I’m (mostly) taking the day off, just like I took yesterday, and part of Friday off. And since we really can’t go on a mini road trip because of Covid19, plus Michael wants to work on the addition while the sun is shining, my ‘days off’ look a lot like gardening and cleaning – to justify the knitting and reading, of course.
To that end, I cleaned my knitting drawers in the living room this morning. This involved pulling out a lot of abandoned half-finished projects, or outright failures. As I was organizing and packing things away (and vacuuming the drawers), I thought about how – when I post a picture of something I’ve knit (mostly over on Instagram) – I always get a number of comments in which people disparage themselves for not being as ‘productive or accomplished’ as I appear to be on social media.
So I decided I’d take some pictures and post these so-called failures just to show that we all struggle, even at things we’ve been doing for over twenty years.
This #knittingfail was just pure stupidity on my part. I’d never worked with mohair and I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t going to be able to wear it next to my skin EVEN BEFORE I BOUGHT IT. And yet, I wanted to try. But did I knit a swatch? Or test the yarn in any other way before knitting? Nope. I loved knitting the pattern, loved the colour, etc, but couldn’t wear it for longer than thirty seconds when I tried it on. There is a slim chance I pull it out of storage, finish the arms and neckline, and give it away. Slim.
Here’s a close up so you can see the pretty speckles among the greys:
I loved the idea of this summer weight sweater and the freaking gorgeous yarn but didn’t enjoy knitting fingering weight yarn on 6mm needles. I put the bottom ribbing on hold, intending to knit the arms and give it a light block to see if I wanted it longer before binding off. But then I absolutely LOATHED knitting the sleeves on clunky, heavy needles. HATED IT!
Pretty close up of the yarn:
I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to knit with this insanely luxurious yarn, but I knew I wanted some sort of cables. I ripped this hat down to the ribbing twice (changing needle size) because I didn’t like the fit, but every time I tried it on I still hated the feel of it on my head – looser ribbing, tighter cabling. It got shoved to the back of the drawer!
This took up an insanely stupid amount of my time, specifically ripping back and trying to knit the legs out of the fuzzy yarn in a small circumference. I actually went so far as to teach myself magic loop (read: a new knitting technique) that I’d been far too lazy to bother with before. I just couldn’t see the stitches properly. So then I decided to knit the limbs in another yarn … instantly hating the combo. Honestly, if I’d had access to a fire, I would have burned this project.
So there you go. No one is perfect, including me. We make dumb choices even when we know better, we’re impatient, have short attention spans, etc.
Now! I’m making my darling husband (who is putting up rafters on the cabin addition today) waffles for brunch, then cracking a new book. I’ve read two books in the last two days – pure luxury!
