Thrift

I own, or have owned, a small number of sweaters from a chap who trades under the name of Michael Ross and who operates websites which my computer tells me are insecure because some security certificate is missing or out of date.

Higher grade sweaters, some of them branded Fair Isle (as featured on ITV3 and to be found at reference 1), although the one that I have to hand admits to being made in England. Fair Isle is, after all, a very small place and is not going to supply very many - if any - sweaters to the English market. In any event, the price of these sweaters seems to vary enormously according to where you get them from, time of year and so on. Today, for example, I could get a small, pre-loved one from eBay for £25. Maybe I should go there for my next one.

However, like all woollen sweaters, they are apt to develop holes at the elbows and BH is no longer good for carefully sewing on leather patches. She was about to throw a sweater away when it occurred to me that one could simply remove the sleeves - the sleeves and body of these sweaters being made separately and joined together afterwards - and use what was left as a gilet - an irritating word I believe one can see a lot of in clothing catalogues.

This has now been done and yesterday I tried my new gillette on over the remaining sweater, as snapped above. It did very well. Not least because the temperature outside had dropped to near freezing and I needed more than one layer of wool under the duffel coat. As things were, I was pretty comfortable for my stroll around West Hill.

FIL, who was careful about such things, would have been very pleased.

It was also the day for batch No.767 of brown bread, with one of the two finished articles being snapped above.

The pink bar above is the Whitworth's cookbook which featured at reference 2, back in its proper place.

Some of it was taken with cheese - Lincolnshire Poacher - when it had cooled down - together with the added flavour that I believe comes from greasing the tins with butter. This morning, the flavour of the bread will have developed overnight and I shall take some more with butter for breakfast.

PS: from leather patches on sweaters, I associate to the days when tweed jackets were de rigueur for the male teachers in secondary schools, along with pipes, which jackets sported leather patches nearly all of the time. Lesser teachers sported patches made of some synthetic material and one did not like to ask where they got their sweaters from.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Isle.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-alberta-date-cake.html.

Reference 3: https://www.lucascometto.com/cascadia-vancouver-island. A chap who likes taking arty pictures of the bark of big trees, who popped up in the course of posting at reference 2 about Canadian cakes yesterday. I have yet to run down any coastal redwoods.