Petunia rambles on and on….

Here’s part of my efforts so far.  It looks like brightly colored zits. 

It’s the Forest Canopy Shawl, available through Ravelry and on the designer’s site.  This is a crappy cell phone picture in lousy light conditions.  The pattern and the work of the designer deserve a better picture.

Patternwork shows, but the colors are sooooo much prettier than represented here.  Cherry Tree Hill Winterberry, fingering weight.   Sadly, I have a better camera with me but no cord or card reader, so its not much help right now!!  I like working on this pattern – I’ve gotten far enough along that the pattern comes easy to my old, tired brain.

I see two issues coming which might be “no-brainers” for the experienced lace knitter, but they have me sitting here somewhat puzzled and/or concerned.

The pattern calls for DK weight.  Because I never do as I’m told, I’m using fingering weight.  Smart-ass know-it-all that I am, I thought, “Well, I’ll just keep working until it’s big enough.  Duh!  That should be simple enough.  I do have 2 skeins of yarn.  Same way Mom taught me to cook – Keep adding until it looks/tastes right!”  What I failed to factor in is the “scrunchability,” and anyone that’s ever knitted lace knows what I mean, even though I may have just made up a new word.   It’s nature of scrunching up, because of the patterns of the stitches; it’s unwillingness to lie flat so you can see how big the damn thing has gotten.  If I try to stretch it out really aggressively, the stitches will slip off the needle.   The only thing I’ve come up with is that the geometry of the triangle here is that it should be twice as wide as it is long from center, neck, to the point at the bottom.  I’m hoping I’ll be able to successfully stretch that down without both sides popping off the needle, measure it, and figure from there how wide it probably is!!!   Another idea is to stretch out and pin a section, count and measure the diamond shapes within that section, and count the total number of diamonds in the length/width. 

Next potential problem will begin when I declare that the size of the beast is sufficient and go on to the next set of directions/chart.  The directions say to work the body until it is XX stitches wide.  Well, that’s out for two reasons – the already-discussed change in the yarn weight means I’ll have WAY more stitches long before it’s wide enough AND the fact that, by the time this gets big enough to suit me, I’ll never be able to accurately count all those stitches.  Hell, I won’t be able to see them.   I don’t have that many years yet to live.   I’m hoping that the border chart is not specifically dependent on have that exact number of stitches.  I don’t think it should be, but I was wrong once before.  2002, I think it was.

Easier would have been to follow the directions in the first place.

Another thing the newbie notices about knitting lace shawls has to do with all the increases.  This pattern, and many other shawl patterns, start at the nape of the neck.  It increases 4 stitches every other row, and this is what makes the triangular shape.  Fine.  We all know this.  No news here.  Taking this one step further – as the number of stitches increases, so does the length of time it takes to complete each individual row and this increases dramatically if you notice a mistake, have to tink it back and re-knit it all, and allow extra time for swearing.  Mom taught me that you NEVER set your work down in the middle of a row unless you have an emergency, and I’ve always remembered that.

Don’t start a row on these babies if you have to pee.

We apparently got some really bad thunderstorms here last night.  They were predicted.  I went to bed.  When I got up this morning, everything was wet.  Everyone at work today was saying, “Wow, did you hear that storm go through last night?” and “Did you get any damage when it tore through?” and voicing similar questions and concerns.  As usual, I’m looking blankly about, thinking, “Heh, I missed a beaut!” because I sleep through almost everything.  In Florida, I slept through a direct hit of a hurricane once, and these thunderstorm stories – I’ve been doing this all my life.  “Storm, we had a storm???” I ask stupidly.  About the only thing that wakes me up during the night is a baby crying.  I really need to get past that.

So today, while at work, we start getting storm warnings e-mailed around, wind warnings, lightning warnings, hail warnings.   Some of the folks based in our building work outdoors a lot, and critically need this information for their safety.  When the warnings come in, I make sure the “outdoor crew” gets the word.  I hunt them down, down the hall, outside loading trucks, wherever.  Sure, they’re sent out to everyone, but if you’re not at your computer reading e-mail, that doesn’t help much.  And as the afternoon grows later, the sky looks more and more ominous.  Black, black clouds.  Really grim looking.

