The designers’ version of the swatch, swatch, gauge, gauge mantra is, don’t swatch a new lace pattern mid-shawl; if you want to run off with a new idea on a tangent from what you’ve figured out and written out beforehand, do it across a few stitches somewhere else first.  (insert whiny voice)  P l e a s e ?  Four hundred stitches across just doesn’t quite qualify as a swatch.  Ah well, live and learn.  (The former is more likely.)  There’s nothing terribly wrong with it as it was, I just didn’t happen to like it, and I’m the one I most have to make happy with it or it would never get finished.  Now that it’s back on the needles, it’s ready to hum along happily and is feeling all the better for having been held to a standard of perfection.  Not to mention, better four rows ripped than forty.

The good part is, taking those needles out, I went and found a UFO and checked the size of their circs, just to see; I thought I’d been doing that project on 10s.  Nines! Holz and Steins!  Not my sentimental pair, but hey!  I switched them out, as long as the slick ones were unencumbered for the moment.  Yay!

I got an errand run in the afternoon, noting how few miles I’ve put on my car in the last month; it felt good to get out.  I pulled off to the side of the road and tried to capture the snowy egrets in that center shrubbery, knowing my camera could only do so much, but hey. I share what I can.  I’ll get a better camera someday soon, since this one is held together by scotch tape; something to look forward to.

A bicyclist came down the bike path between me and the brownery there, saw me perching against my car door with my Pentax in my hands, and shot me a big grin on his way past, clearly glad to see someone else appreciating the day out there.

I can’t wait to see how this shawl is going to turn out!

(It wasn’t till I posted this that I realized how much the clump of stitches looks like an inverted version of the egrets’ perch.  Cool!)