The Amazing Slow Motion Sweater.
No one told me that knitting was like heroin, and I really wish someone had because it would have saved me lots of money and time.
I know this is a frequent sort of lament among people who eagerly spend grocery money on fine yarn, but I really thought I was immune. I mean, I thought knitting was purely a recreational drug, since I'd tried it once and didn't get hooked. However, circumstances count. I learned to knit for a play -- "Dancing at Lughnasa," actually -- and once the run ended, I went about eight years before touching a knitting needle again.
But in the winter of 2003, I saw some really soft yarn at Wal-Mart, and I thought, "Maybe that depressing Irish play actually left me with a useful skill (besides a passable brogue accent) -- hmmm, I do need a new winter scarf..." All I knew how to do was the knit stitch, which is really just the knitting equivalent of a gateway drug. Plus, it's all you need to know to make a simple scarf. I bought the yarn, and my fate was sealed.
Being a drama queen, my simple scarf ended up being well over ten feet long -- and took almost a year of stop and start knitting to complete.
It gradually snowballed after that first project. A scarf for a friend here, a simple hat there. It all adds up. But one day I realized that I could in fact read most knitting patterns, and I knew that the time had come to give up the freebasing and start injecting straight into my veins: It was time to knit a sweater.
I bided my time. I passed over easier projects -- tank tops and the like. I waited, looking for the perfect pattern (and learned about felting in the mean time). I finally found a pattern on Knitty that seemed both simple enough but nice enough to wear: Bad Penny. I got some inexpensive yarn, and went to town.
And decided it was waaaaay too big, I hated the texture, and I had spent about twelve hours on a project that would never be finished.
Let's just say that I let the knitting rest for several months at that point. I've been sewing a lot longer than I've been knitting, so it's always my "fall back" craft. My fabric stash grew, while my yarn stash laid dormant.
And then Lion Brand reintroduced Cotton Ease. I had never used the stuff, but I had read lots of online gushing about how it was really great for an inexpensive yarn -- and also nice for the subtropical climate of Houston, where really good wool is useful for about two weeks each January. I took a little field trip to Michael's, and came home with several skeins of light grey cotton blend...and a new resolve to tackle a sweater.
I went back to the original pattern I had chosen, and did a proper circular swatch. I cast on, got started, and five months later...I am one row away from the armpits.
This is the project that simply won't end. For one thing, the monotony of round after round of knitting and increasing, knitting and increasing, knitting and -- you get the idea -- is almost numbingly boring. The only time I made any real progress on the sweater was when it was too hot to go outside and I was watching the first two seasons of "Lost" on DVD. I have sewn a bunch of stuff since I started the darn sweater, but it's like time lapse photography -- or worse, like geological time.
I swear, we will be in a new geological era by the time this sweater is finished. Or maybe I will have gone extinct, and future insect archaeologists will find this perfectly preserved, half-finished sweater and wonder at its significance, placing it in a prominent place in their national museum. Small cockroach children will waggle their antennae at it in wonder, and no will know what it was -- or how it made me go insane.
Okay, I know rationally that it takes a really long time to knit a sweater. I also know that my lack of progress is compounded by both my knitting speed (which is laughingly slow) and the fact that I don't work on it every day. But my conservative estimate is that I have spent around 17 hours working on a single garment -- and I am nowhere near finished.
When I work on the sweater now, I keep singing "This is the sweater that never ends, it just goes on and on, my friend..." in my mind.
But I will finish, oh yes. I will finish! It may have one dropped and two split stitches -- but it will be done!
I know this is a frequent sort of lament among people who eagerly spend grocery money on fine yarn, but I really thought I was immune. I mean, I thought knitting was purely a recreational drug, since I'd tried it once and didn't get hooked. However, circumstances count. I learned to knit for a play -- "Dancing at Lughnasa," actually -- and once the run ended, I went about eight years before touching a knitting needle again.
But in the winter of 2003, I saw some really soft yarn at Wal-Mart, and I thought, "Maybe that depressing Irish play actually left me with a useful skill (besides a passable brogue accent) -- hmmm, I do need a new winter scarf..." All I knew how to do was the knit stitch, which is really just the knitting equivalent of a gateway drug. Plus, it's all you need to know to make a simple scarf. I bought the yarn, and my fate was sealed.
Being a drama queen, my simple scarf ended up being well over ten feet long -- and took almost a year of stop and start knitting to complete.
It gradually snowballed after that first project. A scarf for a friend here, a simple hat there. It all adds up. But one day I realized that I could in fact read most knitting patterns, and I knew that the time had come to give up the freebasing and start injecting straight into my veins: It was time to knit a sweater.
I bided my time. I passed over easier projects -- tank tops and the like. I waited, looking for the perfect pattern (and learned about felting in the mean time). I finally found a pattern on Knitty that seemed both simple enough but nice enough to wear: Bad Penny. I got some inexpensive yarn, and went to town.
And decided it was waaaaay too big, I hated the texture, and I had spent about twelve hours on a project that would never be finished.
Let's just say that I let the knitting rest for several months at that point. I've been sewing a lot longer than I've been knitting, so it's always my "fall back" craft. My fabric stash grew, while my yarn stash laid dormant.
And then Lion Brand reintroduced Cotton Ease. I had never used the stuff, but I had read lots of online gushing about how it was really great for an inexpensive yarn -- and also nice for the subtropical climate of Houston, where really good wool is useful for about two weeks each January. I took a little field trip to Michael's, and came home with several skeins of light grey cotton blend...and a new resolve to tackle a sweater.
I went back to the original pattern I had chosen, and did a proper circular swatch. I cast on, got started, and five months later...I am one row away from the armpits.
This is the project that simply won't end. For one thing, the monotony of round after round of knitting and increasing, knitting and increasing, knitting and -- you get the idea -- is almost numbingly boring. The only time I made any real progress on the sweater was when it was too hot to go outside and I was watching the first two seasons of "Lost" on DVD. I have sewn a bunch of stuff since I started the darn sweater, but it's like time lapse photography -- or worse, like geological time.
I swear, we will be in a new geological era by the time this sweater is finished. Or maybe I will have gone extinct, and future insect archaeologists will find this perfectly preserved, half-finished sweater and wonder at its significance, placing it in a prominent place in their national museum. Small cockroach children will waggle their antennae at it in wonder, and no will know what it was -- or how it made me go insane.
Okay, I know rationally that it takes a really long time to knit a sweater. I also know that my lack of progress is compounded by both my knitting speed (which is laughingly slow) and the fact that I don't work on it every day. But my conservative estimate is that I have spent around 17 hours working on a single garment -- and I am nowhere near finished.
When I work on the sweater now, I keep singing "This is the sweater that never ends, it just goes on and on, my friend..." in my mind.
But I will finish, oh yes. I will finish! It may have one dropped and two split stitches -- but it will be done!
Labels: Knitting
posted by Code Name Sarah at
4:47 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home