Baby, It's Cold Inside ...

Well, actually that's not quite accurate. It would be more accurate to say that I HAVE a cold, a little piece of wedding memorabilia from my trip to Virginia last weekend. I should have known when both my sister Deirdre and my nephew Brian were scarfing down Zicam like it was a bag of Lindor White Chocolate Truffles that I'd be the next recipient. Oh, well....gives new meaning to the phrase "the gift that keeps on giving." (I didn't intend to lead with this piece of self-centered health trivia, but after all, it IS all about me, isn't it?)

What's most important about the weekend is that the bride was lovely and the wedding was lots of fun. My sister's and the groom's families are both big Irish clans and there was even a bagpiper. (Although my niece swears she missed seeing or hearing him--oh, well. )

We had a wonderful time with daughters and grandchildren and sisters and nieces and nephews and old, dear friends. What more could anyone want? And, for the record, Hanami attended.

You can tell that's my sister by the ubiquitous Diet Pepsi can in her hand. Neither she or I ever go anywhere without it, even, obviously, into the limousine for the ride to the church. I suppose we'll have to wait for the official formal photographs to see if she put it down for them. (By the way, this hasn't helped my entry into the upper levels of society here in Atlanta--you might as well drive a Kia to a union event as show up with a Pepsi in your hand here in Coca Cola City.)

Mr. Pug and I drove the motor home to Virginia so we could take the three pugs. That meant that I could knit away the whole time. (You see, when I say that "Mr. Pug and I drove" what I really mean is that he drove, except for about an hour when he grudgingly released the wheel to me. I cast on for a lace scarf (pix later) and by the time we got home on Monday, it was just about finished.) The pattern is by Jackie Erickson-Schweitzer and the yarn is Panda Silk.

Now what that means is that I did NOT work on either of the two lace knitalongs I'm currently signed up for--Mystic Light and Secret of Bad Nauheim--although I took both patterns and the yarns with me. Just couldn't get into trying to follow those patterns in a moving vehicle. Having finally started ML when I got home, that turned out to be a good decision. I love the pattern but I would have hated trying to keep track of those tiny symbols while bouncing along on North Carolina's bumpy roads.

But, ML is now on the needles and I'm about halfway through Clue 1, with Clue 2 already out. No progress at all on Bad Nauheim--not even a caston, with two clues out. I'm way behind.

Which brings me back to the cold in the first paragraph. I never, ever miss Guild and I missed last night's meeting, which I really wanted to attend, because I was so miserable and so afraid of infecting the whole Guild. So instead I curled up in an easy chair with an old friend, Kiri, and knit all day. Or rather, unknit, and then knit.

It should be a good lesson to me that my brain has turned to Southern-fried mush and I can't just put down and pick up lace patterns. I grabbed Kiri on my way to the Noble Knitters group on Wednesday night and somehow thought I would remember what to do. After all, Kiri is a very simple, repetitive pattern--how bad could I screw it up?

The answer was clear yesterday when I had to tink back 8 rows. When I saw the first, er, uh, SNAFU, I thought maybe I could fudge it. I couldn't. Then I saw the second one. Maybe I could ignore it. Maybe no one would ever notice them. I tried to tell myself that the Lady Godiva rule would probably work in this case. Nope. They were huge, immense, giant, humongous ERRORS.

Tink City.

But like the old friend that she has been for a few months, Kiri was remarkably forgiving. I have to admit I'm not sure I'd have been so nice to someone who jammed me higgly-piggly into a ziploc bag and stuffed me into the bottom of the knitting bag. But once her glitches were gone and she was once again pretty-damned-near-perfect, she jumped in to remind me of why I love this project. After Mystic Light, with every row a new and different collection of stitches, it was so pleasant to sit and knit the beautiful repetitive pattern of Kiri. Once I got back into the rhythm with her, it was like sitting with an old friend, sipping a nice cup of ... well, Diet Pepsi.

She's got a way to go, though. I've knit 10 repetitions and the pattern calls for 12. A search of Ravelry confirms my suspicion that 12 isn't going to be enough. One person did 19 reps and another did 20. Other people moaned that their shawls were smaller than they expected, and they wished they'd done more. I suspect that, after my experience with Birch turning into a shoulder shawl, I'll be happier in the 19-20 range.