I wasn't expecting the power to go out in my town; we expected a lot of rain, but not much wind. We only received 7" of rain (yes, "only;"), and not much wind, and the power went out anyway, for 26 hours.
Once it was clear we were in power-outage mode, I flipped into, "What are the things I need to do that don't require electricity?" Swatching the lace hearts design for the final ring of #LIL came to mind right away.
The pattern called for seven hearts in the outer ring, bringing the total of large hearts to 49, one for each person killed at the Pulse Nightclub shooting. I didn't want to knit the rest of a large ring in the mesh design, and besides, a whole lot more people were affected than died.
I had laid out a tentative pattern on graph paper and wanted to swatch it before committing to seventeen repeats on a 570+ stitch ring.
I cast on two repeats (48 stitches) plus five stitches for a steek. After I was done, I realized I couldn't machine-stitch the steek until I had electricity again, but that was ok.
I was able to complete the test swatch before my body gave up, cramped from huddling within reach of the candlelight. I discovered two dropped stitches which I simply pinned up, not wanting to try and repair the work by candlelight.
I'm reasonably happy with the test. One of the hearts is exactly the way I was hoping they would all be. I'm not sure if the dropped stitches messed up the others; I did make some changes in knitting that had to be added to the lace chart when I finished. The hearts are more distinct on the upper row, where they are bordered by a row of YO, K2T, so I added that to the bottom of the chart as well.
If I were a more perfect knitter, I would knit another swatch to test if my changes worked the way I expect. Instead, I'm off and running on the next ring of the shawl, trusting that everything will work out.
Here's the lace chart for the small hearts:
Knit at your own risk--it hasn't been verified yet! It should yield 3 complete hearts in 24 stitches, over 20 rows plus a couple for the YO, K2T above and below, to match the pattern's existing heart chart.