It has been another fairly unproductive day.

I had a tedious, business-y thing to do, involving the scanning of bank statements. I’ve done it. But that leaves quite a lot of other things undone.

I’ve found the J&S version of the shawl pattern – but have lost my invaluable Italian grammar book. I've reached the bit which any student of Italian will remember, when pronouns and untranslatable "particles" begin to attach themselves to the end of verbs, and then hive off and take their places in the sentence, the pronouns changing, the particles not. Slightly like nuclear physics.

Knitting has progressed well. I have done the first two – plain – rows of the shawl border, counting and counting; and am now establishing the pattern, still counting away. Once that’s done, it should look after itself.

And I was wrong: Mrs Hunter of Unst’s shawl, knit for the previous great-grandchild, has 185 stitches in each border at the beginning. This one has only 160. Should be a doddle.

Knitting the borders back and forth has the very considerable advantage of sparing me the agony of joining all that great length of edging together without twisting it. There was once, long, long ago when I did twist it, despite all my care and caution. I’m afraid I took my scissors to the corner that time.

You’ll have heard that Patreon has backed down, and is not going to impose a surcharge on patrons’ donations after all. Knitty says that their income is down $1000 (per month?) anyway.

And Susan Crawford says that the Vintage Shetland Project will be with us soon. “Eight years ago, when we started work on the Project, we had no idea what we would encounter along the way, but the obstacles we faced have only made the book stronger and better than we ever could have imagined.”

One of those “obstacles” was the fact that crowdfunding produced more money than asked for or expected, so publication was postponed for the first of many times, to allow her to go back to Shetland for more research. It could have been more tactfully expressed.

Tomorrow I mean to start early and Get Things Done.