It’s bitter cold, with the forecast of worse, including snow, to come. Our weather generally tends to move from west to east, but this time, all of a sudden, it’s blowing in from Siberia, picking up strength in Scandinavia. It’s a very good thing Ian’s funeral was last week and not this one.

It was fairly cold on Saturday. The English rugby team came equipped with battery-heated trousers (no kidding) for their substitutes to wear as they sat on the bench waiting to see if they were wanted. Had England won, as all expected, this would have been hailed as a triumph of 21^st century technology. In the event, there has been a certain amount of disrespectful laughter.

The Soutache continues to advance. I have lost the ballbands and can’t remember which of Carol Sunday’s yarns I am knitting with. It is heavenly soft.

And I have thought some more about Alexander’s vest. You will notice that the OXO bands shift with each repeat, so that the centre line runs alternately between and through the O’s. Meg points out that it’s nice to start the v-neck at a point where the V fits into the top of an X. I wouldn’t have thought of it, but I believe she’s right.

It is a great luxury to have a huge swatch. All I had to do was put the tape measure at that point, decide on a length for the vest, subtract 3” for ribbing, and see where the tape measure led me. The answer is, start with a peerie and knit, in all, three peeries and three OXO’s to the underarm-neck.

I downloaded KD’s Machrihanish pattern – I own it but have never printed it – and was surprised to see both that she doesn’t bother with this refinement, and that her patterns aren’t centered. So the point of the v-neck just falls where it happens to be, not at a mid-point, and from there on up the pattern is not balanced on either side of the neck.

It’s a very nice sweater, nonetheless.

My next problem is to learn how to cast on. Meg says that the long-tailed cast-on tends to curl with corrugated ribbing. She demonstrates an alternative, but it is beyond me. I do a long-tailed cast-on by knitting into a loop on my left thumb – I think a friend at Hampton Elementary School in Detroit taught me how.

So first I need to learn the cat’s-cradle method that the grown-ups use, and then modify it as Meg demonstrates. I need to cast on a lot of stitches in a funny way with two colours for Nancy Marchant’s EYF class; cat’s-cradle may get me started on that, as well.