A place for lace

Some years ago, whilst in the San Francisco area, I visited the Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in Berkeley. It's one of the stranger exhibitions I've encountered in my many years of enthusiastic museum-going, not the least because it's actually a store specializing in needlework accessories, and there just happens to be collection of strangely-curated lace tacked onto it. It's a rather nice needlework store with a good selection of needlework-related books for sale. As a museum it's kind of pathetic. In fact, let's call it a "museum." I wonder if a store that calls itself a museum derives some special kind of "tax benefit"...?

If I wanted to become my own lace and textile museum, I might exhibit the beginnings of a scarf/shawl and a sock that are in process as I write this.

The scarf/shawl (haven't yet decided which), a gift for my friend Ana, is the Oscilloscope Shawl from the Fall 2010 issue of Knitscene Magazine.  The Lace Sterling socks, a free download from Kraemer Yarns, are for me, if I ever, as it were, put my nose to the grindstone. The thing about knitting lace, IMHO, is that absolute concentration is required. Such focus has many benefits, but it's hard to summon the focus if your life involves social interaction, myriad commitments, and competing interests, as mine does. So, the sock grows slowly, and I am allowing myself the option of truncating the shawl as a scarf if  I can't finish it before Ana, now twenty-seven, grows grey hair.

Ana