I'm game!

You may remember, or not, that I have been experimenting with various new vehicles for reading. I feel it's my duty, somehow. I tried listening to people with the wrong accents read 19th English century literature aloud to me from Librivox. At a minimum, I need Alistair Cooke for that. I tried reading daily installments of The Pickwick Papers via email from DailyLit (I quit after 4 installments) and most recently I tried reading the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on a cast-off, first generation Kindle. I got through it, but wah! Thumbs down to all these.

Now, DailyLit Style is tempting me again with Shoes, Bags and Tiaras from V&A Publishing. Yes, I have signed up to read about fashion by email.

Immediately afterwards, librarian that I am, I googled around to find out more about the actual book that I thought these installments would be based on. Couldn't find it by title. Let's try by publisher: V&A publishers. There they are, but no Shoes, Bags and Tiaras. Only Tiaras Past and Present. It seems V&A Publishing is an imprint of Abrams. Hmmm. Time for that old librarian's standby, Books in print. Nope. nothing there either.

I'm betting that Shoes, Tiaras and Handbags is some kind of fresh hell that is being put out there with the hope that some of us will then cough up the cash for Tiaras Past and Present. Heck, I'm game for it. I may have a limited attention span when it comes to tiaras, but who knows, maybe one day DailyLit will offer installments of Addis, Sheep and Sharon Miller.

You can read a sort of review of DailyLit here on the Follow the Reader blog.

Now I'd like to offer a quick reply to Chris, who left a comment on one of the Pine Tree Palatine posts without an address to contact her. Chris asks whether I think there is a mistake in the pattern, near the beginning, before you get to the borders charts. Chris, it's been a while, but no, I can't say that I remember any mistakes in the pattern. I do think that if it looks ok to you the way you did it, then that's probably just fine. The whole thing is so big and detailed that most likely, no one will notice. If it's disturbing you, then frog it.

Now, talk about confusing. There is a potentially confusing thing about the borders, further on in the pattern which I only became aware of through talking to another knitter. She was trying to give me a heads up. On each the charts starting on page 36, there is a column of two stitches at the center of the page ("in the gutters" as it were) that are shaded more darkly that the rest of the chart. The rows on the charts on page 36 and 37, for example, continue from one page across to the next, and the darkly shaded stitches are at the center of the row and should only be knit once.

Rather confusing, no? I only avoided this pitfall through faulty photocopying. I photocopied the charts for convenience and when I did it I cut off the column of shaded stitches on one of the pages and so it never occurred to me to wonder about it. You can tell what kind of knitter I am!

Harpa, Helen and Shandy - thank you for your kind remarks. I have not had the second Aestlight off since I unpinned it on Sunday and I am still wearing my Icelandic!