Flowers!

It's an early spring this year and thank heaven for that! The last two winters have been horrid. I got excited today when I looked in my flower bed and saw that the little flowers that grow there every year despite all my neglect were in bloom. I love flowers and I wish I was better at growing them, but I figure you can't be good at everything so I just enjoy them when they happen to pop up.

Happy Spring!

Don't Wait Too Long

I have a bad habit of being overconfident in my ability to remember things and this week that bad habit caused me to rip out and re-knit the same four rows about four times. Why do I always do this to myself?

Here's what happened

I'm making a pair of socks and I decided not to follow a pattern for the lovely cables but simply came up with an ingenious design myself...ahem. Ingenious until you wait four months after finishing the first sock to continue on to the next one. What did I do on the first one? Well, it's right there in front of my face but apparently my counting skills have deteriorated in the intervening four months and...re-knit four times.

Yep. My follow through skills are not so good. I read a lot of self-help crappy pop-psychology magazine articles and apparently there are people out there who are good at the elusive follow-through. That is, they can take a task and see it through to completion; make a plan and follow it. This is not my forte. I like ideas, big ideas, and I'm often overwhelmed by the details, or what I think are the details, of following through. This shows itself in every aspect of my life and, in this case, my knitting is bearing the brunt of my shortcoming. Patterns...just details...who cares...

At least there is hope. Slowly, ever so slowly, I'm improving. I have, in my old age and wisdom, learned that there is value in being exact, following the plan, and taking notes. Perhaps this will not happen again, somehow though, I think it might.

More Photos

I actually did it this time, I've recorded for posterity my grand creations.

Photos

I've been lazy and down lately. I think these last months of winter are difficult for me; it seems I'm more prone to melancholy now than at other times of the year. Because of that it I have failed to post pictures of my completed projects so here are a few:




...Or maybe only two, since it seems I have actually failed to take pictures of my work not just failed to post them. Yes. Well. More later.

Knitting Away the Winter

It's very pleasant to knit in the winter, a big project on the lap keeps you nice and warm in the cold weather.

Although, sometimes I wonder if I'm happily knitting away my life. Should I be doing bigger, grander things? I have talents, should I be making better use of them?

I always second guess my choices. I wish I didn't but I can't help it, my mind always tends towards thoughts about what-might-have-been. I keep hoping I'll get better as I get older and I have, a little bit. But still I'm plagued by the idea that I should be striving for greatness. Seems silly when I put it in writing. Maybe it's our culture, or maybe it's my inner competitiveness showing up when it's absolutely useless. Who knows?

In any case I find sitting on the couch watching a movie with a nice warm future sweater on my lap far more satisfying than conquering mountaintops or scaling the corporate ladder.

Television is ruining my neighborhood!

Stupid TV! First Diners, Dives and Drive-Ins (or whatever it's called, the one with the stupid bleached blond guy who wears his sunglasses on the back of his head) ruined my neighborhood burger joint. I live a block away and can't get into the place when I'm hungry for a burger or beer. Lines out the door all of the time!

Now, as I write this ESPN is filming some homecoming show with Joe Mauer at the high school down the street. I couldn't even drive to my house! Well...actually, I could drive to my house but I had to use the alley and clearly there were a lot more people driving around who aren't familiar with the streets, or how to park on them, or how to properly pass cars on them, or how not to do stupid Y turns in the middle of a busy street and nearly kill other drivers.

I hate TV.

Damnation!

I started a beautifully cabled top-down cardigan in hopes of using up a large chunk of yarn I bought for another sweater that I never made. I used up the first skein of yarn and grabbed another out of my yarn drawer without looking too closely. I then set aside the project for a couple of days and only looked at the new skein and the quarter of finished sweater together as I was packing up to go visit a friend. Shit. Different colors.

Going back to my yarn drawer I realized that the first skein was one of two that I had purchased for accent colors in the original sweater, not one of the eight skeins of main color I have. SHIT!

Now I'm left with two ultra shitty options:

1. Buy 5 more skeins of yarn at a total expense of around 50 bucks

2. Rip out a perfectly good sweater and start over with the yarn color that I have enough of.

Now, normally I promote ripping, but for me normally is when you have a terrible mistake that can't be fixed any other way or your sweater looks like crap and you hate it and will never wear it. This sweater is pretty, I really like it and I don't especially want to rip it out. I also don't especially want to spend 50 bucks when I have eight skeins of the same yarn in a slightly different color that need to be used. What to do?

My lesson from all of this is don't be flippant about your stash, check before you start that you're using the right stuff.

I even made a gauge swatch for this one!!