Bunker Dreams

Yes, yes, yes I know I've been remiss in blogging my knitting and especially have I been non-entertaining lately. Chalk it up to fear of really doing some unredeemable thing to the blog and website. For example, I succeeded in putting the last entry into a nice format. This format will be completely obliterated when I post this entry, because I am still half-a-clueless as to how the templates and style sheet work with Movable Type.

But really, I have been knitting and playing with fiber and such. The latest attention-getting array of knit and yarnover stitches is what I am calling the Mourning Shawl. Jan mentioned she is making a mourning scarf, because of the war I presume, and I, like a lemming, thought that was an appropriate idea. Some people hate knitting with black yarn, but I figured that it was going to be lace and I wouldn't be silly and try to use an ebony needle, so it wouldn't bother me that much. Besides, I have a great-great (x a lot of greats) grandmother who was named Mourning, and I am intrigued by that name. Was it simply a popular name at the time, or was the name indicative of some event in that family's life? Did her mother die in childbirth? Was her father killed in a war? Lori said that sometimes people who lost a lot of children would sometimes name a baby a depressing thing as a kind of "whistling by the graveyard" approach, and maybe that was it. But I digress.

Fortuitously, Caroline and others on FiberTraditions had to point me to a great source of cashmere/silk lace yarn on ebay the other day, and I was suddently entrenched in the mourning shawl idea. When I got the yarn I was really impressed. It's beautiful, not too stretchy-bouncy and not too inelastic. After perusing my library, I settled on making a triangular shawl out of the book "Shetland Lace" and don't ask me who the author is but I know she sometimes goes by the name "Gladys Amedro". I bought the book in Lerwick at Jamieson & Smith's mill.

The shawl is made border first, which is good because it gets the knitter used to the yarn and the gauge before putting her in the middle of long rows from which she might never recover. The border is composed of "scallops" which really look more like diamonds. These vary in size, but are made on a base row of 18 stitches. So far I have made three scallops, and it is very very pretty.

As I knit this border, the CNN news channel is most often the background. I find myself thinking of the knitting as the war itself. Every stitch I take is some ground gained in the war. I am very careful to be sure I don't miss making a yarnover or get off in my count, because then I will need to backtrack and rescue a pow or retake ground I thought I had already taken. Every so often I sit back and look at the progress made, and know that when it is finished it will be beautiful, but it may take some time to get there.

Jan's mourning scarf might (or might not) be for the war, but mine is for everything and everyone I have not taken the proper time to mourn.

What else?

Oh yes, at FiberTraditions we are embarking on a fun little thing called Fair Isle Jam. We look at what colors we have in common for fair isle knitting and then pick a palette. We all then come up with a large swatch of a fair isle design using those colors only, and then we will compare them and see what happened. This is "jam" in the same sense as musicians jam, not as in making sweet edibles from fruit and berries.

This weekend is the Seattle Fiber Arts Festival, which Teri tells me originally started out as a machine knitter's event but has evolved over time to encompass more. It is Friday through Sunday, and should be a fun outing.

Lastly, it was interesting to note that CNN had a little section on "the blogging phenomena" last night. Unfortunately, they seem to think that blogging is all about news analysis and reporting. I may have to write Aaron Brown a little note and inform him that blogs are much more than just commentary about world news. Brad tells me that he got his start in Seattle, where he was sometimes referred to as "Arrogant Brown" but I like him and his style. I also was amused to notice that in a shot of a man making a blog entry, the man was using Movable Type, this very software that I use. Good choice!

OK, enough for me.... now we shall see what posting this wee bit does to the blog page....

p.s. the title of this entry reflects the fact that all last night I couldn't get any proper sleep because I was dreaming of the bunker I would need to design and build in order to avoid war. Sad, isn't it?

Posted by Sheila at April 2, 2003 08:14 PM Posted to Computers and Programming | Introspection | Knitting | Life | Mourning Shawl | Movable Type | TrackBack