Finished Projects/New Starts by Susan L.

  I had been working on a knitted shrug for a couple of years. It is basically a shawl with sleeves at either end that stop it from dragging through everything and help keep it on your shoulders. It was meant to be a graduation gift for my friend who went through the PREFER training with me. It's a good thing she wasn't in a hurry because it sat for a long time half finished. Much to my delight, I've been plugging away at it while fighting this cough by knitting a few rows at a time. So it is finally done.
  It appears I am on a knitting tangent now. There was a sweater kit containing sufficient yarn and instructions that languished in the cupboard until the shrug was finished. The sweater is challenging me to learn to read a pattern. It was a bit of a rocky, aka frustrating, start because it took four tries to get the right sized needles. The pattern did the size conversions from imperial to metric wrong. All part of the learning curve. I now understand the importance of doing a test piece to make sure everything is right.
  The sweater is supposed to be done on round needles that are attached together by a piece of smooth, plastic cord. They let you keep knitting round and round hence the name. I've never used them before so it will be interesting to discover how that will work. So far it's been okay to use the good old fashioned straight ones which I'll continue using until there's no more space. It's much faster for me.
  I had to buy some new needles for this project. There's a little wool shop just around the corner. The woman suggested getting a better quality set of round needles because the work wouldn't catch where the cord joins. It pays to talk to an expert once and a while.
  I was about to say that any form of work is as only as good as the tools used but realized that isn't necessarily true. Many great things have been done by the ordinary.
  "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?" Rom 8:31