Steady Progress

I unravelled the edging on the Pinwheel and I'm now knitting it on four circs. This makes it seem bigger in some weird way and I'm thinking of putting it back on one. You can't really see the edging here, unless you click, but it's some garter stitch and I'll finish with a picot bind-off.

Does anyone have a rule of thumb for the yardage for a picot bind-off? Eight times the distance to be cast off? Ten? I'll just be doing a 2 x 4, casting on 2 and casting off 4.

I ripped the angora Shetland Triangle back completely and started all over again. It's very pretty, and delightful to work with. I thought it would make me cough and sneeze, but it hasn't at all. It sheds a bit but that's less of a problem when I'm not wearing a dark purple tee-shirt.


I'm keeping it in a poly bag most of the time but it doesn't seem to pick up dirt very readily. I suppose rabbits don't get dirty easily, so that shouldn't be a surprise. This Raveller got 10 repeats out of the same yarn, so I'm hoping to manage without buying a second ball. Does angora grow much when it's blocked?

The blue and black yarn is Mirasol Miski, Gretchen, and it's 100% baby llama. Five Valleys Fabrics has it at a very good price just now. They have Sulka too. Their shipping charges are extremely reasonable and as I discovered when I bought the first Barbara Walker Treasury off an American eBayer last night, the pound has dropped sharply against the dollar, so if you're in the U.S. you'll get an even better price. I still got a good deal on the Barbara Walker, but not as good as it would have been a couple of weeks ago. 'Sno fair.

I didn't knit my friend's wedding dress, Moorecat. I used to sew a lot and I made wedding dresses for, I think, three of my friends over the years. Two of them were 'proper' wedding dresses, with miles of fabric and hugely complicated interlinings and arcane haberdashery: this one had a long, very full skirt which required 6 metres of horsehair braid around the hem, an item I haven't used since. It was made with two Liberty Tana lawn prints and I remember the fabric cost about 25 pounds, which was nearly a week's salary for me at that time, 1976. Checking the website now, I see that a single metre of Tana Lawn costs £19.95.

I still smoked then and I can remember taking the trouble to keep the ashtray away from the miles of fabric, although I probably puffed while I was doing the hand-sewing. When I made the most recent wedding dress, I no longer smoked, but the bride did and I made her an elegant little matching bag to carry her cigarettes and her hypodermic (she's diabetic).

I'm very flattered that I've got you knitting, Sea. I think knitting hats on two needles is under-rated, and good luck with the ear flaps.

There was a television series here in the early 'nineties called Between the Lines. It was about the cops who snoop on other cops and it was popularly known as 'Between the Sheets' because of the extra-curricular activities of one of the characters, played by Neil Pearson. I didn't watch it - it was on on a night when I was out (remember when you had to be at home and in front of the television in order to watch something?) or I had an irrational dislike of one of the actors, I don't remember, but it's being repeated now on Alibi and I'm hooked. The grittiness of the series is often conveyed through the incessant smoking and almost incessant drinking that goes on; it makes you realize how hard it must have been for actors to learn to do without these props and how they must have had to find other ways of conveying tension.