picture july.
a girl walks into a yarn store.
she finds three gorgeous skeins of hand-dyed sock-weight yarn. on sale. and on a very generous sale too, she mumbles ecstatically to herself whilst attempting not to foam from her mouth like a rabid dog. she's been looking for the perfect fingering-weight yarn for a certain cardigan for ages, and this is it. she buys all three skeins and trots happily along.
unable to postpone the merryment of starting a new project she casts on, thinking it will be finished in a couple of weeks.
well. it wasn't.
instead, it lay practically unaffected on my (as you, my cunning reader, may already have inferred) dining table for five months after the sizing/frogging disaster that left me so emotionally drained that i wouldn't have pissed on it if it's kidneys were on fire. or something. i've been reading too much stephen fry lately. point is i didn't want to have anything to do with it. i was only able to muster up a couple of rows at a time.
but one night after christmas, having finally become sick of looking at the messy ball of fabric on my table, mocking me and reminding me how much i suck at all things unpleasant, i somehow summoned up enough willpower and stamina to knit the remaining sleeve. i just sat there watching five hours worth of TV and squeezed the thing out of me like some morbid life-to-hairy-purple-things-giver.
so allow me to introduce...
i know i sound like a broken record here, but after all the clusterfucks this top-down cardigan put me through i'm really really happy with the result. it's a defining characteristic of my knitting to be completely unenjoyable to make but in the end satisfy me on all levels but the sexual one. and sometimes that too. why is it that i always associate woolly things with sex?
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| see? boobs. |
i love the lace part although i couldn't find a way to block it properly to really open up the stitches. but i'm sure it'll even out in use. and the color is pretty awesome, which can only be attributed to my impeccable eye and the uncharacteristically far-sighted idea to knit alternately from all three skeins. it was pure torture all the way but in the end it produced an amazing flow of the slightly different tones that works really well with the otherwise boring stockinette. shows too how variegated the colors can be in handdyed yarns.
starting the cardigan twice from scratch was a devastating decision that resulted in me smashing stuff and swearing something along the lines of "i'll never fuckin' touch those fuckin' needles again". both times. but eventually it rewarded me like it always does because now it fits like a dream with no excess fabric in the top part. originally i was making the smallest size but it was still too big for me so i deleted one vertical lace chart repeat (8 instead of 9) and cast on 122 stitches instead of 131. it's only 11 stitches less, but just enough to turn a purple burlap sack into something that makes me look all lovely and stuff.
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| even the model is doing the twirl, and only partly because i forced her to |
so once again i've succeeded in making something completely awesome. i rule. i totally rule. bow down to me i'm the queen of knittingdom YE-HEARGH.
many many thanks to miss A for modeling!
Liisa! Regardless of the crap you had to go through this looks amazing!! I'll give you mucho kudos for knitting this twice! I think that's why I have so many WIPs...I just can't bring myself to re-knit something sometimes. I feel so defeated and like I need to teach the yarn/pattern a lesson by never touching it again. Makes me wonder sometimes why I even knit! :p
ReplyDeleteyeah i do that too. assume that the yarn gives a flying foodle whether i go back to it or not. but my life is such a sad and lonely one that i can't afford to lose the precious relationship between yarn and knitter. so eventually i always crawl back.
ReplyDeleteWow, I NEVER would have had the patience to redo it, but your story should teach me that it's worth it...it looks wonderful!
ReplyDeleteYou rule indeed!