Victorian Lace Today, Gripe

I have this book, it's wonderful. What I am cheesed off about is that the half hexagon, (Spinder's web shawls, p45) isn't. No doubt it's wonderful to wear, lots of lovely lace flowing around your shoulders, but when a diagram shows a half hexagon, with 3 triangles, the angles which meet at the center of the straight side, should each measure 60 degrees. Well, they don't, they are nearer 90. They are bound to really. When constructing a normal triangular shawl from the neck edge, there are 4 increases every other row, this gives you a straight edge, if you have 6 increases, then no wonder the 180 degree angle increases to 270. I've looked at the VLT group on Ravelry, and no-one complains about it, there are many pictures of stunning shawls. So it must be me, I was using a firm yarn just for sampling, and I think it only works in a fine lace weight, then the shaping is fluid and less noticeable. It does sit around the shoulders instead of across them, so from that point of view it's good. But, as you double the amount for a full 'hexagon' as far as I'm concerned, it just means you are knitting two unnecessary sections, to tight wad me (time and yarn) it's a waste.



The top image is how the half-hexagon is represented in the book, p 180, the lower diagram is how it comes out in practice.

And I'm not the only one either, Jersey Knitter noticed it as well. See what I mean?

Six months gone

I thought I would stop blogging, but I keep feeling the urge to get going again. I never worry if anyone actually reads this stuff, but sometimes I just want to write.

Back in March, as I was uploading photos to Flickr, I realised that many were public that I wanted private, so to save time, I changed them all, in one fail swoop to private.

Today, I get my blog out, dust it down and think I will start again, but all the photo's links are broken (pic set to private - does not work). No worries, re-set them all back to public.

THAT DOESNT WORK EITHER AS THE HTMBUGGERL IS CHANGED AND THE ONLY WAY I CAN GET THEM TO DISPLAY AGAIN IS TO REPOST ALL 65 OR SO IMAGES. Then of course you have to play about with their positioning again as for some reason blogger is incapable of placing them anywhere except at the beginning of your post. I thought I would delete the whole lot in a fit of pique, but some of my posts made me smile. Remembering that during this time I was anything but smiling a lot of the time, I really didn't want to to that. So I will leave it, slowly I may restore the images, but until then, any casual reader will have to make do with an awful lot of this.