Knitting Victorian Lace and My Failed Tutorial Attempt

What a week this has been for us locally! Because of the reality of the approaching COVID-19 virus, organizations have been taking extreme measures. The one that affected my family the most was that the facility where my 91-year old Granddaddy is currently located as he recovers from a broken femur went into lock-down procedures. No one can go visit him now—not even his wife! Considering that he really, really appreciates guests, I am sure that this is an additional blow to his emotions and increases his frustration with being there. While it is difficult, I realize that the precautions are necessary, especially since the city released the news last night that the first case has been diagnosed at our local hospital. Who knows what the next few weeks and months will hold…

Earlier this week, I began reading A Charlotte Mason Companion: Personal Reflections on the Gentle Art of Learning and came across a knitting pattern for Victorian lace edging when I was looking through the chapters. Immediately, I wanted to give it a try! Fortunately, I had a set of size 3 needles and crochet thread on hand, and I began.

The pattern was not written in standard knitting terms that I am used to seeing, and it took me a few minutes to figure out what to do. I also wanted to know how many stitches were expected for each row as they increased. Considering that I needed to get started with other morning duties at that moment, I couldn’t work on the project very long. And then later that day I needed that color of thread for another project that I was working on, and I ended up pulling out all of my stitches in the white thread.

But yesterday afternoon during the girls nap/rest time, I started again. I began re-writing the pattern in my notebook so that I could track my rows as a I worked:

Once I had the pattern copied, I began recording the tutorial video. Everything was going fine until I got to row 10 and after much deliberation, I determined that I had not copied one of the rows correctly. Sigh. I fixed that problem and went back to recording. Time passed, and I was nearing the end of the pattern, when I looked at my phone and noticed that it wasn’t recording. I pressed the record button again. Nothing. And again. Nothing. By this time, I suspected that my storage was full on my phone. Sure enough. But my time was up, and I didn’t have time to free up space. So, instead of a tutorial today, I am offering you a time lapse video of my knitting…I will slow it down, however, to show you how I knit backwards to fix my mistakes and will knit one row in real-time. Learning to figure out and to correct my mistakes were the best things I took away from the knitting class I took many years ago.

This video is approximately six minutes long. The real-time portion is about three minutes into the video:

Hopefully, someday, I can successfully produce a video tutorial for you, but I hope that you will be inspired to try something new also…

Blessings to you all during this time. I pray that you will stay well…

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