Needs must

When you have dug yourself so deep into a knitting rut that you find you have spent hours and hours and hours knitting your way through cyberspace and the only thing your fingers have done is surf the mousepad and type the occasional comment, when you have tried buying yarn and buying patterns and nothing, nothing is going right, when you have knit this and knit that and none of it even vaguely resembles the idea in your head, there is only one thing for it.

Attack the UFOs.


I've unpicked the cast-off and last row of triangles and started knitting onwards on Mum's Lady Eleanor. I'd forgotten how much I liked knitting this. It is simple enough to knit while reading, watching TV or talking on the phone, but interesting enough not to make your teeth hurt, and there is a small sense of achievement with each and every little rectangle (not the triangles. Although I like the way they look, they are a bit fiddly, especially the first one, where you have to turn the work after one stitch, and then two stitches, and so on. I know I should be knitting backwards. If anyone can tell me how to knit backward continentally, I would be very grateful. I've worked out how to do it by throwing, but that means I have to swap to holding the yarn in the other hand, and that is even slower than all the fiddly turning).

I have finally got round to frogging the Snooker Sweater. It is taking an age to dry because having spliced all ends as I met them I didn't want to cut them again, and anyway I couldn't find some of the joins, so that is about six balls worth of yarn hanging out in the sunshine.


(It is also a tangled heap. I have turned it and turned it trying to hurry along the drying process. When I come to wind it, I think I will regret this). When this miraculous event finally occurs, the resultant ball of yarn is going to be bigger than my head. I had better start looking out for a large enough bowl, and a more portable project.

Unless you are about to put some plain sock yarn in the post with my name on the package, please don't mention footwear. I mean it. Not even shoes. Or if you absolutely must, please please don't mention the layer of knitted fabric that may or may not lie between a bare foot and the shoe. One of the lucky stars I am counting today is that it's hot enough to go around barefoot, so I can avoid thinking about those pesky boomerang-shaped knitted objects that seem so perfectly suited to variegated yarn, and are so obstinately not.