Faroese shawl and Gilead

Well, blogger ate my post, so I am having to repost a lengthy musing on this Faroese style shawl. I believe my friend Naomi asked me what made it faroese - so doing the plundering I am inclined to do to acquire bits of knowledge here and there, I find that there is a group of Faroe Islands between Ireland and Iceland, and if you are Norwegian or from Denmark, you do not need a passport to travel there. Also in my surfing, I read somewhere that a TRUE faroese shawl can go through a wedding band - now that would be quite the lace shawl. However, I can assure you that this will NOT travel through a wedding band or bracelet. but it MIGHT go through a necklace.
Now details on this shawl. The pattern comes from Cast ON magazine 2004 and called for Lion Brand Homespun - I tried starting it several times and I could never really see the pattern. Now, I am no yarn snob yet, so I had no problem using Homespun, but it never looked right to me, so I changed out to Plymouth Encore in a nice medium purple. It's 75% acrylic and 25% wool and is knitting up quite nicely. The image you see is pretty true to the color. It's knitted from the top down and a 16 row repeat. I am using size 11 circulars and I am guessing I have another 32 or 48 rows to go. I believe I will use 2-3 skeins by the time I complete the shawl.
I find that I am most successful in not making as many mistakes if I go ahead and plan on completing 16 rows before stopping. If I stop midpoint, I am likely to forget where I am, and I lose the momentum.
Now, on the Madli shawl that I am working on - it's doing pretty nicely, but I have a spot that I can tell there is an error. It's not negotiable as to whether to leave it or not, it needs "fixin", the question is can it be done without ripping it out. TWT (Time will tell)


Our church's book club just finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year and is probably one of the most beautifully written books I have read. Now, I have not completed the book, because I keep on rereading sections of it as if for the first time. It's a book that I believe will withstand the test of time. Robinson captures the essence of God's grace and love and delivers to the readers an opportunity to explore life in a character that has lived life through its beauty and suffering, knowing God is present in his every day life. Robinson has given us a jewel of a book and each and every one of our book club members gave it the thumbs up. My guess is that it will be the pick of the year as the best one we have read.