I know I said a while back that I was disturbed by the fact that I knew there were a few minor errors in the Crest 'O' The Wave scarf I was knitting.

But once I got it done, and saw how nice and long it came out (I don't like short scarves; I like to be able to wrap them at least once around my neck), I decided the errors didn't really matter:



It blocked really beautifully. This was almost an entire skein (I think I stopped with about 15-20 yards left over) of Dream in Color "Starry" yarn. (I think one skein of that yarn is somewhere on the order of 450 yards).

The knitting was very simple - just the old "Crest o' the wave" pattern (knit four rows knitting every row, then for rows 5, 7, 9, and 11 you k1 *k2tog, k2tog, yo, k1, yo, k1, yo, k1, yo, ssk, ssk, k1* and for rows 6,8,10, and 12, you purl). I added 2 garter stitch (knit every row) stitches at the edges to cut down on rolling after the scarf was blocked, and I both started and ended with the four "plain knit" (garter) rows for the scarf. And I did three repeats of the pattern across the scarf. (I have no idea - and am not going to take time to count - how many repeats of the pattern it took to make up the length of the scarf).

Here's a close-up. One of the nice things about some of these Shetland laces is that they naturally go into waves or points at the ends:



I like knitting these old, old patterns. With the number of knitters that there are out there, and with the fact that nearly every stitch pattern book contains them, I doubt they are in any danger of going extinct, but I also like to feel like it's honoring the past and Those Who Went Before a little bit to knit something in an old, old pattern. (As I've said before, I tend to fancifully imagine my Irish and German and Scots forbears knitting - perhaps the Scots ones even knitted this very pattern. (The Germans probably would have knit something different; every culture seems to have slightly different traditional stitch patterns).

I have to say, one thing I like about the old Mavica camera - as clunky and dinosaur-like as it may be compared to more recent models - it has a really good timer function, so I can photograph myself without having to resort to the old mirror trick.

And a nice thing about being a bibliomane is that you always have a convenient way of building a "tower" to set the camera on so it is at the right height so the top of your head does not get cut off, or you don't inadvertently photograph the (ahem) teetering stack of magazines next to your chair when you're trying to photograph yourself.



One I just read (Mauve), three I'm sort of in the process of reading ("Water from the Well," "The Whiskey Rebels," and "Lark Rise to Candleford" - that's the really giant Folio Press book (and a gorgeous book it is) on the bottom of the stack), a couple I've not started yet.

The Beatrix Potter book, in particular, I'm very excited about - a friend of my family (the one I saw at Thanksgiving) is a retired geographer from Great Britain and is a tremendously interesting person (she is, I'm guessing, late 80s-early 90s. She was in Britain during WWII and while I don't think she was "officially" a Land Girl, some of the duties she carried out sound very much like what they had.) She is also a book lover and someone who really hunts through the discounter catalogs like Daedalus and Edward R. Hamilton and when she sees something someone she knows would like, she buys it for them.

She knows of my fondness for Beatrix Potter (and yes, I do consider Potter to be one of my heroines: a writer and naturalist and someone who didn't follow the "expected" path of that day of marrying young and for property - she was in her late 40s when she married (after her first love died of leukemia) and from all accounts I've read, it was for love. And she was a great countrywoman and was interested in preservation of the countryside and things like traditional sheep breeds).

So she bought me the Potter book (Actually, I think she read it first then passed it on to me, but as she doesn't write in her books and takes good care of them, it's like getting a new book). She noted that this book talked a lot about Potter's natural history work, so it should be very interesting. (And it was a book I didn't even know existed.)