Knitting at a Slow Pace

In the past few weeks, I've been making a concerted effort to work on my Icarus shawl, long dormant in my WIP pile. I started it last August (in fact, I can remember the movie I was watching when I cast on), but it got put down for the wedding and honeymoon, and then the lure of sweaters and socks and other wooly things distracted me for a long time.

Now that it's summer (in spirit if not in fact), I've been hearing the siren call of lace again. Lace is great for the summer because, even with a nearly complete shawl, the pile of wool in your lap is light and airy and entirly tolerable. I've been working on Icarus in part because I feel guilty for neglecting it for so long but also because I have it in my mind to finish it before the Goddess Knits Anniversary Mystery Shawl KAL starts up. That goal might be a tad bit too ambitious, as the first clue comes out a week from Saturday. At the moment I'm in the fourth of five repeats of rows 19-42 of chart 1 in Icarus. It looks bigger than the last time you saw it, but not by much (for scale, that's a 32" US 3 Knit Picks circular in there):


(I do realize that's a awful photo, but it was the best of several that I took. It's already difficult to capture bright red on camera, and as fate would have it, we're having an overcast, rainy day just when I want to do a photo shoot.)

The knitting on this shawl is going very slowly, even though the pattern isn't very tricky at the moment. This yarn, while labeled laceweight, is actually closer to cobweb weight, and added to that is its tendency to snag on rough spots on my fingers, so I have to be very careful and deliberate in my knitting movements.

I discovered last night that a really bad thing to do when you're trying to knit lace with what is essentially thread is to watch a playoff hockey game, particularly when the Cup is on the line. I had a couple of scary moments where I nearly dropped stitches, and I decided it would be best to put the knitting away after the second period. Fortunately the lace was fine, and the game ended for the best (and no, I didn't stay up until the end).

Depending on how brave I am, I may actually bring the shawl to Hurricane Knitting tomorrow night (7 p.m. at the Waterworks Barnes & Noble) -- but maybe I should be safe and just bring socks. You'll have to be there to see!