See the map?  The pink-ish color indicates Severe Thunderstorm Watch.  The gold color is Severe Thunderstorm Warning.  These gold colored counties are bouncing and moving and changing, as new data comes in.  I think it all means that, if you are anywhere in this general area, you are probably going to be wet soon.  Very wet.

So, clearly knowing that there’s a damn fine chance of all hell (weather-wise) breaking loose at any time, I decide to go to Sam’s Club, a discount, quantity buying store, on the way home from work.   There is absolutely nothing that I critically need; I decide to do this because Pop is working until 8, so he won’t be home, and I don’t need to race home to start dinner.  Might as well get the shopping done tonight, says I, the wonder brain.

And as I’m driving up the highway, the smart part of my thinking capacity is saying, “Wow, look at those clouds.  Gonna be some storm!”  and “I think those clouds are getting closer.”

And I continue north and go into Sam’s Club, and fiddle around in there, filling the cart with groceries, looking at the CDs and the DVDs and the books and magazines and just thoroughly taking twice the amount of time needed.

And then, I hear a sound.  Not a faint rumble.  It sounded more like the entire roof was collapsing on top of us all.  As I looked up, it FINALLY dawned on me that perhaps this isn’t the best time to take my time, and that I ought to get my tail feathers moving.  My greatest fear was not the thunder or lightning – it was that the store might lose its power and I wouldn’t be able to check out!!!!  

And then I could hear the rain, and by the time I got to the door, well, I haven’t seen rain like that since I left tropical Panama, and the lightning flashes were coming one right after the other.  There must have been 15 people waiting with me, under an overhang that was keeping us dry, waiting to see what the weather was going to do next.  I ended up standing there, feeling really good that I hadn’t bought ice cream, waiting for it to subside.

This is part of what came in the mail this week.

If it has pinks, or blues, or purples, and does not require a new “consolidation” mortgage on the house, I buy it.  This is Winterberry, Fingering Weight, one skein of a pair, more suitable for my eyes!

Working it up into Forest Canopy Shawl.   While working the pattern on my practice piece, old worsted acrylic, one thing I found that was causing me problems was the physical lay-out of the printed pattern.  (This is NOT a criticism of the pattern, which is well-written for physically normal intelligent people)   It prints out in Landscape, wider than long sheet of paper.  My whacked-out eyes have trouble tracing the line of text across the page.  One more damn idiotic pain-in-the-ass effect of pars planitis of the eye.  I can not do well on the Amsler Grid Test.  Sadly, several times, I found errors, and tracked them down to starting out with Row 3 directions and ending with Row 5 directions.  Somewhere out there, my eyes dropped to the next line of text.  With great, great concentration, I could avoid that, but still, it was risky, and tinking back would get more aggravating as the shawl grows.  Adding 4 stitches on every right side row, if the error is made way down, that’s a lot of pulling back out.  A lot of muttering and swearing.

Then I remembered a hint I had read about and thought it might help.  With Forest Canopy, there’s a short bit that “sets up” the pattern, then it goes into an 8-row body repeat.  And of those 8 rows, the 4 wrong-side rows are all “borders on each end and purl the middle.  Duh!”   So I really only had 4 rows to worry about.   Daughter had index cards and I grabbed 4.  On each one, I wrote EDGE, BODY, CTR, BODY, EDGE down the left side, and what stitches I needed to do.  At the top, the ROW number, Forest Canopy Shawl at the very bottom.  Paper-clipped them together, so they can be easily rotated as I work through them.  I put the printed sheet back into my tote bag.  This way, ONLY the correct directions were visible at a time, and I could quickly change over to the next row.  This helped immeasurably for me to read the full line of text AND the correct line of text.

Concentration is another issue.  Husband is watching repeats of Monty Python.  I’ve seen them all.  Thousands of times, over decades.  I’ve threatened my children with excommunication if they repeated the Parrot sketch at the dinner table one more time.  While knitting lacework, I still can’t stop watching, listening and laughing again.  I need a way of rotating my brain where the smart part is on top.