I didn’t work on the afghan yesterday because I was at the next stage in the picture but hadn’t decided how I wanted to configure my trees: branches reaching up? Or down? They’re more redwood-like if they’re going down, but the way the lace flows it’s just plain prettier reaching up.

How would you integrate that with trunks? How can you have redwoods without them? My typical lace pine pattern has repeats of each size of branch in order to add a sense of height, but a lace trunk would be off-center by a stitch.

So, I told him over dinner, I went looking through Ravelry patterns to see what other people might have done with the concept of a simple lace tree–and what I found, over and over, was people using Barbara Walker’s Christmas Tree pattern or her Fern pattern, which I hadn’t thought of as tree-like but okay.

Not much to learn there.

But it was the, Now if you’d done this with it it would have been more original and if you’d done this you could have had… Well, probably not like that but unless you wanted a date palm trunk look but like that…

(A side note: there is the iconic shot of Palm Drive, the entry to Stanford campus lined with palms. What they don’t say is that they take a chainsaw to the lower trunks to shave them smooth, obliterating their criss-cross patterning to keep rats and mice from nesting in all those little pockets going up to welcome the new students. And I could knit them back in now if I wanted to. Hah!)

Hey.

It’s not like it’s some great grandiose thing, and it’s not the palm trees. But definitely there is some personal satisfaction involved: I got it. My redwoods. I definitely think I got it. Given that I’m three weeks into this afghan, it took me long enough.

I didn’t know till I had to.