Tornado Lace

Here is the swatch of lace that I was working on last Friday during all the tornadoes.

For those of you outside of tornado alley:  when there is dangerous weather,  the local stations have their weather guys on the TV, telling us what’s happening.  There are no network shows on.  Just weather coverage.

And they are wonderful and expert.  They can tell you right down to what street the tornado is on.

So when the weather conditions were starting up that evening, we got our essentials ready (a go-bag of sorts) to go down into our storm shelter, just in case.

We have an underground tornado shelter in our garage. 

It’s great because you don’t have to back the car out, so it stays in the garage, protected from hail.  ('Cause the odds are, you won’t get hit by a tornado, but you will probably have hail.)  And it's also nice because you don’t even have to go out into the mud and rain, like you would have to if you had a shelter in your backyard.  (Although they are usually bigger and cheaper.)

(If you don’t have a shelter, you are supposed to hunker down in an interior room, that is, a room with no exterior walls -- perhaps in a bathroom tub, hopefully with a helmet on and a mattress over you and yours.  I heard that a lot of head injuries in the May 20^th tornado were from flying bricks.)

Anyway, after packing up our laptops and Rx’s and getting ready just-in-case, I sat down in front of the TV to watch the weather coverage with my knitting.

The storms ended up being very south of us, so we knew we were in the clear, but then again, you never know.  So we watched the coverage all evening.  It’s like there’s nothing else to do.

And I knitted and knitted.  Knitting is very good for the kind of restless energy that you have during such times.  (Or maybe that’s just me!)

It’s funny… My husband was like, how can you be knitting during all this?  And I’m like, how can you not be??  It’s obviously very therapeutic for me.

Anyway, I had just finished another lace pattern swatch earlier that week, so I started a new one that night.  It’s a easy 4-row repeat, with 2 purl rows and 2 pattern rows.

The pattern is easy enough, but what makes it tricky is, it’s the same pattern on each row, but it’s offset by a few stitches the second time around.  This makes your stitch markers totally un-useful on the 2^nd pattern row.

Fortunately, I learned to change my stitch markers on each purl row.  I have no idea what other people do with this problem, but that’s how I solved it.

So for hours that night, I knit and knit, and we prayed and prayed.  We’re all pretty much ready for the storm season to be over with for this year.

The lace knitting, though, will happily continue.

XOXO,

Lucky Dog

♥