Things you May Not Know About Lace

OK, I cast finally cast on for Mystery Stole 4 on Friday night, and I've discovered a few key facts about lace that I thought I'd share with my readers. Let's begin.

1. Knitting Lace is hard: it takes attention and focus to detail, and it's not something you can mindlessly do while watching television after spending an exhausting day working and/or running around with 2 kids under 5.
2. Lace weight is tiny: My last 2 lace projects (Cluaranach and the Lace ribbon scarf) weren't knit with your traditional lace weight. Even though I've knit with lace weight before, I think I had forgotten how frickin' tiny it actually is, and what a pain in the arse it can be to work the stitches.
3. Knitting with beads is really persnickety: Man! getting the stupid beads on the tiny crochet needle is a pain, getting them on the stitches is difficult... Seriously! The second row of Clue 1 has 1 bead on every alternate stitch (you cast on 113 stitches, I don't think that's giving too much away)? It must have taken me a bleepin' HOUR to get one row done!
   

So apologies to all if there are no progress pictures. I've only worked up to row 3 on clue 1, so progress is non-existent at this point. I wasn't able to work on it last night because we had Phil's brother and his girlfriend over for dinner, and when I came back downstairs from putting Maxime to bed (Émilie was spending the night with Phil's parents on their boat), they were all sprawled out with the lights out in the living room, watching season 1 of Heroes, and I felt bad asking them to turn on the lights. So I worked on a sock instead (that I can pretty much do blindfolded). On the upside, I think we've brought them over to the dark side of the force. It wouldn't surprise me if they had camped outside Best Buy all night to be able to buy the DVD as soon as they opened their doors this morning. :)

I do have some pictures of today's excursion to a local apple orchard to pick apples with, apparently, everyone else in Laval.

Even though apple picking is quite the traditional Fall activity in this neck of the woods, I hadn't been since I was a little girl, and this was the first time we went with the kids. It was a beautiful day, and we had loads of fun.

Of course, now I've got more apples than I know what to do with. Anyone got some good apple recipes to share? Apple pies, bread, muffins, cobbler? You name it, I've got the apples for it.

Lastly, Robyn nominated me for an I love your Blog award!


The rules are:
1- Post the award on your blog.

2- Add a link to the person who gave you the award.

3- Nominate at least 4 other bloggers and add their links:

Obviously, I love Robyn's blog, and I love my co-nominees as well, so I won't name them. I nominate Maggie, Alison, Sinéad, and for my "famous" blogger, I'll nominate Anne Hanson (I don't think I'll tell her though, I mean come on...).

Happy Knitting Everyone!