Limited Knitting Content

Busy week!!! Losing all of Sunday and most of Monday and Tuesday to Ravelry - OK, lots of Ravelry time on the other days, too. Ravelry is awesome: The incredible database they are building for books, patterns and yarns; the worldwide knitting community with the forums and links to other knitters; and the speed with which it is growing and the capabilities they keep adding to the site. I don't know about other knitters, but I'd think it was a bargain if there was an annual fee in the $25-50 range to support the work they are doing. I do realize that there are many knitters for whom this would be a financial problem. OK - hey,CBM! - you can just contribute. Duh.

Thursday I went to see Shui Kuen and her mother again, and had more wonderful dim sum. Then we went back to SK's mother's house and just hung out, chatting about our lives and our knitting. I saw SK's original Forget-Me-Not shawl; let me tell you, she does a wonderful job of blocking! I'm going to be more aggressive with the yarn in the future. She says there's still another SK pattern in the not-too-distant future, but she didn't offer more details, and I didn't ask - it will be a nice surprise when it happens. BTW, Elann has some more of the gorgeous Alpaca Fina yarn coming up for sale in September, along with - ta da!!! - their first superwash merino. There are dozens of colors of the alpaca, too, lovely solids and heathers.

Last Saturday I took a dear friend from my seniors' group to see Josh Groban at the Honda Center in Anaheim. I have a bad, bad history of getting lost in Anaheim, so DH insisted that he should drive us there and back. (What a treasure my DH is!!!) He packed up his laptop and a DVD and hung out at a nearby bar to watch a movie while we were at the concert. My friend is going through chemo and is rather frail now, so the front-door delivery that we were able to give her was really needed. She treated us to dinner at the Phoenix Club, a well-known restaurant and banquet place, a gathering spot for the local German crowd. The concert was quite good, but I had forgotten that our near-the-front seats would also be near the speakers. So it was LOUD. They set up 2 big video screens, so we had up close views of Josh as well. Josh's music has evolved, so he did only one or two of the songs from his first album, which are my friend's favorites.

I also 'discovered' Amelia Peabody, Elizabeth Peters' archaeologist character in Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. A friend gave me an audiobook of one of the later books, "The Serpent on the Crown," and I discovered a lonely paperback, "Seeing a Large Cat," in my book stash. So I spent a lot of knitting time reading. I'm a newbie to the concept of audiobooks, so I wanted to enjoy the paperback first. I was immediately ready for more, including the back list. And for a change I remembered the public library, so my trip there on Wednesday brought home as many books as I could hold in my arms.

OK, finally the knitting. It has NOT been a good week or so for the knitting, more like knit one stitch, frog two. I'm working on a scarf-sized version of the Pewter Lace Shawl from Knitting Daily, using more of the teal acrylic/mohair that I used for the Comfort Shawl. That's moving along at a reasonable if slow rate.

The real problem is the Vine Lace vest from Classic Elite. Knitters, this is *vine lace*! It's one row of pattern, shifted by one stitch every other row. This is the easiest lace pattern ever. I've made about 3 scarves using 2 or 3 repeats of this. But can I manage to knit it in this vest without F**KING it up? Not. I am wondering if the yarn will be worn out by the time I get the first 6 inches knitted. I have frogged and tinked and frogged again. And again. When I left my Friday Night SnB group at Unwind last night, I had perhaps 4in of the lace done. Came home, worked on it a bit more, and about 10pm really looked at it. Great *&$^% error about an inch down. Again. Trust me, it's hard not to heave it across the room. But this is the exact sort of vest that I like and know that I'll wear a lot. I decided to frog nearly all the lace and start over yet again. Then I stomped off to bed.

Tonight DH and I are meeting Knitdevil and her DH for dinner, so the holiday weekend will have a really fun start. But it's the 4th day of a record-setting heat wave here in the LA area; right now (10:49am) it's officially 94F in Burbank. Yesterday at 3pm it was 106F on our shaded back porch. So the main plan for the weekend is to stay indoors and be indolent. Knitting should be a suitably low-energy activity. Unless Vine Lace keeps on kicking my butt. Temper tantrums take more out of me.