Thanks for the help with the ASJ – current thinking is to taper the sleeves into a garter stitch cuff of some sort, keeping the sleeves shorter than the version in Knitter’s – and for the undeserved compliments on the colours. Lorna’s Laces did it all. My only contribution was the coup de rouge, in fact several, and “Envy” to add a lime-green accent the way Kaffe does.

I bought Famous Blogger colours, especially of course “Franklin’s Panopticon”, for the sake of the bloggers. “Amy’s Vintage Office” was perhaps a mistake, in this context. I like it, but maybe not here. I see a slouch hat or socks in its future – I’ve still got two complete skeins.

Anyway, on we go. I had planned to give today to the cashmere watchcap, which has started well. Note its new Progress Bar. But the skein I’ve now got to wind turns out to be disordered. How did that happen? Not my fault. I’ve got it over the back of a chair and will have at it from time to time, but for the sake of my temper, actual knitting time had probably better be devoted to actual knitting.

The excitement here yesterday was the arrival of Father Christmas in the form of all those knitting books I ordered from Amazon last week while I was supposed to be doing on-line Christmas shopping.

“Haiku Knits” was a mistake – I knew it was a gamble. There are some nicish things, but nothing I’ll ever knit, and nothing that catches and lifts the spirit like the things in my Japanese magazine, Flat Knits of the New Style or whatever it was called.

“Painter’s Palette” – the Koigu book – is much better. With that, and with Herr Schulz when he turns up, I should be able to work out something in mosaic knitting for my Koigu stash. Choose a shape and devise little pieces to fill it. Schulz is in German and will arrive from a different source.

I haven’t even started on the Norwegian and the Swedish books.

I have found myself thinking, the last couple of days, about a wild, swoopy asymmetrical jacket. The sort of thing that looks as if you had seriously miscalculated. I hoped maybe Haiku Knits would produce one, but it doesn’t. The Anhinga has something of the spirit, except that it’s not a jacket and not very asymmetrical. Perhaps I’ll trawl the Twist Collective today.

As for photography – by accident rather than design, all five recipients of my Christmas knitting will be members of the party on Loch Fyne at Christmas. I’ll take the ASJ along and get photographs of the whole crowd.

Target un-hit, again yesterday. Casting off 450 stitches purl-wise (or however many it was – somewhere in that ball park), is not done in half-an-hour. But it's finished -- that part is finished -- although the hat isn't started. I like what I’ve got. I’m particularly pleased with those neat mitered corners.



My initial reaction, contemplating it like this, is to think no collar after all, and perhaps simply lengthen the sleeves to mid-forearm without shaping. I’ve got the ASJ-revisited pattern out, from Knitter’s Fall 2000, in which the sleeves are tapered to a garter stitch cuff. So I might do that, keeping the sleeves on the short side. I had originally thought to shape them and end with a ribbed cuff which would harmonise with the ribbed collar.

Decisions, decisions. This is a good moment to stop and knit that watchcap.

Comments, etc.

Janet sent me a jigzone.com puzzle to do this morning. Art, rather than knitting. It was fun. It was Helen C.K.S who launched me down that particular primrose path – she’s got some good ones in her sidebar. Knitting, rather than art.

Janet (again), when I first read your Pearl Harbor comment, I thought one or the other of us must be remembering the time wrongly. Time zones always give me trouble. But then I worked it out – your 5pm EDT would be 4 or even 3 in Detroit, and that’s how I remember it, mid-afternoon.

No more electronic gaming comments, but I had a rambling financial one this morning.

A friend is coming to lunch today – art, rather than knitting – and although it is only going to involve a hearty soup and some French bread, I had better go start faffing about.

I vividly remember December 7, 1941. My father was the Associated Press bureau chief in Detroit. The memory is of him answering the phone, and rushing out. He was at home because it was a Sunday afternoon. One of those memories in which I can almost see the room and its furniture.

Less than I’d hoped got done yesterday. Couldn’t have anything to do with cider-drinking? But I have now embarked on what will be the last ridge, the last two rows, of the edging of the ASJ. Then it has to be cast of in purl. So today’s plan is to do that, and to start the watchcap if there’s still time. If I succeed, the ASJ will be ready for quite a revealing pic tomorrow.

The intended recipient for the watchcap will be among a substantial party expected on the shores of Loch Fyne on Boxing Day. On Christmas Day itself, there’ll be nobody there but us chickens, namely the Loch Fyne Mileses and my husband and me. So I can knit the hat right down to the wire and even finish it on Boxing Day in the morning if need be.

