Post-viral crochet

Last week was a bit rubbish - I had a viral thing I think, and felt very drained and just not right. I persevered with everything because it felt as if it was just about to turn into a cold and then I'd know I was ill. Yet it never did.  In the end I gave in to it and consequently spent most of Wednesday and Thursday asleep. And felt much better for it!  I don't think I'm completely over it yet, but at least I'm functioning again. However the upside of last week was that I decided to treat myself to Rachel Coopey's Toasty as I'd come across on one of her hat patterns that looked nice on Ravelry, and then another and another, and then I realised they were all from this one book which was entirely too easy to order online. No regrets though, it's a lovely book with loads of nice patterns and actually useful information. And it smells nice too. I like book smells.

So have I immediately leapt into action and cast-on a gorgeous hat using the wool left from my Hitchhiker scarf, which after all was the reason I was looking for hat patterns in the first place?  No, not exactly. Actually, after an idle conversation with my mother-in-law, I took the notion to try crochet yet again and have been making a trapezium. Only now I think I've cracked it and it's an actual rectangle. Ish. Big strides forward!

However once I've found the wool and my circular needle of appropriate size and have decided which of the several gorgeous hat patterns in Toasty I'm going to use, the hat will start. Just in time for spring, no doubt.

Incidentally I looked up 'trapezium' to check it was the shape I was thinking of and discovered that apparently, according to the online dictionary I consulted (so it may be complete bollocks), trapezium means one thing in the US and something else in the rest of the world. In the US they use trapezoid where we'd say trapezium, and a trapezium is some related shape but not quite the same (without any parallel sides perhaps?). Divided by a common language indeed. Language fascinates me, especially the differences between the different forms of English. You find yourself wondering when and why the forms diverged. As a knitter the whole clothing thing is very evident every time I browse Ravelry  - sweater/jumper, jumper/bizarre pinafore thing, waistcoat/vest, vest/I dunno, undershirt?  Why those things and not, say, 'hat' and 'shoes'? Did they go through an intermediate phase where nobody actually knew what they were wearing? I imagine not or every garment would called a 'thingy' and Ravelry would be so much trickier to search.  Perhaps a thneed is what we need!