Non-knit

Archie is coming today. It is always good to see him. He has been on a brief tour, with a school party, of sites connected with WW II – Normandy beaches, Berlin, Auschwitz. I'll go pick him up at school at midday and look forward to being the first to hear about it as we drive back for lunch. Then, somewhere in what might be called the middle of the night, he'll get up and get a taxi to the airport (I don't mind early, but this one is ridiculous) to go to Athens for the Easter holiday.

I had occasion yesterday to boot up my husband's old DOS-based computer in search of a file which had somehow got left behind. (I found it.) Do you remember how fast computers were in the old days? It was almost like turning on a light.

Knitting

Thank you for your help with my struggles.

I've just been watching the YouTube video of the German short-row which you recommend, Judy. It's most impressive. I'll Evernote it for future use. But it won't help here. My rounds are all full-length – it's just that at the end of each one of them, I turn around and go haring off in the other direction. The wrap holds the whole thing together in a circle.

Cam, I was very interested in the very lucid explanation you took the trouble to write out for me (comment yesterday). At first I thought, this won't do, because it involves TWO stitches, with one or the other being wrapped and turned-on in alternate rounds. I've only got one, the centre stitch of the fourth corner, with a lattice ladder on either side of it formed by YO's on alternate rounds. Those YO's are at the heart of my difficulty.

I think what I'm going to try today, when I get back there, is to add another stitch (so that there are a pair of them up the centre of the fourth-corner mitre) and do it Cam's way.

After all that night-time cogitation mentioned yesterday I decided to do each turn by knitting the stitch, when I first arrive on the scene, then turning, then slipping it back and wrapping, then slipping it back again and knitting forward. Observing myself doing this, I discovered that the YO tends to get slack during any subsequent struggles with wrapping and turning. I think that accounts for a great deal of the untidiness in that corner. So I decided that, for that corner only, I will always do the YO after wrapping and turning. With Cam's system, the wrapped stitch will always be one stitch away from the YO (I think) which should work even better.

We'll see.

I flipped through Knit One, Knit All before putting it back on the shelf, but found no help there. It's odd – isn't it odd? – that EZ never seems to have addressed this problem. She was ideally qualified – she loved garter stitch, she loved knitting in the round, she wasn't at all keen on purling, she brought an engineer's intelligence to the problems of knitting, she wasn't afraid to “unvent” a method never used before. There are all manner of ingenious construction methods in that book, as elsewhere in her work, but no garter stitch in the round.

Meanwhile I've reached round 19 of 136. It's a start. The border pattern consists of six rows of lozenge-shaped motifs, each row different, all framed by an all-over lattice formed by k3tog's. I've finished the first row of motifs, started the second – they're bigger, this time, but mercifully light on k3tog – and the lattice has just closed over the head of the first row of motifs.