth Games. You must come across to Edinburgh – an hour's train journey, and they leave every 15 minutes – especially at the end of the month when the Festival will be raging.

But if you can manage a few days in Shetland, that would be the icing on the cake.

Gerri, what do you mean by the reference to your “mathematical knitting book”? Is this something I should know about.

Thank you for your concerns for my health. It's not something that is going to be soothed away by a few crocuses, I'm afraid. I'll make another appt with the nice dr next week, as I get to the end of his course of pills. I'll time the actual appointment to be a few days (or longer, as necessary) into Lent. I often feel more sprightly without cider, but haven't the strength of character to abstain now, with Ash Wednesday looming.