I love Stitches West.
I love the deadline that is Stitches West. I got a cashmere shawl finished last year out of yarn I’d been hoarding rather than knitting only because that date wasn’t moving anywhere further away and my ego wanted to show off–well, and I wanted to show off for someone else’s ego, too, since Dianne had dyed the laceweight I ran the Cashmere Superior with.
So this year. There’s some yarn that I started knitting back in September: I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it and I had a reason why only that yarn would do for that mostly-worked-out pattern.
I ripped it totally out the first time around. Took notes, made adjustments, tried again.
I got it going, and it still wasn’t… it didn’t…I dunno… Huh. At that point, I was frustrated.
So into the ziploc bag and out of my sight, and time and again I nearly ripped those two new days’ worth of work out to make myself start from scratch.
Well but let’s not, though. There are two balls; how about I just start from the other ball once I get going again with this, just to make sure.
If only.
So four months later, here I was this morning, suddenly thinking how nice it would be to show that off in three weeks.
And in those four months since the first attempt I’ve knitted all kinds of other things that have let other ideas gradually seep through without my quite realizing it until all at once, as I was pulling the thing out of that bag and looking at it, suddenly all the things that previously were wrong about it were what I wanted about it now. It would do, most definitely, it would do. I finally had it! It had just needed that time and experience. Best part is, the first two days’ worth of work were already finished.
It’s humming along quite nicely. I think it’ll be a little different from anything I’ve done so far; it’s going to stretch me a bit, and I may do the last part more than once. But that sense of long-sought achievement is so close and so compelling that I had to make myself put it down and come here to give my hands a break.