This is the reason I learned to knit.
 
It is a piece of knitted lace I found in my grandmother’s sewing box a few years ago when I stayed with her for the summer. Darney couldn’t remember what it was meant for or when she had made it but she said I could keep it.
 
The cast on edge is a little over three inches long and stretches to about three and a quarter inches.  The short side is about seven inches long and the long (scalloped) edge is just a little over ten inches.  The end of the lace has not been bound off - the size of the stitches and the crimp in the yarn keep it together as long as it is handled carefully. The yarn is more like a heavy thread and the needles must have been around the one to two millimetre mark.


The lace is very soft and drapy and has quite a bit of flare to its shape.  It would be wonderful as a cuff or collar edging. I haven’t worked out the pattern yet put it makes a sort of ripple effect. The first three stitches of each row (or the last three if you’re going the other direction) are garter stitch; the majority of the rest of the way across is stocking stitch with a pattern of yarn-overs and knit-two-togethers, worked in garter stitch (I think) every five rows. The last inch or so of lace, opposite the garter stitch edge, is a mesh pattern with points.

I’m planning to take a nice sunny afternoon to properly work out the stitch pattern for this lace so I can reproduce it in a different yarn and gauge.

We are getting to the part of the year where seeing the sun is rarer and more exciting. I took this photo outside the museum last week when we had a particularly good example of just how fantastic the atmosphere up here can be. No matter how much I dislike the cold and the bugs, the sky up here always amazes me. We get perfect fluffy sheep clouds in the summer and hours of golden orange sunset over pink rocks and dark pine trees. We get the startlingly blue sky which only happens when the temperature drops bellow -30. There are days in the winter when everything seems touched with gold because the sun can’t get high enough above the horizon to give clear light.
 
Here are a couple more pictures I took the same day.
 
This one shows both sides of the sun dog though by the time I got outside they were not as bright as they had been fifteen minutes earlier.


This was taken using the zoom on my camera.  I hadn’t really expected much (the sun being so incredibly far away) but it looks kind of cool.

An update on current projects, some are relatively new while others have been on the go for months.



The picture above is of the smaller pieces so far cut for our quilt. The orange pile of triangles make flying geese with the smaller dark blue triangles and fly toward the bright orange squares. All of the geese and squares are cut but due to shear numbers I’m cutting the little blue triangles in batches as I need them.

This is one of the projects which has been going for months ... in fact this has been on the go since last July when we first moved into our current place. My goal is to have the entire quilt top finished and ready for show-and-tell at the June Guild meeting.

... then I’ll have a basting party and get everyone to help me put the sandwich together. Yes ... there will be cookies provided :)

The pattern is from Batik Beauties by Laurie J. Shefrin and is called Mystique of Bali.


We added another row of squares to the bottom and side to make it considerably larger so that it will fit on our bed when finished) the original is a wall or lap quilt). Rob worked out a template in Photoshop so we could play with colours until we found something we liked. After that we just had to redo the math to figure out how much fabric I was going to need.


Picking the actual fabrics was a lot of fun. The batiks have such wonderfully saturated colour and there were many to choose from. I wasn’t sure how long it would take to make up this quilt so we decided to get all of the quilt top fabrics at once so that we didn’t risk not being able to match a fabric when I needed it.

These are the colours we ended up with. The blue grey is the background throughout the quilt. The textured black is the narrow border and the striped teal is the large border.


Progress so far ... I have one hundred and ninety geese finished and only sixty left to go (and they go pretty quickly when I sit down to it). The geese are the smallest pieces of the quilt so progress seems slowest while I am working on them.




I’m happy to say that my mesh triangle could now pass for a shoulder shawl and not a kerchief. I’ve still got a long way to go though - another one and a half balls of yarn before I start the top border pattern.

... and I was worried my smaller gauge wouldn’t produce a large shawl!



I worked up the swatch for my pattern last weekend and, to my great surprise, it was perfect. **This never happens.** Seventeen stitches to four inches - what a funny number.


I’ve been working on it a little each evening this week and I now have just over four inches of hat finished. I’ll be able to start the decreases for the crown soon and when I’m done that I can try it on! This is the first thing I’ve done in seed stitch and I really like the way it looks.


I love the feel of this yarn. It is Mission Falls 1824 Merino. If feels beautifully soft and squashy and is even washable!



I started renovating the coffee table on Labour Day weekend ... it’s still on the go. It turns out the paint takes longer to dry than I had anticipated and I don’t like painting in the dark - it’s to difficult to see where you’ve missed.


Once I’m finished painting (I’ve got about two coats left) I’ve got some fancy shelf brackets to secure the legs to the table top. The table is a bit rickety and I am hoping the shelf brackets will give it more stability along with looking interesting.