We now restore you to your regular programming…

I’m now in London’s Heathrow Airport, en route to San Francisco.  I had a great time in Ghana – check out my Ghana blog for the details – and am on my way home.  Home! Land of hot showers, dependable electricity, and real coffee.  I can hardly wait.
Ahh.  I have now caught up on the last 21 days of blogs, news, and so on.  I feel refreshed, like I’ve FINALLY had a decent cup of coffee and a newspaper (both are sadly lacking in Ghana).  If I can just get a hot shower and a change of clothes, all my worldly desires will be met.  Just a few more hours, and then…. 🙂

I made significant progress on the entrelac shawl – I knitted the first row (four blocks) in knitted lace (or is it lace knitting? I can never keep track of which is which) – every other row purled, for a stockinette stitch base.   The second row I decided to do exclusively in patterns from Heirloom Lace (sorry, I’ve forgotten the author’s name and am too lazy to look it up right now), complex Shetland garter-stitch patterns.  I knitted three patterns, started the fourth, and realized that I was running out of complex Shetland patterns.  I didn’t feel like reverting to simpler patterns, so I spent part of yesterday
cannibalizing bits and pieces of patterns from Heirloom Lace into a new, extremely complex pattern that I’m looking forward to experimenting with.  Shetland lace is relatively easy to design since the yarn-overs are mostly paired with immediate decreases, meaning you’re working with a pattern of lines and holes, rather than the more complicated types of lace knitting.  It makes it easy to swap in/out patterns.

I do feel I’m getting a better “feel” for lace design; I’m glad I undertook this shawl.  It’s a nice venue in which to work out new patterns (and find out what an existing pattern looks like), without having to commit to an entire shawl’s worth.  I strongly recommend
doing it as an exercise – it’s like swatching, except that you get a usable end result.

Anyway, my flight is coming up soon, so I’ll wrap this up here.  Welcome back to civilization, one and all – I’ll miss trekking through the tropical sun, but it’s nice to be going home at last.  Washing machines! Hot showers! Cats! Clean fluffy towels!  Fresh milk, and hot coffee!  Yay!