Quest for lace

Made it to the pool at 7:30 this morning to swim laps with my climbing partner Jack and housemate Lisa, hopefully our first of many morning fitness attempts. Thought it would be a nice early start to the day, but I promptly wasted the morning browsing knitting books at Borders, made friends with a dachshund at Bogey's Used Bookstore then whiled away a bit more of the morning at the local yarn shop. My quest was to find a book on lace knitting as I have belatedly realized that a little guidance might be in order if I am to knit a grand old circular lace shawl. The problem is that I don't necessarily want to use someone else's pattern. I figure I can use the pi shawl principle of doubling the circumference as the radius doubles then insert various lace stitches etc. Or I could free-form it. What I'd really like to find is an article on how to create new lace stitches, but haven't found one yet so I think I should just start playing with it. I've done a couple lace cardigans and lace gloves before, so I vaguely understand how the different manuevers work, but I've never tried to create my own stitch pattern before, I've always used a stitch pattern from one of Barbara Walker's collections. I did finish one 50g skein of lace weight alpaca, 350yds of 2-ply. But that's not going to be enough to do much more than a smoke ring. Maybe I should be less ambitious for the Knitting World Cup and do a circular shawl on a longer timeline. Hmm...well I pulled out a different alpaca fleece (for some reason I don't have much more of the fleece I've been spinning) and will try doing a gossamer yarn tonight.

I'm a little hampered in the sample knitting department by my wrist tendonitis acting up. My hands started falling asleep while playing bass last Tuesday, and by this Monday I was only climbing really easy juggy routes and stopped after two climbs. I had to wear my wrist braces up until I played Monday night, but the show was great and once we got going, the adrenalin set in and it didn't hurt. Soul Remnants opened for Zion I and Dead Prez. Good turnout and we had a good set. Zion I was awesome; I was enraptured by the beats--Amp Live is crazy. Pretty inspiring.

At any rate, I'm holding off on knitting until my wrists stop aching. My right wrist almost feels sprained, but I can't remember doing anything to it. Luckily, I can relax while spinning and my wrist stays pretty straight. Weaving will be fine on my wrist too if I can ever finish setting up the loom. 36 inches at 24 ends per inch, that's how many ends? Threading the heddles in shadow weave, should be a good pattern. And maybe I'll finish in the next two days since I can't do glass or wood right now...