I’m all ready for the new Aga tomorrow. Well, more or less ready.

Jean, tomorrow’s reconditioned one will be electric. An Aga service man told me once that most of the ones they install these days are electric. I was surprised that I could get a reconditioned one – I thought it was so new an idea that nobody would have discarded one yet.

Old Faithful is gas-fired. It’s very old, probably 50 or 60 years. I suspect it was solid-fuel to begin with. The man who last serviced it, two or three years ago, said that he really ought to condemn it. Then he didn’t turn up for the next annual service, which was even more alarming.

I have two gas burners to totter on with, if for some reason tomorrow’s installation isn’t successful. And two cats, to keep me warm. And the weather has turned into springtime.

Let’s think about knitting…

I didn’t get on as far as I hoped, with the Soutache. I’ve done the fancy bind-off, however, and started on the loose ends. All I’ve done for Alexander is re-read the Techknitter’s piece about corrugated rib. I decided to store it in Evernote. I knew I had an account somewhere, with some interesting items in it, although I haven’t used it for a while.

I found it and logged in – mercifully, the computer remembered my password; I certainly don’t – and discovered, to my surprise and delight, that the Techknitter’s essay was already there., and had been for about a year. I had no memory of having read it before.

Shandy, I meant to answer your question about the new KD pattern (comment, Tuesday) but forgot. I like it, but… I hadn’t thought about its old-fashioned air, but you’re right, of course. KD herself, in the essay accompanying the pattern, says that it reminds her of pieces she has seen in the Shetland Museum, and that such sweaters were “popular in Scotland in the middle of the last century”.

The “but…” above concerns the yarn. This pattern is written for Fyberspates’ “Cumulus”, silk and suri alpaca, which sounds wonderful. But it looks awfully like Rowan’s Kidsilk Haze. I once knit a big, beautiful striped scarf in that yarn – a Kaffe Fasset pattern, I think; on the cover of a Rowan magazine, I think. The result was very successful. I gave it to granddaughter Hellie. And resolved never, ever to knit with Kidsilk Haze again.

It sounds as if all the rest of the West Highland Way patterns are going to be in “Cumulus”.