Here I am!

The life that intruded last week was a spring break visit to Florida, featuring an official Dual Grandparent Visitation.  We left last Friday morning, spent several days in the Aventura area with my family, then zipped up to West Palm Beach to visit my in-laws; then returned south for a splendiferous Passover seder.  We flew home this morning.

Aside from making the standard "arms tired" jokes, I can say it was an enjoyable whirlwind of a week.  The kids are suitably viewed, the grandparents accordingly pleased and proud, the weather was wonderful, and we had lots of fun doing tourist-type things.  More on them later this week.

On the knitting end, I can report zero progress on Rogue.  I didn't take it.  It was too big, with too many adjunct parts (magnet board, multi-page pattern, extra yarn, pouch of vital knitting doodads).  Instead I took the Birds Eye Shawl to finish.  But it is Birds Eye no longer.  I like the gauge and needle size for the pattern.  I adore the pattern itself.  I love the yarn I used.  But not all together.  The more I got into the piece, the more I realized that the hand-dyed multicolor was fighting for attention with the graceful eyelet pattern.  So I ripped back the entire thing - roughly two feet measured from the triangle's tip.  Instead I'm working the Paisley Lace Shawl from the Spring issue of Interweave Knits.  Scroll down almost to the bottom of this page for IK's photo of the thing.

I had worked on the Birds Eye shawl on the flight down, but grew increasingly unhappy with it as I knit.  By the time I got to our destination, I was looking for an excuse to do something else.  In a classic example of good deeds coming home to roost, I'd given my mother a gift subscription to IK this past holiday season.  She pulled it out to show me a project she was contemplating, and I riffled past the Paisley.  It would work.  The pattern is mostly solid garter stitch on large (for lace) needles.  The garter stitch is worked in a square from the center out, and is pierced by little flower-like quads of eyelets.  The solid area shows off the colors of the hand-dyed quite nicely, and the eyelets provide just a hint of interest instead of major league competition.  The flower eyelet center is ringed by a band of motifs that give the piece its name.  The effect is sort of reminiscent of the pattern placement in a bandanna, but done in lace.

So far 'm almost to the end of Paisley's center section.  I've got one more repeat of the flower eyelet chart to do.  Then it's on to the namesake pattern around the edge of the piece.  I may have enough yarn in my Lorna's Laces Helen's Lace to work an additional bit of trim around the outside of the paisley section.  Lord knows, I can't just do a pattern as written - dire things might happen.

Pictures as soon as I find the digital camera.  I packed it and took it with us.