And away we go

In all my planning for the Knitting Olympics I neglected to consider one thing; the one thing that has demonstrated the rather obvious and glaring flaw in my plan to knit a large lace shawl in only 16 days.

This would be the fact that watching amazingly talented people do marvelous things on television (i.e. watching the *real* Olympics) is extremely distracting. And if this were just a plain old boring stockinette sweater I could easily knit along and not have to watch what I am doing. But it is not, and focusing on the lace means not being able to focus on the aforementioned amazing people doing amazing things. Heh. Oops.

The good thing, at least, is that I am making good progress. Last night, even while consistantly distracted watching the Opening Ceremonies, and then Battlestar Galactica, I managed to get the neckband done and work up to the fourth repeat of the first diamond pattern. And today, since Richard was off at a writer’s group meeting for the most of the day, and the amount of skiing I can watch on television is rather small, I had nothing at all to distract me. Even the cats mostly left me alone, since daytime knitting time is their prime nap time.

I took a short break this afternoon to whip up a progress tracking system in a spreadsheet so I can figure out how far along I am, just because this sort of thing amuses me, but also because it is really nice to be able to take a break now and then and see where I stand. Just in case anyone cares, there are about about 82,500 stitches in an Irish Diamond Shawl (including the binding off). That’s a lot of stitches.

I am telling myself that I am not allowed to go quietly insane from doing the purl rows, because even though purling across 400 stitches at a time (what I currently have on the needles) is tedious, it is going to be that much worse when I near the end and have over 750 stitches on the needle. Just the thought of purling that many stitches in a row makes me feel a little queasy. But I am going to be strong.

Anyway. End of Day 2 status report. Just finished row 71, and have decided it is time to stop because my hands are starting to hurt. I’m nearly at 23% complete, which means I am well on my way to my goal to have this thing over 25% complete by the end of the weekend.