Grandmother Rachel just emailed to say that Juliet smiled at her yesterday – aged five weeks exactly. Early but not implausible. It has always seemed to me wonderful that the first thing a child learns to do is something so utterly human.

And another thing that seems wonderful, in a thoroughly imperfect world, is that English asparagus and Jersey Royal potatoes appear in the supermarket at the same instant. I’m sure neither were there when I last was, on Saturday. We had them for supper last night, with a bit of haddock. My husband didn’t think the asparagus was very good.

Knitting

I took myself in hand and went back to the Sous Sous. I have extended the four-stitch ribbed edging to a length which should reach around the back of the neck. The next instruction is to graft the live stitches from the front shoulder to the bound-off ones of the back – “or, alternatively, cast off the stitches and sew shoulders together” – a rare touch of insouciance, for a knitting pattern. I love grafting, so I’ll at least attempt the former option.

I haven’t matched front and back yet. The back shoulder stitches were sloped, a few cast off at the beginnings of many rows. It would have been a bit fiddly, but by no means impossible, to keep them live for future grafting. I wish I had read the pattern through at the start, but I am sure that is a virtue I will never acquire.

Comments

Thank you very much, Lisa, for guiding me to the Ravelry page with the patterns from Valimaki’s “Color Wheel Knits”. She is a designer I very much like, and there are some good things there – but I now know that I don’t need the book, at least, not right now.

Joni and Tamar, thank you for guiding me to Franklin’s colouring book. I pre-ordered it from Amazon.co.uk even before reading the next comment. Isn’t this an extraordinary phenomenon, adult colouring books? One likes to imagine the marketing meeting at which a Brash Young Person suggested such a preposterous idea. And now it turns out to be the Next Big Thing! Where does anyone find the time to do all that colouring-in?

Knitlass, I hope you have a grand time at the Knitting and Stitching show. My husband and I went to one at the Ally Pally once. The astonishing thing, which he remembers as vividly as I do, was the Japanese pavilion. So it must have been 2001 when we were there. The journey to north London was well worth it for that alone.