know thyne enemy

“Know thyself, know thyne enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”
Sun Tzu (b.500 BC)

Today I met not one, but two, enemies. The first was a common one – the dreaded football journalist. Studying at a sporty Uni was bad enough, but this crosses the line. I agree with DK, a line has been drawn. So, I immediately started calling upon local knitters for help. M and I (with some help from Mum) came up with a wicked idea involving a recumbent bow, a knitted apple and some knitting-needle-arrows. Be afraid, oh lowly football blogger.

Be very, very afraid.

And, then, horror of horrors – I encountered The Beasts. Of the wool-eating variety. After teaching a nice boy to spin (no, sorry, forgotten his name already) D, M, and I went upstairs to the office to wait for a ride – cuz there was a monsoon going on outside. M started investigated the Guild’s rather large abundance of wool only to discover these:

See those little black dots? Yeah. THOSE. Bloody moths.

So, we took all the fleeces and roving we’ve accumulated over the years out into the hall and started picking through them. Right in front of the Commentator’s office, too. I dunno if M and D did that on purpose…

Anyway. We ended up throwing out the first bag of wool and this Vitamin D rich fleece:

Of course, I knew we were in trouble when M and D spotted the alpaca Y sent down. I figured they’d earned it after picking though fleeces looking for dead/ living moths. Or larva. Or cocoons. Anyway, here they are, petting it fondly:

And, now onto the knitting progress. I managed to get to the rose leaves in the border motif on D’s Dalebarn sweater, when I realised that I had missed a stitch about 150 stitches ago, and had to tink back. Realising I would probably end up doing this a lot if not careful, I put in stitch markers marking each pattern repeat. Here’s where I finally gave up for the night:

I also made progress on my SKB – to the flared increases on the right sleeve. I haven’t looked at the Dulaan mitten all day and feel very guilty. I also need to work on D’s gansey. Badly. Actually, I need to work on a LOT of things. The sidebar is a good way for me to keep track, actually, so yeah. I’m gonna try and keep it up-to-date.