An act of lace

Published by Shana | Filed under Knitting

After 85,000 stitches, 12,000 beads and four months, this is what I have to present to you.

Oooo... ahhh...

I am assuming that you are gasping with delight and are thoroughly impressed will my skills. I will accept your compliments below.

Except, you know what, lace is really not that hard. It’s knit stiches, yarn overs, and decreases, with a bead slipped on here and there. That’s it. As long as you just keep going, you get something impressive. Not complicated, especially with a few years experience under your belt.

Knitters often have this weird fear of projects that look more challenging than work they’ve done in the past. They’ll hem and haw on message boards and digitally wring their hands over they challenges that they could never rise to.

This photo lies. The shawl is red.

Do you know what happens when you fail at knitting?

Nothing. No one dies. Children don’t cry themselves to sleep. Most people don’t even notice. At worst, you wasted a couple bucks on a pattern, and you have some yarn you need to repurpose. On the scale of things over which to wring your hands, it is nestled comfortably between the noisy material that Sun Chips bags are made out of and the stripe that your windshield wipers can’t seem to get even though it keeps going over it. Trying things you didn’t know how to do is how you find out what you can.

I put beads on it. This wasn't tedious at all! (Exclamation points indicate lies.)

That is really easy to say when you’ve already been doing something for, oh, 8 years and have a solid grasp of the basics and are really just adding more advanced skills. It’s not so easy to say when you’re the gym-hating, food-loving girl who joined a CrossFit gym.

This article explains what Crossfit is pretty well, but in short it’s a combination of weighlifting, calisthenics, gymnastics and feeling like you are going to die.

These two are basically performing the cobweb lace equivelant. Did you just throw up in your mouth a little? Yeah. Me too.

Let’s be honest – I’m not particularly good at this. Getting better, sure, but good? Um, no. After three months, I’m still trying to figure out how to pick up a dropped stitch while everyone else is blazing past with a fancy cabled sweater. (It’s possible I’m pushing this analogy too far…)

But, here’s hoping the same principle applies. 85,000 yarn overs, knit 2 togethers and slip slip knits to a lace weight shawl, 85,000 push ups, cleans and prowler pushes to a butterfly pull up.

Keep showing up and lace is easy and so is picking up that 200 lb barbell.

I'm not burying this photo because I can't get a good pic of the whole thing, yet feel like I'm obligated to have one!

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