By the way, K found a suit. He says it is "VERY NOOOICE" but won't tell me how much he payed for it. Hmm, should I be worried? They'll have the alterations done on August 1st. Hooray!

Despite Portland's reputation for being a veritable hotbed of knitters, I rarely see any. Maybe most aren't the knit-out-loud type. I ride the MAX, the light rail train, to work every day and I have yet to see a single knitter. I felt pretty good the other day when two proto-teen girls complimented me on the Lily of the Valley stole. Get 'em hooked early, muahahaha.

Nothing like lace to milk the compliments, baby. Everyone thinks it's so complicated and fussy, but it's not really harder than just regular knitting, and you can be more fast and loose with your tension (which helps on a train). I'm kind of an intuitive knitter, I want to see where the stitches are connecting to each other row by row, and that helps me memorize the pattern much faster. Lily of the Valley is a very intuitive knit, it's repetitve even over a 14-row repeat. I know that I'm supposed to start the YO-K1-YO-nupp sequence when I get to the stitch above the last YO you did, releasing me from the necessity of counting most of the time (or at least as a check on the counting). It's also easy figuring out where you stopped after last time.

I had an awful lot more trouble with Branching Out that I did last year, as a first lace project. I suspect that's because I wasn't trying to pay attention to where the stitches fell, line by line, but slavishly following the chart. I kept having to rip out many rows and redo it all. However, the chart on Branching Out is a lot more complicated than Lily of the Valley, whose stock in trade is really those nupps, a few K2togs and one triple in the middle.