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
20th 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 2nd 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
♥
