Is it me?

I've been knitting away on the Mystery Shawl and am almost finished with clue 4. Clue 5, the final clue, has been posted but I haven't looked at it yet. This betrays a certain indifference. It's not that I'm not enjoying knitting with the yarn (beautiful - skinny but beautiful). I'm not quite sure what it is. This has been my first ever KAL (although I have knitted various shawls together with my knit f(r)iend) and I can't say I really need to know how everyone else made a mistake; how this one mis-read the pattern; how that one is wondering what needles to use (have a try, dare I say the word "swatch"?); how that one is having a picnic at the frog pond. There have also been various mistakes in the charts - nothing major and easy to spot and rectify. We have, however, had to wade through tens of emails, all saying, "Is there a mistake in the chart?", then more saying, "Yes, it's such a thing." Get a grip, girls. Read the message and if it's already been said, don't bother saying it again. Maybe I'm just getting cranky in my old age but I really can't be bothered. I haven't found the pattern to be particularly challenging, either (but that is not the designer's fault - how is she to know that I am the pickiest knitter on this earth?)

I was discussing what it is that makes a "good" lace design with said knit f(r)iend the other day. I think it's that the pattern seems to grow and progress in a natural, almost organic way. For me, there needs to be a logical progression (as in Rosy Fingered Dawn and even better in Sandy Terp's "The Great Cosmos" - the shawl I have enjoyed knitting most of all) and I do not like constant repetition of the same motif. (Because I get bored easily - so bite me.) I'm sorry to say that in the mystery shawl there was very little of the former and too much of the latter for my taste. So why don't you design your own lace patterns, I hear you ask? Well, I just might do that.

Fluttering round cyberspace I am constantly amazed at the beautiful places all these knitters live. They live in the desert, they live by the sea, they live in Finland and Norway and Japan. They post pictures of their houses and views from their windows and I want to live where they live. Yesterday there was a rainbow over my house. The pot of gold was not in my garden but in that of the house across the road. I got a picture of that and I got a beautiful picture of the setting sun from my bedroom window. It made me glad I live here and not anywhere else. I'd like to share those pictures with you, so that you all can lust after living in the rural backwater, but Blogger will not play ball. You may get them later, you may never get them at all.

It's gone very dark. There will shortly be a great downpour and a thunderstorm. 'Im indoors is ordering me to get off the computer. He always likes to look on the bright side of life and is fully expecting lightening to strike through the keyboard and that he will find me charred and blackened - sacrificed on the altar of the blog.