One of the great joys of ’09 was finding and buying clothes to wear to Theo’s wedding. For the wedding itself (as distinct from the rehearsal dinner) I had a sort of embroidered linen coat, not as grand as it sounds, worn over an old dress. I think I’ll get it out for Christmas Day. Maybe Ketki would wear her shalwar kameez. I have heard her little boys asking her to wear her “wedding dress” again.

Comments

Yesterday’s comments, including one from Ambermoggie herself, sort of answer the question about the pattern for the Red Sandstone Jacket. How unexpected the answer seems – a spinner’s leaflet. All my knitting used to be done from them. Now, I can’t remember when I last used one.

Kathy, I went over to the Ticker Factory just now and found it very confusing. I get the feeling that the underlying idea is to measure menstrual cycles looking for fertile times. A worthy objective, but of little use to knitters.

I think you start by choosing the option to count down or up to an event, and then just toil through screen after screen of rulers and then of sliders. I like my little sock, but the background is boring. My starting date was the day the box of yarn for the Grandson Sweater arrived from Sweden.

Sabrina, you’re quite right, I can turn on full moderation or word verification for the blog when we head west. The spammer has left me alone for 24 hours (I think) – perhaps that’s encouraging. There used to be ads on www.jigzone.com (my vice) telling you how much money you could make at home with your computer. I wonder if your task would prove to be placing spammy comments on blogs and getting paid when people clicked on them?

I’m half-way through the ASJ edging, buttonholes in place. I put in only two, in the modern fashion. Saves all that fuss about spacing them, and I really don’t think buttoning up from top to bottom is what will be wanted.

It’s got six mitres, at various corners – four outward and two inward. I think I’ve got them all going in nice straight lines. It was a bit scary at the beginning, with poor eyes and poor light and dark yarn. I put in lots of markers, of course, but if you put in a marker between (say) the bottom of the jacket and the upward-advancing stitches, and then start a mitre, you have to remember on the next round, a long time later, whether the centre stitch was the last one on the front or the first one on the bottom edge.

I can’t bear to leave off now, so I will go ahead and finish the edging and cast off, possibly achieving all that today. Then tidy up, then maybe think about that last Christmas present, the cashmere watchcap, before proceeding to lengthen the sleeves.

Comments

Donna, your concern about sag is a serious one. I will keep you posted. Sock yarn is light, and garter stitch is firm: I have high hopes. My worst episode on those lines was an alpaca fisherman’s-rib sweater, long ago. After a couple of wearings, it was a mini-dress. A couple more, and it was discarded. It was bliss to knit, and I learned something about alpaca from the experience.

Kathy, that is an unnerving story indeed, about your unwanted commenter. I think the only time I’ve deleted a comment that (probably) came from someone who had actually read the blog, was the time I was describing the street in south London where EZ’s aunties lived and where she herself spent some months towards the end of the Great War, to get away from the Zeppelins. Mount Nod Road, not far from where Rachel lives, and one day she drove me along it. The comment was the one word “snob!” and I took it to refer to something I had said about the comparative size or detachment of the houses. Or did I refer to the “better end” of Mount Nod Road? I’m sort of scared to look back.

I’m keeping up with the electronic-gaming comments, which are coming in thick and fast. I worry about what will happen when I go away for Christmas.

EJ, I want to know about the “red sandstone jacket” too. I’ll write to Helen C.K.S. today. I didn’t try Ravelry myself, but I followed her link to Ambermoggie, from whom she apparently got the pattern. There’s the jacket again, and again no specific detail about the source. It clearly depends on having a wonderful self-striping yarn, and I don’t think I’ve got anything that qualifies in stash, so I mustn’t let myself think about it too much.

Oh, TickerFactory! I wondered yesterday whether I would continue to get credit for individual days, now that the scale has changed. I do! What fun!

And speaking of shameless plugs, I’ve had a few unwanted comments lately mostly (or perhaps entirely) about electronic gaming. They're not obscene, and I get rid of them pretty quickly. I think they’ll go away after Christmas. I’d rather not moderate if it can be avoided. If anyone does have anything to say about electronic games, please put in something relevant to the day’s post so that I don’t cast you needlessly into oblivion.

Excitement on the ASJ front.

I’ve got the border stitches assembled. It will be difficult indeed not to spend the day working on it, but, like everyone else this time of year, I’ve got a lot to do.

When one finishes the “skirt” of the jacket, one finds oneself at one of the lower front corners. The instruction is to knit upwards, picking up stitches on the selvedge just knitted and then adding the stitches on waste yarn and then going around the neck stitches before turning around – the back of the jacket isn’t involved at this point – knitting downwards and around the back and then up the other side.

