Yarnification

I’ve healed up from the fall, no more freaky nerve pain, and am back to my projects again.

I have a doily in mind that I think I’m going to start tonight. I’m starting to miss crocheting with all the knitting I’ve been doing lately, but I did need to go on a big knitting binge so as not to forget the new things I was learning almost as soon as I learned them.

Right now I’m working on the candle flame shawl. It might be overstating things to say it’s in progress because I haven’t gotten back to the lace bits yet. But I’ve finished that first eighteen rows of garter stitch (for the third or fourth time) and am now threading a lifeline through the eighteenth row. I have learned the error of my ways and do not want to have to frog all the way back to the beginning again.

I thought, last night when I got out the darning needles and a ball of #30 crochet thread, that the lifeline would be a quick thing and I’d be off and running on the lace. But it’s taking me forever to get it run through. I really need some itty bitty darning needles, I think. I’m using my smallest one, but it’s still fairly big. Not as big as the ones sold in a pack of five as “yarn needles” but about the biggest size that came in the pack I once got that had a variety of small sizes. The rest of the pack is gone—seems the smaller the darning needle, the less likely I am to be able to keep it in my possession for more than a week or two.

I thought about trying a quilting needle since they’re so skinny—I have a pack of those that I bought to string beads on crochet thread for a project ages ago—but I decided I’d make a mess of the yarn because they’re so sharp that they’d split the yarn instead of going underneath the stitches.

I think I need to find some sort of little plastic tube to store those needles in. I usually just keep them in their original cardboard package, but that deteriorates quickly being knocked around in the big plastic tube with all my crochet hooks. Needles eventually start falling out of the package, then I dump everything out looking for my #5 Boye steel hook, and *poof* some poor innocent darning needle vanishes, probably condemned to death by vacuum cleaner.

Anyway. I thought about showing you a photo of what I’ve got so far, but it’s not much to look at. It’s all squashed up on a straight needle, and it’s, er. Garter stitch. In pretty laceweight yarn, but still it’s two inches of garter stitch squished up on the needle. I’ll take a photo once I get through a repeat of the lace pattern, though.

I do have my doubts that this thing is going to block out to eighteen inches wide as specified in the pattern. I mean, I’m trying to have faith in the process and hope for the best, but I’ve gone up a needle size (I do knit tightly) and it still doesn’t look like it’s more than 16″ wide. It’s hard to tell with it squashed up on a 14″ straight needle, but if I spread it out across the whole needle, it looks like it would be an inch or two wider than the needle.

Can it really pick up that much width in blocking? Or is it going to be a rather wide lace scarf? We’ll see what happens.