Doh, again

I'm not having much luck following instructions at the moment. After having to do a bolero sleeve twice, I sewed one of them in and it looks very peculiar. I've knitted this pattern twice before without any problems, so it must be me. I'll unpick it, block the pieces properly and try again. I'm sure it'll be fine. Really.

I picked up Chrissy last night and did the first bit of the shaping at the front neck. When I started on the second bit today, I realized that I had done the shaping on the sleeve edge, not the collar edge. Doh. (That's not actually what I said.) So I've unravelled that and I'm doing it again tonight, while watching another episode of Law and Order: my very own personal Groundhog Day.

For some reason I thought I had done the sleeves of this already, but I haven't. I don't think they'll be too bad as it's a dropped shoulder so they're quite short, and I'll probably make them even shorter. I tend to wear my sleeves pushed up and there's no point in knitting extra yards of stuff. The ribbing at the hem is a 4x3 rib which is very tiresome: I think I'll do a 3x3 rib at the neck and cuffs.

The ospreys are still keeping me busy - well, maybe not busy exactly, but occupied. I'm amazed by how much more enormous they are every day. They were ringed the other day and got their tiny satellite backpacks on, so they now have little aerials on their backs and look like remote-controlled boats. They are walking about the nest a lot and stretching their wings: flying lessons should start soon. The sound has been off today so we've had no chirping.

I was thinking of having a competition for the Swallowtail Shawl, but I have decided that Nellie is the winner since she left a comment offering to be my milkman - can you leave your email address in a comment, Nellie? If you add it and then delete it, it will still arrive in my inbox and you should be safe from spammers. That's one of the nice things about having a blog, isn't it? Making up your own rules.

I watched a Dogme film the other night, by mistake. It was a comedy so it was all right in the end. Called Italian for Beginners, it was about a group of singles who all attended the same night school and although it started very gloomily there was lots that made me stay with it. The characters were all very sympathetic, even the awful one that everyone else shouted at. I suppose they were all imperfect in some way, but that's no bad thing. When it finished I wanted to watch the sequel right away so that I could find out what happened to them later, but there isn't a sequel, sadly.



Fans of Edinburgh roadworks may be interested to see another indie classic, Number 11 Bus.