She is definitely falling to pieces.  But still in large chunks for the most part. The nice thing about this is that I can take a small piece with me if I need to.  Although I am finding that it usually only takes me a couple of minutes to translate the stitch from straight needles to round in my head and fix it in my mind.  That is what comes with having done 175 stitches already.  I have a much better grasp of knitting stitches than I used to, even though I had already been knitting for almost 50 years when I started.  At the beginning, I often had to chart the stitches out so I could do them in the round.  

The other nice thing about the book falling apart is that I feel none of my usual reverence for it as a book.  I am totally fine with scratching notes throughout and highlighting the stitches as I do them in the table of contents.  Of course, my reverence for it as an inspirational work of knitting history grows constantly.

Today’s hat uses Double Mock Ribbing, pg 97 and Woven Diagonal Herringbone, pg 96.  I dug in my bag of weird and wonderful odd balls and got one that is mostly cotton (80%) with a bit of glitzy nylon.  It was called Gedifra Fiocco from Italy and was originally $7.75 a ball.  I combined it with plain grey Patons classic wool.  I cast on 96 stitches.  For the Herringbone, that was 16 repeats.  Basically the stitch is slip 3 with the float in front, then knit 3.  One round of plain knitting, then shift the float one stitch to the left.  To decrease, I ssk  once in each repeat and still moved the float, but there were only 2 stitches between the floats.  I did several rows like this, then ssk in each repeat again so both the floats and the in between parts had 2 stitches per.  I did this again for a while, then decreased the in betweens to 1, then after a while, the float to one also.  This left me with 32 stitches which I reduced first to 16 then 12, then made the rose.  This seemed to maintain the integrity of the pattern almost to the top and the rest was hidden under the rose.