It’s wonderful to have my knitting back.

I’m at that stage, familiar to all – especially to all who are slightly worried about whether they have enough yarn – where I go round and round and round, watching the ball of yarn from which I am knitting diminish, while the knitting itself remains unchanged.

In sober fact, I’ve knit nearly 5 inches. There are 11 to go before the underarm. The construction of the Kirigami is that of a simple yoke sweater. When I get to the underarm, I ought to have a better idea of how the yarn is holding up. I could, perhaps, shorten the arms somewhat.

I chose the percentage for the sidebar simply because I had eight skeins of yarn and I have used up one of them.

IK turned up today. I was almost afraid to open it, so disappointed had I been with the last issue. This one’s OK. Almost everything is cabled. I think I would go first for the Sandy Neck pullover, but maybe that’s just because I’m keen on their male model. I do like cables. I don’t think I’ve done any since the Dunfallandy blankie I knit for the first great-granddaughter.

As for the rest of life, I (as so often) didn’t get very far. I did make progress with the task of dispatching two boxes of my husband’s papers to the man who has taken over work on the magnum opus. I’ll have to do Italy tomorrow, after all.

Does anyone know about booking Italian trains? I know it is possible, probably easy. But is it necessary? Here in GB, it would be insane (price-wise) not to book a train as far in advance as possible. But it might be less stressful not to be committed to a specific train.

Mulfina, thank you for the link to the article on New Jersey Italian. I'll chase that one up. The Duchess who gave me and Archie our cooking lesson in Palermo told me that she once was employed in Glasgow teaching Italian to Scottish-Italians a couple of generations removed who knew none of their "native" language.