Else and Anonymous (comments yesterday): You’re right, Lynne Barr’s Knitting New Scarves is the book I was trying to remember. I knew as soon as I read your comments, because I have a friend whose name is Chris Barr. (We hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence these days. I think the human brain will stay ahead as long as it can make completely illogical and correct leaps like that one.) It’s not on my scarf shelf, and I haven’t consulted it for years, so I ordered another. It was pretty cheap on Amazon because several libraries were de-accessioning it.

 

When I am gathered to my reward, which can’t be far off now, if my children notice duplicate copies when they are clearing the house, they will think, poor old thing, she forgot she had it and bought another. Not a bit of it: she knows she has it, and is desperate to consult its pages. Drop Dead Easy Knits is another of which I have two: I was desperate in that case, I think, to knit Mary Lou’s Pollywog pattern again.

 

My card seems to be functioning again. (See Thursday the 17^th) I ordered a graphics card for Archie today. He’s going to pay me back in instalments. You’d think if the Accts Dept were on the ball, they’d wonder why a blameless old woman in Drummond Place wanted a graphics card. It wasn’t cheap.

 

I spent some more time with the new Gaughan book. It gets more and more interesting. But for us mortals, EZ is much more use. But I love Meg’s anecdote in her book Knitting, introducing the Box-the-Compass sweater. EZ had the idea of rotating the four raglan seams of her EPS sweater so that they ran up the sleeve top, and mid-front and mid-back. She went ahead and knit a whole adult sweater. Her idea  worked fine on the sleeves “but the centers front and back stood out in sharp cone-shaped points. Even in the face of that physical evidence – so unused was she to being wrong – Elizabeth came up and patted me on the breastbone. ‘Oh, that’ll block out,’ she said. Nuh-uh.”

 

No knitting again today – but I got around the garden with Daniela, and I got Wordle in three again. Pure luck: my starter word produced one brown tile. I tried another starter in the second row, and got two more browns. In the third row I thot I’d try one of my browns in the first place – it can be useful to know the starting letter. I managed to think of a word that did that and also incorporated the other two. Bingo! But pure luck.

 

I heard from my sister today. She and her husband are in a retirement community in DC. She says she is under a lot of pressure to try Wordle but is so far resisting. That must be true of many of you, and you must forgive me if you can for rabbiting on about it.