The dog isn’t looking too bad:

It still needs its other ear — the ears seem too big to me, and I don’t know which way is meant to be up — and a nose and eyes. The latter features need black wool and are applied by means of satin stitch, on the one hand, and French knots, on the other. How on earth was life managed before YouTube? I’m not absolutely sure I’ve got any black yarn, either. Everything I pull out of stash turns out, in natural light, to be very dark brown or very dark blue. I’ve found something, but it might be charcoal grey.

Our friend says that all she requires of a knitted dog is that it stand up. That I seem to have achieved. The back legs tend to splay, but he’ll stay upright if you arrange him carefully and then tiptoe away.  

I can’t venture out to the LYS because I am expecting both the copper saucier and the yarn from Jimmy Bean today.

The really bad news, on the needlework front, is a hideous rent in one of the net curtains in the front of the house. The curtain was old and frail and no great loss. The hole was clearly made by a furry person who shall be nameless, who wanted to sit there and look at Drummond Place. But it must look dreadfully slummy from the outside. From the inside it is concealed by a real curtain which is normally kept drawn to protect works of art from direct sunlight, thus forming a nice little concealed space for kittens. (Direct sunlight is very bad for almost everything.) I will have to devote quite a bit of needlework-time today to attempting a clumsy repair.

Miscellaneous

Knitty is appealing for sponsors. Advertising revenue has apparently fallen off sadly of late. I think I’ll probably chip in. I had a nice time this morning tracking down the patterns the Editor/Publisher mentions by name in her appeal — the Clapotis I have actually knit. I wonder what became of it? The Dunfallendy blanket is an interesting thought, if great-grandchildren ever appear. The Dunfallendy Stone from which it derives is a Perthshire landmark.

The Skew socks are terrific, although I am sort of scared of anything that begins with Judy’s Magic Cast-On. I mastered it, more or less, when I was having a big Sock Session a few years ago. But I’m still scared.

Non-Knit

I’m getting on nicely, if uncomprehendingly, with “Life’s Greatest Secret”. It’s sort of fun replaying my own life at the back of my mind while reading. The double helix was discovered while I was at Oberlin, unbeknownst to me. Everything happened pretty fast after that. The book has now reached the mid-sixties (all four of my children have been born) and the genetic code has been cracked.

I am surprised to see that I am only about 1/3rd of the way through the text but have concluded, thankfully, that much space must be occupied by appendices and indexes. (I’m reading on my Kindle.) There are four more chapters bringing us up to date — the human genome, I presume, and I hope a discussion of evolution. Then I am going to re-read “The Genome” by Matt Ridley which I remember as much more ignoramus-friendly.