Where I am up to

I don't have much to blog about at present. I'm too busy trying to sew 126 crochet squares together. And I'm already wondering whether Eli needs one of these rugs too or whether this intricate design is actually a bit girly (somebody out there tell me that all these small squares joined together is girly - please!). I'm thinking that his could be more blocky, with perhaps a checkerboard effect (and thus less stitching up to do!).

I started all the stitching on the weekend and then pulled it all undone on Monday night. The pattern just says "sew squares together stitch to stitch" but what you have to work out yourself is whether the two-chain gaps in the corners count as a stitch or not, so it all lines up when you're joining big squares to small squares, and how you're going to work it in the corners etc. Then I worked out that just tying the threads on with a knot at the back looked a whole lot neater than this fancy figure-8 start-off I was doing from a book, which meant you had clumps of doubled-wool in places. This is the point at which there is too much room for perfectionism. But now I think I have sorted my technique and am away. Then I have to do the border, and after that I am having a little crochet break.

I'm also reading Felix Holt rather slowly. It's considered George Eliot's most political and least-admired novel (I think there's a correlation). I'm actually quite enjoying it but it is interspersed with chapters about old English politics that I just have to push on through. I do like the hero Felix though, and am beginning to warm to Esther. Isn't this nice:

But now that she had known Felix, her conception of what a happy love must be had become like a dissolving view, in which the once-clear images were gradually melting into new forms and new colours. The favourite Byronic heroes were beginning to look something like last night's decorations seen in the sober dawn. So fast does a little leaven spread within us - so incalculable is the effect of one personality on another. Behind all Esther's thoughts, like an unacknowledged yet constraining presence, there was the sense, that if Felix Holt were to love her, her life would be exalted into something quite new - into a sort of difficult blessedness, such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers.

Felix Holt: The Radical, Chapter XXII