Friday, March 21, 2008

The Orkney Pi

This is Elizabeth Lovick's "Orkney Pi" shawl. She made this pattern and is leading a KAL (knit along) for a yahoo group called EZasPi (a play on Elizabeth Zimmerman's name as well as Pi). I am in the midst of section three, which is the lattice work area. In this section there are 640 stitches per row, and it's going very slowly for me. The stitch pattern is very regular with a short repeat so that should be easy, and yet I've made some mistakes. What is challenging about this section is it gets repeated 5 times. That's a lot of knitting! The last, outer section with the large trees has 1280 stitches per row and a lot of rows. That will be quite daunting for me, butut I do want to make it to that point! I've managed to keep up through this KAL until this week. Well, naturally, it wasn't that hard when I had 80 stitches per round, or 160, or even 320. 640 has really slowed me down, and I can't imagine making any progress when (if?) I make it to 1280!

So I've been dividing my time between tapestry and lace knitting for the past several weeks. I haven't taken any photos of the progress on 'little man in the boat' (I need a name for this piece!) or H.Rob, and I'm not sure why. I just don't feel like photographing them yet....maybe that's a sign that I'm not happy with something about them. I'd better give that some thought!

Monday, March 17, 2008

Well, I'm mostly over all my angst of the past week, in time to celebrate my Celtic roots before the day is done. So here's a photo of my favorite Emerald Isle and a quote I love to use more often than I should!

'Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.' --Yeats (of course)

Cead Mille Failte

Onward



Well, there you have it. I was too bummed out last week to even look at the photos I'd taken in Philadelphia until today. Here they are! The theme was New Orleans Jazz. I've decided that indoor flower shows are very weird: I can't get used to the artificial lights and the harsh accoustics. It is nothing like being

outside. I guess if one is really, really desperate for spring this is a pretty good substitute for the real thing. I don't mind the seasons too much, though I always get tired of both winter and summer before they are quite done. Spring and autumn are never long enough! This flower covered mannequin reminds me of Project Runway. There was an episode in a previous year when the designers had to get their materials from a florist! They didn't get a big enough budget to make anything like this!




























Here is the view from our hotel room just after dawn. It was a lovely get away even if I'd always prefer a garden show outside!

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Photos

In a few minutes I will download the most recent photos on my camera. There will be shots from the Philadelphia Flower Show taken during our visit on Wednesday last week, there will be shots of boat projects that my husband is currently doing, and there will be shots from an event we hosted on Friday evening at a restaurant in New York.....what there will not be is my son's 24th birthday which we celebrated with him yesterday. Ask me if this makes me sad, and I'll have to say yes. I'm feeling very sorry for myself right now that I let that landmark event go unrecorded. And please don't ask me how many birthdays I didn't record as it will just make me sadder still. We had a lovely day at Rob's house, but today I find myself so sad that I have nothing tangible to mark the event. I took the camera....I just never got it out of the case. Why is it so easy to photograph projects and so hard to photograph my family?

So, as you might guess, I'm in a bit of a funk today. I knitted for a couple of hours, working on the Shetland KAL that Elizabeth Lovick is leading for members the of EZ as Pi yahoo group. It's my first traditional shetland shawl, and so far, since I've only got 320 stitches in each round now, I find the knitting easy. It's more logical than anything else. Let's see if I say that when there are 1,000 stitches on the needle and the pattern gets algebraically more complex!

The highlight of my day was spending an hour weaving the clerical stole while listening to an episode of Cast-On. I'm deliciously behind on listening, so I might be able to weave the entire stole while catching up. It's hard to sit at the loom and mindlessly weave when all the color choices, warping, beaming, threading, and sleying are done. There's nothing left now but the rather tedious process of weaving off the six yards of material. In my funk it was very hard to go down and do it....but Brenda Dayne made it pleasurable!....and got me out of my funk for a whole hour!

Monday, March 3, 2008

In Progress

I'm making progress on some things, and it feels like a new beginning! I guess my internal clock feels the stirrings of spring. Whatever it is, I'm so glad to end each day with satisfaction that things are progessing!

Here's the minister's stole. I had already cut off a sample and washed it. It has a good hand!


And here is my little man in the boat. He looks like such a cartoon character with his pot belly and watchman's cap. I need to focus on this project most of all and get it done!















And yesterday I gave this shawl away to its new owner. Boy, did she look great in it! My friend has such flair and grace, she looked wonderful in this! I totally recommend this project (Swallowtail from Interweave Knits, Fall '06) because it's a fast knit and looks more involved than it really is!