Saturday, August 18, 2007

Yarn Demon: 2, Tama: 0

It has not been a good day in my knitting reality.

Last night I finished the first ball of yarn on the scarf I was knitting, which is a wildly-colored variegated. So I attached the next ball and began knitting and was immediately struck by the thought that it didn’t look quite right. The colors were…different.

One ball has a thick band of bright yellow, the other does not. The purples are different. The blues are slightly different.

Same “color”, different dye lots.

And they clash.

Damn.

Soooooo, I pulled out what I had done while I regroup on that project. It’ll have to be stripes, with a neutral color between the two variegated, I guess. Meh. :::whirl!!::: goes the ball winder, undoing all that work.

But this is OK. It is part of the creative process. It is a reminder to me that just because balls of yarn are in the same bin does not necessarily mean that they are the same dye lot. For most of my knitting life, I have not had local yarn stores. I order online. The nice, and also smart, people at the online yarn stores have done this kind of checking for me. It’s just a small smack-down and I am a big girl. I can take it.

Then I dragged Siv out from under the sofa where I had shoved it in a fit of pique at the beginning of the month. I was about to start knitting when it suddenly occurred to me that it might be a good idea to figure out where, precisely, I was in this whole project.

And then I realized that I had blown it on the armhole decreases and needed to tear out twelve rows so I could go back and fix that, and also that I had 22 centimeters left on the armhole part and that I was definitely going to be running out of yarn long before I got to sleeve #2 and as I tried to use my short-sleeve-a-vision to decide whether I’d like it to be short sleeved (or even sleeveless, because really – I’m going to run out of yarn) my brain shorted out.

:::WHIRL!!!!!:::

So now Siv is no more and I sit here without a single project on a needle anywhere in the house.

But not for long. Because I never learn am dedicated, I’m going to move on to the Lily of the Valley Smoke Ring I got from Crafty Momma.

Because goodness knows, fingering-weight lace knitting is peaceful and relaxing. Not like those stupid worsted weight K3-P2 scarves. Phooey on them. This will be better:

Some Assembly Required

5 comments:

Jeanne said...

August appears to be Frog Month. It seems that everything I attempt to knit lately, even boring stockinette, has to be ripped back at least once if not three times before I "get it" and it goes smoothly. Must be a planetary misalignment, is all I can figger. Such is life.

Good luck with that!

Yarnhog said...

I think frogging is good for the soul. It's cleansing, freeing. At least, that's what I tell myself.

Amy Lane said...

But of course it will be better...the next project is ALWAYS better...

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I think knitting should be called unknitting, since that is the part I seem to do most often.

And apropos of nothing, I'd like to point out that my word verification letters are nearly spelling out "in lace."

Ariel said...

Ah, the frogging orgy, followed by the new project afterglow. I've been there. Good times.