A long week...

It has been a long week. The Government Department which I work in has had an almost complete change of ministerial team in Tony Blair’s latest reshuffle and that has meant all of us civil servants running around like headless chickens trying to bring the new team up to date. So I’m afraid that I haven’t had the energy to post this week. But I have been reading everyone else’s posts to get my knitting fix - parasite that I am!

Anyway, I thought I would update you on my first Print of the Waves stole (pattern by Eunny Jang ). I have managed 8 repeats this week. Not much I know but I have also almost finished a shrug in Polar. I’m knitting the stole with cobweb weight yarn and 2mm needles. It is like knitting dental floss with toothpicks! But I also have to say that this is a very enjoyable knit, it feels like a real challenge after some of the easier patterns I’ve been doing lately. I included the needles from my shrugs in the picture above just to show how truly tiny the 2mms are!

The blue threads that are running across are the lace knitting equivalent of safety nets. After every repeat I thread a piece of sewing cotton through all the stitches on the needle. This means that if I make any mistakes or drop any stitches I never have to undo more than one repeat. It makes it easier because with all the yarnovers you use in lace it is incredible hard to pick up a row if you start to undo it. By the way, if you decide to try this too, make sure you thread the cotton through the stitches using the eye-end of the sewing needle first, that way you are more likely to go straight through the centre of the stitch rather than the wool. It also makes it easier to count the number of repeats you’ve done.