In my last post I mentioned that I was knitting a top secret project for a birthday present.  Well, today is the birthday, but the present is nowhere near done.  Alas, such is the life of a busy woman!  SInce there is no longer any reason to protect it’s secret identity, I give you a progress shot:

I imagine that many of you will recognize this immediately.  For the rest of us, suffice it to say that this is the inscription written on the Ring – yes, THAT ring – from The Lord of the RIngs.  Or, at least it will be when I finish knitting the first line of text.  I was about to launch into a linguistic description of the langauge and script, and realized that anything I wrote would be instantly corrected by thousands of Tolkien fans (my daughter, Leah, Tolkien fan and birthday girl, chief among them).  I will get Leah to brief me, and then I will report back to you, armed with the facts.

The writing is a pain in the you-know-where to knit, but beautiful to behold.  Here is a close-up:

Once it’s been properly washed, blocked and steamed, it will be stunning!  (Or so I hope!)

The three weeks before we hopped on a plane to Vancouver were among the most stressful I can remember in a long time.  Not the kind of stressful that comes from bad things happening, but rather the kind of stressful that comes from too many things happening, deadlines to meet, too little sleep, and nerves.  Enough so, that when I finally got onto the plane, I burst into tears.  (We flew here on Wednesday, a day that was so foggy at Heathrow that planes were being cancelled left, right and centre.  I was so relieved to actually take off and leave some of the craziness behind.  My apologies to my fellow passengers who no doubt thought I was a crazy woman.)

Now, however, I have three weeks in Vancouver where I can spend time with the girls, knit, hang out with Doug’s family, knit, write a blog post or three, knit, maybe even get some knitting done.  And, oh, did I mention the paper in Managing Process Systems I have to write next week?

And, of course, let’s not forget the Imminent Steek:

If you want to know what this project will turn into when it grows up, check back soon for a progress update!