On the needles

I'm not as far along with my knitting as I thought I would be but this is not unusual. I thought I would finish the Heart and Sole socks at the conference and start another pair. I thought I would finish the cardigan fronts that I was working on and  cast on for the sleeves. No and no.

I did quite well with the cardigan fronts, finishing them off on the flight back from Charleston, but I left the printed pattern in my luggage and I couldn't remember what to do about the sleeves so I read a book, Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out: how two million women survived without men after the First World War.  This is a very interesting book, written almost entirely as a string of anecdotes. This makes it a good book to dip into and put aside. I keep flipping to the index and the notes were, fortunately, published with the book and not slung out on a web site somewhere. 

The print in my paperback copy is very tiny. I can't wait for my new glasses to come later this week. Anyway, this book is keeping my attention partly because I am so often reminded of my grandmothers and their sisters. Grandma Tina started a typing business in the 1920's or early 1930's and employed women at typing up electoral lists, advertisements, etc. The anecdotes in the book allow one to fill out some of background of the lives of one's own relatives, as least in imagination. I link to the Amazon UK site here because the reviews are more interesting than on the US or the Canadian Amazon. Also, the British edition has a slightly different subtitle. 

So here are the pieces of the cardigan so far. I am putting my trust into the anonymous designers of Twilley's of Stamford, but I do wonder whether this will fit or not. I also wonder how the colour pooling will seem when the different pieces are out together. I'm not going to worry about it nd that's that.

















I didn't finish the socks either. I'm coming to the outside part of the skein of mohair and it's coming out a bit tangled. It requires occasional massage to make it come out straight and that is what has slowed me down. Looking at this picture makes me wonder if I wouldn't be better off inserting something into the center of the mohair skein to keep the thread unravelling neatly rather than pulling off in bunches.


Comments

Helen said…
Thanks for the recommendation for Singled Out: it's one of those books I've wondered over on Amazon. Now I might just have an excuse to buy it when I'm buying Xmas presents for other people :)
November 10, 2008 at 6:46 AM
Marjorie said…
The beginning of John Keegan's book on WWI also talks about the huge numbers of women who remained single or lost their husbands and boyfriends as a result of the war.
November 16, 2008 at 5:05 PM
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