Sunday 18 September 2011

Waiting For The Curry To Arrive

Sunday evenings have become curry night for me. Having found an Indian restaurant that delivers to my area, I now ring with my request just before I start my stint in the office and can then eat it while I am working.

Tonight I will be working at the computer while I eat. I have drafted the first part of another shawl pattern and managed to knit the part that has been drafted. Now I need to think about how the rest of the shawl will look so that I can draft the chart ready for further knitting. If I can work out what is needed tonight then the next few days should see me knitting at a frantic rate to see if I can finish another project for my book. That will see six items finished and another three in the pipeline.

The curry is ordered and I have moved my laptop to the office to work while I am waiting for it to arrive. There are a number of specialist computer programs for knitting designers and I have two of them. One would expect that such specialist applications would be very expensive, but they are, in fact, very reasonably priced. My more recent purchase has the accepted symbols for the specialist stitches to be used for Estonian patterns. The Estonian lace knitters use a number of stitches that are found nowhere else in the lace knitting world. Even Shetland knitted lace uses little more than a combination of increases and decreases to create the filmy fabric that the Shetland knitters are famous for.

My current work in progress uses an Estonian gathered stitch to form the background fabric for the shawl and the diamond-shaped insertions will have more traditional Shetland-type patterns within them with the somewhat unusual addition of some lovely little clear glass beads which have a slightly iridescent centre to them. Adding the beads does slow me down quite a bit but the finished effect is so beautiful that it is worth it.

So now you know what I will be doing this evening. Tucking into a delicious curry and trying to decide what pattern I am going to put where on my current project.

1 comment:

Dr Sunshine said...

Nice to hear what you're upto again!! You've made me really fancy a curry though, which is bad as I've just had dinner!

xx