Yarn Along

Joining Ginny this week!

Lenten Reading:  Revelations of Divine Love, and Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth.  Not the new one; dh is reading that one.  I really like Revelations, but it's one that you can only read a small section of per day and then spend the rest of the day digesting.

Another book not pictured is Where the Lillies Bloom.  I picked it up at the church yard sale for a quarter.  I've never read it, but I saw the movie as a child (a young teen?) and it has always haunted me.  Do you have movies or books like that, that you just barely remember, but you know how they made you feel, and you've always wanted to find again???  So far, in 10 minutes per night, I'm enjoying it.

The knitting is, as usual, going better than the reading.  I've done 3 repeats of the pattern and am halfway through the 4th.  I have to do 6-8 repeats, which sounds like I'm almost halfway done, but you have to bear in mind that each repeat is longer than the one before, so they go slower and sloooowwwwweerrr.  "Let me just finish this row!"  takes on a whole new meaning.

I also had to break my yarn yesterday to string more beads.  Bummer.  Since I calculated that I need 10 feet of beads and I had strung 5 feet to begin with (figuring that half was the right amount for one skein of my 2 skein work), I was a bit disheartened.  The stringing takes forever and it's hard to work with 5 feet of beads hanging from my ball of yarn!  I have to keep stopping to push all the beads down a few more feet so I have some free yarn to work with.

I think it's a good metaphor for Lent and my spiritual progress:  the more I do, the further behind I feel.  And it's never going as smoothly as I'd like!  I don't seem to be making progress, just mistakes.  At least with the knitting there is visual proof of progress.

I must have calculated the number of beads wrong.  There are 8 repeats and 128 beads per repeat; that's 1024.  Plus another 5 dragonflies at the beginning: about 320 more beads.  That's a lot of beads, and the little containers don't tell you how many are in each one.  I may be popping into Joann's with my handy coupons to buy more beads in a couple of weeks!

Another thing about this project is that it requires me to have faith.  I don't know if you can see how each diamond puckers, but they do.  I'm working hard to keep my tension even and loose, but they all do that and I have to trust that all the flaws will be smoothed out with the blocking.