Chapel Veil

This is a big step away from my typical blog posts, so here goes. I'm knitting Twilight Lace from the Winter 99/00 Interweave Knits. Here's my progress so far and a closeup of the lace pattern.

Nothing so interesting about that, right? But I'm shortening it to make it into a chapel veil. As in covering my head when I go into church. I've been working on it for several weeks, but wasn't planning to put it up on the blog. With all of the recent stir on the knitting blogs ring about politics, I've been feeling pretty alienated and the last thing I wanted to do was further push myself away from "normal" by letting the blog world know that I cover my head as a sign of reverence at Mass. I know that not everyone would be comfortable doing so and canon law leaves it as a personal decision, but it's a tradition that fell out of vogue a few decades ago and I want to continue. Hopefully no one's horribly offended or thinks that I'm somehow degrading my status as a woman by covering my head. Back to knitting talk, okay?

I first started this project in the summer of 2000, sweltering away in a room at an MIT fraternity on Memorial Drive I shared with three other girls. I had a research assistant job I hated on the ugly side of campus. This was my first attempt at lace and I was having an awful time with it. Consequently it was thrown in a bag with about four repeats done and not discovered until now. I threw out the old attempt since I was making a shorter version anyway and started again. The lace pattern is so incredibly simple! It's amazing what a difference four years of knitting can make, isn't it?