Patience

In thinking about lace, I am reminded of patience.  You have to have a lot of patience to knit the stuff, but even before that, lace requires patience.  

I was playing around in the big box of lace yarn and realized a skein of Merino Silk was in peril.  It was looking ragged around the edges.  Its softly folded ends of the skein were looking disordered in a way that usually means knots rather than knits.  So I decided to sit down and deal with it.

I know a lot of people who wind this sort of very fine lace by hand rather than on the ball winder.  I have done both but this time choose to do it by hand.  And it is a good thing too.  The messy looking ends meant that there strands were out of order all along the way.  

You can get through almost anything in yarn and have the outcome be beautiful if you take your time, don't pull anything tight and accept that it will take just exactly as long as it takes.  

Lace is in every way, at every step, a metaphor for patience.