I think more and more about what you said the other day, Mary Lou, about your former relationship with mah jong. Freecell is taking up too much of what little remains of my life.

No pic today, despite promises. I’ve finished the lozenge and have embarked on the peerie pattern. I like to leave the swatch-scarf at that point, where I’m ready to snatch it up and embark on the next experiment. I wonder if the original knitter welcomed the peeries as relief from the stress of knitting eight (or however many) different lozenges around the body, or found them a tedious interruption to the intellectual excitement.

My own experience veers towards the latter.

It occurred to me today that perhaps Alexander’s problem with my latest experiment is the slightly Christmassy effect of the red stripe across the middle of the lozenge in conjunction with Flugga white. Perhaps if I went back to the original sub fusc colours and threw in a gentle blue stripe instead.…

I must go back to my Craftsy Fair-Isle-vest class with Mucklestone and try to find and mark the place where she extols the merits of swatching and says, perhaps with a wicked smile, that you may never need to knit a sweater again. Who would have thought that I would be so totally drawn in to a practice I have always avoided? I’m sure it helps that there’s no immediate need for the garment, since (as Alexander’s remark about his winding sheet implies) there’s no immediate (or even remote) prospect of Scotland's winning the Calcutta Cup.

My plan, vaguely, having invested all this time and interest, is to go ahead and knit Alexander a non-Calcutta-Cup vest. Then when we do win, if I’m still capable of knitting, I’ll knit his wife one in the brighter colour-way.

And my more immediate plan, once I’ve finished the current peerie pattern, is to return to my husband’s Tannehill sweater and finish it. What a lot of italics there are in this post!