Transformed

As promised, I have pictures today of my blocked Suri Alpaca Blue Jeans Leaf Lace Shawl.  The hand spun yarn came from A Simple Piece of String and the pattern from

Ramblings of an Uncluttered Mind.

This shawl measures about 50 inches across the top and is about 25 inches deep.  The sides are about 35 inches each.  I made it slightly smaller than the pattern indicated, using size 3US needles with the lace weight yarn.

   

My vision was for an ultra light, warm, little shawl I could throw over my shoulders that I would barely notice.  That is exactly how it has turned out.  Alpaca is both extremely warm and very light weight.  And the shawl just rests on my shoulders and back.  I can bring the ends together in the front with a shawl pin if I want to.  but it’s not necessary, as they are not long and don’t get in the way of what I’m doing.  I have it resting on my shoulders now as I’m writing this.

I can envision keeping this shawl in my office for when it gets a little chilly from summer air conditioning or winter temps.

It took quite a lot of hard work to transform the jumble that this piece started out as into this lovely, light, lacey shawl.  I had to stretch it quite a lot and started over with the blocking a couple of times in order to get all of the leaves to line up correctly.

 

Yesterday I read in The Walk by William DeBuys about the glaciated boulders that slowly move along the river bed that passes through his walk.

I imagine that if water could dream, it would dream of the ocean, where it is always trying to go.  I imagine too that if boulders could dream, they would dream no less for the ocean, but they would dream incomprehensibly slowly, and they would dream of themselves as sand.

Talk about transformation!  And a vision of what we are to become.  I wonder if any of us thinks about ourselves becoming so totally transformed and complete in our life purpose.

Someone in one of my Ravelry groups has been writing about the terrible struggle she’s been having knitting a lace stole.  Lace is no simple thing to knit as you are usually working with extremely fine yarn and there are lots of yarn overs and knit togethers that are what create the lace.  Unfortunately the yarn overs are very easy to forget to do and difficult to find and fix without un-knitting, sometimes back a very long way.   There are many times when you just want to chuck the whole thing and give up.  

It seems to me that knitting lace provides so many good lessons about the transformation of a life.  We can envision where we want to be, what beautiful finished thing is to become.  But, oh, it is so painfully slow and difficult to get there.  Most of us are not water joyfully rushing to the sea, but big heavy boulders, slowly creaking and cracking our way, trying to become sand that ebbs and flows with the unceasing waves.

So what if the metaphors are mixed:  lace and boulders.  Isn’t that what transformation is all about?   

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