I  felt substantially better today,  and got once around the garden with Helen.

 

Thank you very much indeed for all your help with all my problems. I was so interested to discover what the long-tail cast on would look like with two colours, that I pulled my stitches off the needle (from Attempt Two) and started again. Interesting, indeed. Having finished the cast-on (and cut off the extra colour), I turned back, as I always do, even for socks, in order to have a bit of knitting on the needle before joining into a circle, in order to avoid an unwanted moebius. And what turned out to be interesting, was how different the two sides were. The only possibility was to go on with the “right side” – the one facing, as I was casting on, not the first knitted row of my turning back.  “Look at your knitting” is one of the very best of EZ’s maxims.

 

And I won’t forget, I hope, how to do the cast-on with two sources of yarn. Nor your suggestions that the cable cast-on would be a better idea to begin with.

 

I’ve now joined it up, making the connection after the fourth row. One of the great joys of circular knitting is that a stripe can be an uneven number of rounds if it wants to. After doing the fifth row/round, I switched to the other colour I had used for the cast-on, and that’s where I am now. This is certainly a lot more fun than dark charcoal, round and round.

 

And I failed to thank you yesterday for advice about “Audible”. It sounds to me as if you have more choice in the US. It is possible here to buy individual Audible recordings, but at enormous expense. And there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. I think I will have to bite the bullet. I am impressed with how much they offer, unabridged: “I Malavoglia” “Il Gattopardo” and Barbara Vine’s “Minotaur” which I have turned to after finishing “House of Mirth”. To name but three. It wasn’t all that long ago when finding an unabridged recording of anything was a bit of a challenge.

 

And think how much more knitting I could get done…