Friday, April 5, 2013

My Life in Stitches: What Do You Want to Be?


My yarn fast is going well. I’ve taken three trips to two different yarn shops and didn’t buy yarn. I’m quite proud of myself. I’m also enjoying rediscovering the yarn I already have.

I have, however, added to my stash. I made my one yarn purchase for the year. A dear friend gave me a gift card to Jimmy Beans Wool. I decided to use it to buy yarn I’ve “dreamed” about for a long time. Welcome my skein of Dream in Color Smooshy (In Vino Veritas colorway). It’s quite lovely but I haven’t decided what to do with it yet. It has a lot of yarn in the queue ahead of it that doesn’t know what it wants to be, either.

That is one of the challenges of knitting down my stash: Trying to figure out what the yarn wants to be. Case in point, I had a skein of Ellen Cooper Zohar's Socks that I bought at Knitting Addictions in Kitty Hawk, NC that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. I think I tried at least five different patterns before I settled on Multnomah.

I also had a skein in a half of Rowan Tapestry that went through multiple cast-ons before I came to the Just Knit It scarf. Although I didn’t think it would work, the scarf came out very well. Well enough to be featured on the pattern page! I had to keep trying until the yarn matched the pattern.



I think that’s the moral of the story. Sometimes that match doesn’t happen right away. Sometimes you think you’ve found the right pattern only for it to end in an ugly ripping break-up. Just keep trying because in the end, you’ll come out with not just a lovely project, but a lovely pattern made lovelier by determination. 

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