Yesterday I began knitting lacey initials into the First Holy Communion veil. The veil is for my granddaughter Rachel Miles, who will make her First Holy Communion in April. But her little sister Kirsten is not many years younger, so I have decided to do both sets of initials.

It occurred to me that this would be a good point to insert a “life-line” – a lace-knitter’s device by which a fine thread is threaded through a row, so that if disaster strikes you can rip back to that point and recover the stitches easily. Did I do it? You guess.

As I said yesterday, the veil is knit top-down so the letters in Bridget Rorem’s useful lacey alphabet have to be turned upside down. And the right-side rows, where the patterning is, are knit from right to left, so the letters “R” and “K” also have to be reversed – “M” is OK because it is symmetrical on its vertical axis, if I’ve got the terms right.

Even after thinking about this for much of the night, and writing about it yesterday morning, I found it confusing. I still had the “K” to chart yesterday, and did it with panache, thinking, I’ve got the hang of this – but when I turned my chart the other way, I found that I hadn’t reversed the letter.

I was finally satisfied, and started knitting. I’ve done six rows, nearly half-way. I then turned the veil the other way up – the way the viewer will see it – and discover that, reading from left to right, I am knitting MR MK.

……..After I wrote that much, I went off to try to take a photograph to show you what I mean – and found that the knitting fairies had come in the night and rearranged the letters the right way around. That is a picture of RM beginning to emerge. The veil is photographed right-way up and from the right side (the photograph looks a bit like reversed st st, but I have double-checked: it's not), and you can at least see that the larger letter, the M, is to the right of the other one, as it should be.

I remain confused, and I’ll let what I’ve just written stand. I suspect that the moral, if any, is that it's a good idea to put a major disaster down and go to bed.

Comments

Franklin, thank you. I know that what I need to do, to show the AlmanacAlong button, is to insert some HTML code into my template. (I can talk a good game.) How do I get the code?

Laurie, I thought there was a Yahoo knit-the-almanac group. It’ll be interesting to see what happens this time.

Grace, thank you for the further help on the steamer front. A bright future opens before me.

Non-knit

2006 is gradually staggering to her feet. We had a mail delivery yesterday, and today the local butcher will re-open. The year won’t really start for me until the fishmonger and his wife get back from their annual New Year holiday in Spain, in another week or so, but it’s progress. Yesterday was ugly with freezing fog