The Inexorable Mouths of Snails

The pattern I've been working on for over a year, a screen-accurate copy of the red shawl worn by Saffron in Our Mrs Reynolds, is nearly ready! Watch this blog for updates regarding the release.




Thanks go out to my volunteer tech editor and the brave test knitters in the BigDamnKnitters group at Ravelry.


This pattern will be a free PDF download, available through Ravelry and my document shelf at Scribd. I will make announcements here, on twitter, at my public blog, and on Ravelry.

This is part of a larger story, inspired by this incredible glass spinning wheel I saw online several years ago. The larger story is not anywhere near complete, and even the names of the characters and the time I want to set it in are in flux. I have descended into research. As I quite like research, I tend to wallow in it and thus avoid the actual work of assembling anything from it.

It is set in a fictional town in Occitania, some time in a nearly 500 year period. Right now it's sitting in the early Renaissance. Kind of. Maybe it needs to be in a sort of dreamtime. I'm not sure. Right now all I really have is a mass of notes, historical, cultural and linguistic research, a small note I found about a spinning Madonna in Catalunya, a picture of the glass spinning wheel and this fragment. This is really a manufactured fairy tale with heavy Christian influences, befitting the location and time.

Story below the cut. Critique welcome, I'm kind of at an impasse.( Read more )