Lace, and a basket to keep it in…

One of my favorite thrift stores had a 50% off sale today. Needless to say, I was down there with freshly sharpened elbows and a double-espresso-sharpened mind right around opening time. I tried for a mean glint in my eye, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

Unfortunately, this particular shop doesn’t have a lot in the way of kid clothing – but I did grab a pair of tennis shoes for Captain Adventure (who still goes through a pair a month minimum - wears the toes right out in less time than it takes to lose the receipts), a pair of jeans and a t-shirt for me and a cookie jar to replace the one we broke last year and hello, what’s this…



I find this basket exciting for one simple reason: It has a sturdy lid. The open basket thing has become something of a problem for two reasons: One is that the kids tend to drop things into my open baskets (wrappers, crumbs, chewed gum) (GAH!), and the other is that dust and cat hair have a way of accumulating on my work-in-progress.

Oh sure, I’m going to no, REALLY wash it before I block and all, but you know what’s better than washing dust and cat hair out of your project? Not having it on there in the first place!

And at $3.50 $1.75, it was a serious woot!

Naturally, I immediately rescued my taking-too-long lace scarf from the floor (sigh…it was in the basket, but then Captain Adventure happened…) and put it and the rest of its yarn into it and then I cooed at it and told it was my best friend.



And then it stuck it’s tongue out at me! Oh. Wait. No. That’s the scarf.



And this is the scarf on Danger Mouse, who is obviously barely tolerating her Very Strange Mother.



This scarf is definitely taking too long to make, but I have fallen back in love with it so it’s all good. This is the Elfin Lace pattern from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. The yarn is KnitPicks Shadow, a 100% Merino laceweight in Juniper Heather.

The reason it’s taking so conflabbed long is that I got fussy about the lace definition and went with #3 needles on this project. It would have gone much faster on, say, #7 needles…but I just didn’t like the way the lace looked so I kept going smaller and smaller and then Eureka!, the #3 hit the sweet spot. Sweet, and sloooooow…

Once I’ve gotten this to about 48” (which I figure should be sometime around January 2012), I’m planning to do a knitted on border all the way around. Because Lord Knows it isn’t fiddly enough as it is. Oh no, not nearly fiddly enough! It obviously is going to need some scalloped-diamond-shelled-whatnot knitted all the way around it!

So, see? I’m still knitting. Sometimes. Slowly.

One of these days, I swear I’m going to make a garter stitch baby blanket on #13 needles, just for the joy of speed…