Diamond Madiera lace, 6th birthday party

A while back I had to drop down a section of lace and build it back up, and I decided to photograph the steps. This was back in March, and I kept putting off posting it (not really for any good reason except maybe laziness, which isn't really a good reason after all) until now.

So here we go, in a series, dropping down a section of lace in the Diamond Madeira section of my Shetland Tea Shawl.

This is Step One, isolating the stitches that I'll drop down. All the pins on the sides stop the stitches from running farther than I want them to. In this case I'd done something wrong about four rounds down and I couldn't fix it by just working a stitch or two back up or down--this pattern is worked every row (instead of every other row) and I figured it would be easier to just re-do the section.


Step Two, dropping all those stitches down. At this point I always think "Oh my goodness, WHAT have I DONE??" but then I take a couple of deep breaths. ;-)


Step Three, working row-by-row (or round-by-round in this case), following the chart for one repeat. The trick here is isolating (on the chart) which stitches I'm dealing with and ignoring the rest of it. Remember to breathe.


Continuing to work row-by-row:

And more...
And I didn't get a picture of the finished fix, amazingly enough!! I'm not sure where my brain was that I didn't get a pic, but I think it was pretty late (like close to midnight as usual) when I did this--it's the only time the house is quiet enough, with no interruptions, for me to do things like this. My kids like to "help" by putting my pins away for me, which normally is a great thing--except when those pins are holding lace where I need it to be. :-)

I'm making pretty good progress on my Shetland Tea Shawl and hope to have it finished in the next month or so. I've got about four more rounds to do on the Diamond Madeira, then some plain rounds, then the edging! I've decided to do something different than the pattern in the book, but I haven't done any of the math or swatching to figure out exactly which one.

DD's party was today and it was a lot of fun! We're all pretty tired, though. This year we had it as a place called Playhouse for Kidz, which was really fun. I could do without the religious signs but it's wasn't too overwhelming. It was SO nice to be able to go there, have a party, and leave without having to do all the cleanup. Last year we had a party here at the house and I swear I spent days getting ready and days recovering afterwards! It was fun, too, but I liked having the party away from the house.

Here's the princess' cake:

And the boy, who did play for a while (despite the sign--I know they mean not to climb on the outside, but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to take this picture) as long as either Greg or I was standing nearby.

And here's the birthday girl, or actually one of the birthday girls--Gillian and a classmate shared their party so that we could pool our resources and invite the whole class. It was fun!

Yes, she really is totally pink and sweaty--it was warm in there and the kids were playing with everything they had! The drinks were really popular. :-)

I have lots more pictures of course, but since I don't have permission to post pix of other people's children I'll refrain.

Back on the knitting front, I started a project for me: a yoked sweater using the yarn from Bernat that I won. I'm really excited about it. Or I would be if I hadn't made a whole bunch of reverse progress today. I've redone the sleeves twice now because I'm just not happy with them. I think I may have finally nailed down the shaping so we'll see how far I get tomorrow. Perhaps far enough to have something to photograph, but we'll see.