Work In Progress

I've had this cardigan since the last recession. I bought it in the Scottish Borders when I was an undergrad.

Elsewhere I've written about what it was like to graduate into a recession. My career remains Work In Progress, LOL: bits and pieces of teaching and research stitched together over the background of my life rather than one neatly stitched up job. Perhaps it's a particularly feminine way of working. 

Knitting is suddenly trendy, it seems. LOL, those girls in Karl Lagerfeld's advert for Chanel are holding their needles all wrong. I don't think they knitted the skirt and bustiere which are depicted in the same issue of the FT's How to Spend It magazine for a mere £4,000.00.

The patches I use were samples which a friend gave me; they came free. As mine is a Scottish knitted cardigan, tartan patches are just the thing. I enjoy picking through them and seeing which ones look well together. I get quite excited when I find a hole in the cardigan. 

The patches on the sleeves are handy. They are so thick that I can roll the sleeves down and use them as oven gloves to get something hot out of the oven, like the apple and blackberry crumble Piglet made the other day. 

Some of the patches are so old that they're getting holes in them. I wondered about patching the patches. In the end I began darning them instead. I use wool leftover from socks I knitted for friends. Now that my teaching has finished for the year, I go to a café and patch my cardigan over a coffee instead of working through the text books to keep up with my students (wink). Then I put my cardigan on and go out into the mists and mellow fruitfulness.

(Darning up the ravelled sleave with care.)