Here's an odd story, to keep us largely away from knitting for another day.

Our young Polish cleaning woman (whom I love and trust) comes on Tuesday mornings from 8 to 10, the idea being to be finished and away before my husband gets up, as he rather tends to dominate the stage. The one drawback is that the bedroom gets dustier and dustier since she can never get in there.

At Christmas Ketki came up with the brilliant idea – Ketki is very good at thinking – that we have her come one Sunday morning so that she could clean the bedroom while we were at Mass. So we did that on the 1^st of February and it worked fine. She then came as usual on Tuesday the 3^rd.

Sometime last week – after Tuesday, but was it before or after Friday when the iPad disappeared? – my husband came into the kitchen with a white baseball cap, and said, You have a lot to answer for. It is one of his lines. He had found it on the bedroom floor, near the head of the bed on his side. I've never seen it before in my life, I said. It must be Gosha's. He thought, indeed, that it might have been lying there a day or two before he confronted me with it, and we agreed that it was probably hers.

So yesterday (another Tuesday) I gave it to her as she was leaving, and she said she had never seen it before in her life.

We are profoundly puzzled. We had an opportunistic thief once in Birmingham. It can happen. He got in through the open back door while my husband was working in the garden and got away with his wallet from the pocket of the jacket on the chair by the bed. Pretty cool.

This time, the wallet is still there and the drawers undisturbed. The Bad Man would have had to have his own key, to have let himself quietly in while we were almost certainly in the house, to have gone to the room almost the furthest from the front door – and to have thrown in his hat before quietly leaving. With or without the iPad.

No, it's improbable. Maybe Gosha's husband came in that day – he often comes to fetch her and hovers outside. Maybe it's his. But why would he snatch his hat off and throw it on the floor? Why wouldn't Gosha recognise it?

I undoubtedly had the iPad all last week, until Friday the 6th. Its disappearance can have nothing to do with the bedroom-cleaning on the 1^st.

Knitting

I finished the linen square last night, and cast on one using the two balls of Jaipur silk held together. I like the result a lot. It's slow work – even with two together it's going to need more than the 44 stitches of the pattern to make a reasonable-sized square. The pattern is corner-to-corner, so I just have to go on until it's an acceptable size. And one has to be terribly careful to include both yarns in every stitch – all too easy to leave behind a loop.

But the resulting fabric is very nice indeed, firm and shiny, despite my clumsiness with garter stitch. Despite slow-th I think I could knit eight such Pocket Squares before September without stress. This could be it.

Sue posted a comment yesterday directing us to Techknitter's discovery of a way to knit Kitchener stitch. It is very interesting indeed. I don't need it myself because, as it happens, I absolutely love Kitchener-ing with a tapestry needle, but I recommend it to all needle-phobes.