I didn’t realise the drawbacks until I actually had the thing in my hands, starting to do it.

1) If you do it that way, the selvedge stitches on one side are picked up from behind, and on the other side, from in front. Surely not a good idea?
2) There will be one more row of knitting, half a ridge, on one side than on the other.

Since you’re probably going to be changing colour anyway at this point, why not get another long dp out of the cupboard and start at the top and go all the way around in one swoop? That’s what I did, and as I was doing it I wondered whether there weren’t a third objection to the original plan –

I left those stitches on waste yarn after a wrong-side row. If I were now to knit another wrong-side row on them, wouldn’t I get the dreaded line of st st? Even if it’s only on the inside, it seems an avoidable nuisance.

And I think, while I’m at it, that there’s an actual mistake in the pattern. There’s a drawing on page 7 of the Schoolhouse Press A-B-C-SJ leaflet, of the whole thing at the stage I’ve reached. It shows the letters “E” and “F”, relating to an earlier diagram, at what seems to me an impossible place. It should be “G” and “H”.

Hundreds of people, thousands, must have knit this famous pattern. It seems most unlikely that Mrs Miles of Drummond Place could have spotted things which eluded them all. It leaves the uncomfortable possibility that I have totally misunderstood the entire thing.

Vitamin D

Thank you most sincerely for your note on Vitamin D, Mel. I am taking cholecalciferol, by good luck rather than good management, and I’m glad to see it’s one of the safer forms. I drink a lot of Waitrose Sugar-Free Bitter Lemon; I hope that counts as water. Kidney stones don’t sound fun. And I plan to pack the project in, or much reduce the dose, at the vernal equinox.

The TickerFactory measure has re-set itself! So exciting! The most profligate among us often go a month without buying yarn – the achievement is negligible. But it feels good.

My system, if you can call it that, of thinking about the stash and sorting it and forming a mental list of possible projects is going to be helpful, I think. But danger lies everywhere, as for a recovering alcoholic. The Faculty Meeting Knitter bought some unbelievably beautiful yarn the other day – fortunately for me, a limited edition which had already sold out. Helen C.K.S.’s Red Sandstone Jacket (Wednesday December 2) is another form of temptation – I want one like that.


Yesterday went well enough, up to a point. I racketed about in the morning and hit all my targets. I was exhausted by lunch time, but it was my husband who succumbed to hypoglycaemia so we didn’t, after all, go to the Coen brothers’ new film in the afternoon. Soon.

I’ve read about Vitamin D in the NIH link Gerri provided. I seem to have hit upon the NIH upper limit all by myself – 2,000 IU a day. The symptoms of overdosing sound dreadful and seem to encompass most of the human condition: “fatigue, somnolence, headache, dry mouth, metallic taste, vertigo…”

I haven’t got to Schulz yet.

As for knitting, I keep fretting about the length of the ASJ. How long is a piece of string? Is it reasonable to measure it against a cloth jacket? It is currently 24” long, I just measured. The edging will add another inch.


I consulted Vicki Square’s ever-useful “Knitting Great Basics” – she thinks that’s enough for a medium-sized adult jacket. I have embarked on what is meant to be the final horizontal stripe – “Franklin’s Panopticon”, of course, which is going to go in all the important places. I think I’ll knit a bit more of it this evening, and then proceed to the edging, the Panopticon stripe narrower than originally planned.

I’ve had a frustrating morning of computer slowth – I’ll stop here. Here is a picture from the family Thanksgiving in London last weekend – Hellie and her boyfriend Matt and the Miles boys from Loch Fyne.

In considerable haste, this morning. I am scheduled to spend the day racketing from one end of Edinburgh to the other like a ping pong ball, and must begin with my porridge-and-yoghurt eaten slowly and calmly as usual, if I am to get anywhere. First on the agenda, an early dental appt.

Tomorrow morning, when life calms down, I am going to follow up the Vitamin D links you provided, Gerri, and read with care. The article in the FT said exactly what you say, Kate, that Vitamin D is really more like a hormone. It also said that the large-scale trials which might (or might not) demonstrate some of the advantages claimed, don’t get made because Vitamin D is out there and cheap and no one is going to make a packet from selling it.

Thanks for the Horst Schulz information, too. I will also look up the Ravelry group when there is time to draw breath. I added his “Das Spiel mit Farben und geometrischen…” in cheap paperback form to my acquisition pile yesterday. One of his books has taken off into the stratosphere with Starmore-like prices.

The ASJ lengthens slowly. I won’t launch the final piece of Christmas knitting until its border stitches are securely picked up.

Now, off into the darkness to get the newspapers. Can’t eat my porridge without a newspaper.