No socks.
No blankets. (Well not, strictly speaking, true but we will get there)
No sweaters. (Also not true, but we will get there.)
I can't cast on for my Contest Entry until March 20th, and if I swatch with that yarn any more I am liable to run out before I run out of shawl to knit. So that was right out. I was actually in a right funk about it. Until I looked at my Ravelry Project Page and noticed that there are several things there that just haven't been finished.
Usually somewhere in the Spring I go on a Fix It or Forget It Spree with my WIPS, because there are only a couple of reasons for projects to end up tossed in the corner.*
The first being - there is a problem with the project. Maybe the instructions weren't clear or I made a mistake. Maybe the yarn doesn't play well with the pattern. Or the colors didn't work out the way I wanted them to.
The second being - I got bored with it. In a world where at least nine times a day I get an email telling me about a great yarn sale or I log onto Ravelry and see that 47 new patterns have been published since I was there this morning, it is very easy to drop a project for the New Thing!
The third being - the project is big! I knew it was a long term project and that lots of other little things would get done while it was being worked on. That is the project that I keep going back to, in the usual way, and work on a bit at a time until I get a bee in my bonnet about getting it off the needles and give it that final push to get done. Great Big Monster Blankets in thinner yarns come to mind.
But back to my Ravelry Project Page. I pulled out the projects that still listed as "in progress" and gave them all a good hard look.
Some needed some major or minor fixing (cat snagged yarn or my screwing up a chart) those are hibernating until I am ready to deal with them, which is not today! Some just needed to be frogged, errors in the pattern that I wasn't willing to overcome or mismatched yarn and project, and one pair of socks that TOB decided were "too loud" for his tastes.
There is (was)a sweater. I have blogged about, even semi recently, chevron cardigan, top down, beautiful striped yarn in shades of pink through purple. Body is done to the waist, one sleeve is just past the elbow and....and...I am just not feeling it any more! I really thought I could live with the stripes on the sleeves being different than the stripes on the body.
I can't.
I am a matchy, matchy kind of girl. And short of cutting yarn out of the ball every couple of rows to make the stripes match, there is nothing that will make these sleeves match the body and even if I finished knitting it, I wouldn't wear it. It's a pity, really, that I didn't think it through before I cast on. The pattern is beautiful, elegant even. The instructions are very detailed, you get the how, the why and the when, every single step of the way. It just isn't me.
Which left me with one.
One big project that I started over a year ago. A test knit that I let get out of hand.
"It was like this..." started no good story ever! But, really! It was like this. Andrea Jurgrau, of Bad Cat Designs, was creating a very pretty, very useful, use up your scraps of sock yarn, modular blanket for a magazine. We test knitters got the file and I had these high hopes of making a very colorful and useful blanket out of all my scraps of sock yarns.
Remember what I said about being a matchy, matchy kind of gal, and that the stripes on the sleeve of a sweater not matching was bothering me? Well, as it would turn out, a jumble of colors, even in a blanket are not my cup of tea. (And by that I mean coffee, I don't drink tea!)
So.....I gathered together some scraps and some full balls and I created a plan that would have my Margarita's Coverlet looking like a Grandmother's Flower Garden Quilt. I made what some would consider pretty good progress, and knit a hex or two between other things, then one day, I don't know why, I threw all the yarn, the completed hexes and the needles in a rather large project bag and never took them out again! (We won't mention that there are actually 5 hexes still on a blocking mat that has been hiding behind the love seat for the best part of 6 months now!)
There are 8 "flowers" completed there, of the minimum of 12 that I need! (I might change that to 15 when I see how big four rows of three flowers gets me.) But, each flower takes 7 hexes, with 4 more hexes between them, and 9 hexes between each row of flowers. And if I decide to put a cream border all the way around the outside.....I'm not good at math, but I know that is going to be a lot of knitting! Which for some reason the knitting elves did not work on while the project was stuffed in a bag!
You get three guesses what is my WIP Wednesday Project this week!
~M
*For a while projects were getting dropped because I didn't have the capability of knitting them correctly. Fingers that were not cooperating or moving at speeds that made race cars look like they plodded around a track, but gave me the attention span of a gnat. (Yeah, I miss all the stuff I got done each day, even if it was a "little here, little there, start this, then that, go back to this, then that" then...might not have been healthy to be running at a million miles an hour but now that I am slowed down to what the medical profession calls normal I feel like I am constantly walking through hip deep water, with heavy boots and ankle weights on. Not to mention needing more than 4 hours sleep in a day really shortens up my useful hours!)
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