Princess Shawl

I got a full repeat, and a bit more, of the Princess shawl edging done yesterday. Imagine another five years of blog entries like that one, and you'll see what we've let ourselves in for.

I surmounted the first disaster, too -- the discovery of an errant stitch cavorting merrily downwards. I unravelled three or four rows, got the stitches more or less back on the needle, and succeeded -- that was the hardest part -- in figuring out where I now was and how to proceed. I have never used a "lifeline" in lace knitting -- where you run a contrast thread through the stitches so that if the Worst Happens, you have a known, fixed point to unravel back to. But I think, if I go on with this, it might be a good idea to start doing it when I get to the huge and beautiful border.

I heard from my cyber-friend Janis this morning -- the one who is thinking of doing a Knitalong with me on this thing. She wonders how a bride  would wear it, given that it is a triangle. I think the long top edge would go on the head, secured with a crown of some sort. She also wonders, why not just knit it as written with the larger yarn, and let the result be as large as it wants to? That's an interesting thought. I think I know enough now -- from having dressed the beginning of the edging -- to calculate pretty closely how big that would in fact be. I'll hit the calculator one day soon, and find out. Janis asks that the next time I photograph the edging, I put in some object to provide a sense of scale. Good idea.

Other Knitting news

The tammy proceeds. Picture above. I don't think I could knit the Princess Shawl full time. It's mentally exhausting, in a curious and rather exhilerating sort of way. That may change as I get further into it, and when I have my new eyes installed. Meanwhile, the tammy continues to seem both coarse and boring. I'm glad it won't take long. It should become marginally more interesting when we get to the decreases on the crown. For now, the Fair Isle patterns are so easy as to seem insulting. My fault, for going for a ready-made pattern.

I had a look at the Knitting Curmudgeon (http://www.knittingcurmudgeon.com./) when I was cruising the knitting blogs yesterday, and found a reference to myself, an honour which stunned me. My friend Selma knows both her and Queer Joe, and says that in real life the Curmudgeon is rather sweet and Joe rather bitchy, in both cases unlike their blogs.

Non-knit

We're off to the country today, to rejoin my vegetables (and the over-grown grass). Blogging should resume next Wednesday, the 15th. I'll be glad to stop wrestling with cobwebs for a while and get back to Rachel's striped Koigu. When we get back here, I will probably have forgotton all I have so far achieved with the Princess border, and have hands too roughened by toil to knit it, anyway.