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.

It's Very Snuggly

It was cold and very damp when I got up this morning and got myself ready to go to the hospital for my weekly psychotherapy session. Perfect weather for giving my new jumper a trial run.

I can report that it kept me nice and warm as I walked up the road to the bus stop, and as I missed a bus by a few seconds, I steeled myself for waiting in the rain for the next one to come along.  That would normally have been a wait of about 10 minutes, but fortunately this morning the next one came along fairly quickly so I didn't get too wet, and the jumper ensured that I didn't get cold.

There was a bus at the bus stop when I came out of the hospital from my session, but there was no way that I was going to catch it so I thought that I was going to be waiting in the cold for some time again.  It was about 15 minutes before the bus arrived, but once again I was cocooned from the cold. So I think that I can report that this has been a total success. The comments that I have received to my last post show that my readers seem to like it too.

I am lucky because I was taught so many handicrafts when I was a child.  I was taught to knit at about the age of five, and I have knitted for most of my life. One of the joys of knitting is that I can make things in the colour or colours that I want, and if I find a pattern that I particularly like I can make it in a number of colours.  It is also possible to make things so that they are a perfect fit, something that is not always possible when buying machine-made woollens in the shops.

After completing the jumper that I am working on at the moment, I will have to take a break from knitting things for me.  I have somewhat foolishly decided to knit a Shetland lace shawl for one of my 'kind of relations' in Canada who is expecting her first baby in February.  I went to her wedding in 2005, and she herself was born when my parents were making one of their first visits to Canada.  So Kelly always treated my parents as another set of grandparents and she desperately wanted my Dad to be at her wedding, and he was there as her honorary grandfather, as both of her real ones were dead.  Now I continue the relationship with the family which dates back more than 50 years, and I am going to knit this incredible shawl for Kelly's daughter (yes, we know it is going to be a girl), so when I am not studying for the next few months I will be knitting a very complicated lace pattern in very fine wool, and I just hope that I can get it finished and on its way to Canada before the little one is born. The shawl should be fine enough to be able to pass through a wedding ring, something that Shetland lace shawls are famous for.  I'll let you know if it does.