As fast as the arthritis in my left shoulder starts to improve, I get a frozen shoulder and torn muscle on the right, so for now there’s no knitting machine! Consequently, I am delighted when MKM arrives and I can sit down with a cuppa and browse! With my forearm supported on the desk, I can also browse the Net. It’s mostly hand-knitting but interesting. One site is Knitting Daily, which has recently come up with what it calls a (moebius) snood, a lacy scarf with a single twist before stitching the cast-on to the cast-off edge, making a circle with a twist. When you put it over your head, it hangs in a neat fold in front.

that this is not a real snood. Snoods, as we made and wore them in the 1940s, were constructed from a single knitted or crocheted square. The row ends were gathered up at each side and fine elastic was threaded right round, through the cast-on and cast-off edges, so they looked like decorative hair-nets. The big joke was that if you made a larger double square, stitched the sides and put handles on the cast-on and cast-off edges, you’d made yourself a shopping bag for the groceries. That’s not as daft as it sounds and useful too because it was difficult to find shopping bags to buy during the war, when all materials went into ‘the war effort’. I’ll try to do a sketch on the laptop (the iMac doesn’t ‘do’ drawing!) and send it by snail mail!

Best wishes
Edna Cahill, Sandown, Isle of Wight