monkeymom's Diaryland Diary
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If at first you don't succeed, just hide the pieces.
I am groggy from taking an antihistimine to relieve my allergy symptoms and to help me sleep, but it should wear off in an hour or so, and then I'll feel better.
Diana called tonight, feeling sad about her latest knitting project. She says her sewing-up looks like crap and she thinks she melted the fibers while pressing it. (Which was my brilliant idea, by the way. There's a lesson to be learned here, I think.)
When you finish a knitting project and are all proud of your little pile of pieces and then you start sewing it together, and it isn't looking very good; in fact it starts to look very much as if a kindergartner made it, you just feel so bad about yourself! You can't make anything right, why do you bother? You have no talent, no taste, and you wear ugly fingernail polish!
I can't begin to count how many projects I've finished and then just hated them and they end up thrown on the floor of the closet so I don't have to look at them. The amount of money I've spent on knitting and sewing projects that end up in a wad in a corner, thrown there while I scream the filthiest language I can think of, is a staggering amount.
And after my tirade (because he's smart enough not to say much while it's going on) Rich always tells me to just stop sewing, or just don't knit anymore. "Why do you keep sewing?" "Because it's my hobby dammit!"
I don't sew anymore, but I keep knitting because I have to. I can't stop it; it's soothing, comforting, entertaining, and it's part of what I do everyday, everywhere I go. I'm pretty good at it now, and usually things look like I want them to, or if they don't, I can recognize it before I finish them and then I rip them back and save the yarn, letting it rest in the yarn room until I find another project for it. I know how it feels when a project "fails", though, and I know that eventually you find a new one that speaks to you, and you start again.
I gave some yarn to Karin yesterday to start a sweater, and about 1/3 of the yarn wasn't in wrapped skeins anymore, it had been unravelled and rolled up, and some of it was still a largish knitted piece that she can unravel herself. That yarn has been made into 2 and a half sweaters, but none of them were right. I gave it to Karin to start a hooded, cabled, zipper-front cardigan from the Fall 03 issue of Knitty . We're having a knit-a-long (KAL)! I've been wanting to make that same sweater for Jeanette, and I've got the same yarn (Paton's Decor) in a varigated blues and purple for the one I'm making.
I started the sweater before, but I was having trouble understanding the pattern, so I ripped it out and started a scarf with that yarn. Then Karin wanted to make something, and I thought of that pattern and we started yesterday, blindly following directions until they made sense. She is actually better at reading the directions than I am, because she actually reads them, instead of just skimming the first line or two and then plowing ahead. My kids say I only read my favorite words!
So my current knitting projects are these:
1. KAL sweater - "BPT" from Knitty, Fall 03.
2. Blue cable vest for Elder Harrison, Scott's companion.
3. Purse socks - denim Kroy (I think, the yarn doesn't have a label)
4. Nagano sweater (I'm sick of it, but it was so expensive that I'm forcing myself to work on it. At least it won't have a damn zipper at the neckline!)
5. Brown Fair-isle sweater for Scott. I started it a year ago and I want to finish it before Spring.
11:44 p.m. - 2003-12-29
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