Thursday, February 06, 2020


Mary Lou, I know the yarn will come eventually. But I want to start the shawl right now and am afraid that if I am forced back on my own resources – shopping the stash – I may start something and then feel I have to go on with it.

In fact, I have decided that there is nothing to worry about. The email about my yarn came from “Pitney Bowes” – don’t they make postage machines? – and contained a tracking number and the news that the estimated day of arrival was Sunday. But when I click on the tracking number, I find myself in the familiar arms of the Royal Mail, with no news (or estimates) whatsoever except to say that the package was handed in at the Lerwick post office yesterday afternoon, and was sent 2nd Class Signature Required. The Royal Mail is not going to deliver a second class package on a Sunday.

My previous recent orders to Shetland – to Jamieson & Smith, and to Uradale – were filled so fast that I could only assume all other business was suspended until Mrs Miles’ package had been rushed to the airport. I sort of thought Jamieson’s would be the same.

I have finished binding off the long, long bottom edge of the new Dathan, and started tidying the yarn ends. I think I have been deliberately dragging my feet a bit, so as not to finish too soon. Some ladies came to tea today. That slowed me down, tidying piles of paper away to make room for their teacups. Alas that the Spring Shawl is not the sort of Lost Object to hide in a pile of paper.

Non-knit

Thank you again for your help with my new jigsaw puzzle obsession. Aine, I will have a look at the British Jigsaw Library. My husband believed in doing puzzles without a picture. Snickers, thanks for finding the Gorey for me. Shandy, thanks very much indeed for the offer of your recently-finished puzzle. But I think if I’m going to succumb, I’d better start with the one my niece brought me, Robert Burns (not the poet), “Diana and her Nymphs”, very 1926. The original lives in the National Galleries of Scotland, but I have no memory of ever seeing it on their walls.

Here is a picture of Manaba practising baby-care, in anticipation of the wee creature for whom my “Hansel” hap is intended:





3 comments:

  1. Yes Pitney Bowes do make postal franking machines, and Royal Mail definitely do not deliver on a Sunday. So have your proper Sunday.

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  2. Doing puzzles without the picture? That is an altogether different level of puzzling. Then there are double-sided puzzles....One of the hardest we did was a map of Cumbria which we thought we knew really well, but we had reckoned without the various Black Crags and Low Fells to be found in different districts.

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  3. I can't wait to see a photo of Manaba with the baby wrapped in the hap! Glad your sunday is settled! I had to go look at the Burn's painting. Lovely, very 1926 as you say, and looks really, really hard!

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