Hey! Bernie won in Michigan!

I’ll have to write my gloomy thoughts about Politics 2016 one day soon. Essentially I think that Hillary would make the best president of a dispiriting lot. But I’m sort of happy to think that if I were 18 again, and at Oberlin, I’d be as keen for Bernie as I was once for Adlai Stevenson.

An email from one of you yesterday morning really got me serious about the EYF. She sent me a link to this useful blog, which itself contains a link to a Survival Guide written last year.

I have phoned our private care providers and asked for cover from 9 until 2 on each day from Thursday until Saturday next week (classes being from 10 until 1). I haven’t heard back from them; that probably means all is well.

And I have grasped that that won’t leave me proper time for the market, and that the market richly deserves proper time. So I have (sadly) cancelled my Friday class with Tomofholland. It would have been such fun, especially as no preparation and no supplies were required of attendees. But I don’t see any way around the problem.

The Survival Guide mentioned above contains the excellent advice – would I have thought of it? – to go to market knowing what you want. Even if there is a danger of restoring my stash to its previous dimensions, it will be far better to have it stocked with patterns-and-the-yarn-with-which-to-knit-them rather than random, wonderful skeins. So I shall at least look out and write down the yarn needed for the little shawls mentioned here recently for Cathy and Lucy, and that capelet or whatever you’d call it, in IK.

And I am rather taken with the Antler pullover, discovered recently on Flipboard. The blogger who wrote about it says “It turns out that if you work on stuff, it eventually gets done.” There’s a great truth there. However, the Antler starts off with a madtosh yarn and I doubt if I could bear to substitute anything for that.

I have also re-read Franklin’s famous (I hope) essay on the Ten Knitters You Meet in Hell. Ethel the Unready, that’ll be me.

Vivienne, I had already looked for that pattern leaflet in “Heirloom Knitting” and, prompted by your comment, I looked again. It really wasn’t there. But this morning I thought of a third possibility – Hazel Carter’s “Shetland Lace Knitting from Charts” (which also mentions it in the bibliography). And there it is.

The other loss, alluded to yesterday, is much more serious. I’ll tell you tomorrow. I am encouraged to hope that I’ll find that one, too.