Adventures in Lace Knitting

If tangents were spiderwebs, I'd be up there with Charlotte for world's most prolific spider.  Actually, just pretend I never said that.  After hours of seam-ripping on self-designed dress number...1? 2? whatever...my mind started wandering to the upcoming RenFaire.  I'd made that apple-green faux-satin gown back in the fall but kept procrastinating on headgear.  Enter a few green additions to my yarn stash, left over from wedding presents.  Must...make...hair ornament.

So, remnants of a fairly smooth cotton-based green yarn, I'm thinking snood/caul/whatever-you-call-those-hairnet-thingies.  Since I don't happen to have beads or the patience/coordination to work with said beads, my next best option was an open lace.  For that I chose Arrowhead.  Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me, my rough draft in worsted yarn (the only stuff I'm willing to part with on a lark) and approximately-size-8 double-points would go on to produce...a doll's beret?

Options here?  Well, I could make the decreases a bit more gradual and knit more loosely (plus my green yarn of choice is a slightly finer gauge).  Or...time to break into the stash for more gorgeous hats?  This could get dangerous.  Anyone want a beret?  I promise I'll make it human-size next time.

Anatomy of a Design

During one of the rare free moments I found during my "vacation," I happened to notice I've been a bit derelict on my blogging.  Actually, does this count as blogging?  To this day I have no idea if I'm doing it right or not.  But, to paraphrase Charlotte Bronte, Reader, these have been the busiest two months of my crafting life, and here's why.  During the months of February and March, I've been honing my draftsman skills on wedding presents whose characteristics I'm forbidding myself to reveal until June and August, respectively.  I've also been designing dresses (well, only two at the moment, since I'd finished one at the time of my last post and just started thinking about the most recent one after my mother, raising her eyebrows at my latest venture, bestowed upon me about 2 yards of a leaf-patterned cornflower-blue silk that had been moldering away in her closet since a relative gave it to her on a previous trip to China).  So, as a motivation for me to get started on my more challenging dress project, this is how it started.

 OK, technically, my inspiration was a set of luggage ads on the subway, 'cause a person's gotta look at something during the long ride from Brooklyn to the not-quite-Upper West Side.  For each piece of designer luggage on that ad there was a model wearing a variation on a simple sundress.  Between one of the dresses and my memory of upper-class 1930s fashion, this sketch was what ultimately emerged from the vestigial design centers of my brain.  But what to make it out of?

So, after a bit of boredom and online fabric-browsing, I discovered cheap satin and chiffon to play with.  The hot pink was specifically a dare from my sister, who's probably the one person you'd be less likely to see in hot pink.  My deadline for this project is, unfortunately, August, so there's bound to be a lot of procrastination before it's all over and done with.  But I do have all the requisite ingredients procured, so all it takes is a few cat-free moments with a wee bit of floor space, scissors, and a handful of straight pins, and then maybe a weekend of sewing like I mean it.  I'll take bets now on what happens first: the dress or the lifting of my do-not-reveal taboo on wedding presents.  There will need to be knitting charts...does anybody know the easiest way to do those on a computer?

Also, in honor of National Poetry Month, I'm going to leave off this post with the first decent poem I've written in, oh, probably the past 2 or 3 years (no, the February set make the don't-completely-suck category one or two tiers below that).

"Mr. Eliot's Easter Service"

Ten o'clock Eastern: another day
Laps somnolently past like the silty river
We strolled by in the last cool
Of morning.
The heat, early afternoon,
Tarring roads and cars, settling
Anesthetic-like on bones, sinews,
And, if they exist, souls,
That swim through the shopping din,
Babel of cooking smells,
Cacophonizing in the complacent air.

Easter idled in, saddling
A rare breeze, a penitent cloud-wisp,
Sighed out on less: a degree drop,
Neon digits on a clock display.
Would a fanfare of carillons
Suit more to start, a chorus
Of nightingales to mark its passing?
Then would we remember
This spring, stagnantly early,
This cruelest month,
This whimper?