Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

Ugh, it has been a week. After the emotional rollercoaster that was last week - I feel like I should talk about it, but I just don't wanna, suffice to say it involved some steep learning curves, and I now have lots of useful knowledge and experience that I didn't have before but boy could I have done with out having a challenging week both personally and professionally at the same time - this weekend has been about recovering. I slept for 12 hours on Friday night. I've mostly chilled out, knitted and drunk my own body volume in tea. I also managed a couple of loads of laundry, to go to the gym for the first time since August (OMG exercise endorphins, I've missed you!) and to spend some quality time reading in the bath. Rocket Science bath bombs from Lush are just the best.

Anyways, I didn't want to grumble about my week, I wanted to talk about knitting!

So last year I did a fair amount of clearing out of DVDs and books, and feel that in general my books and DVDs are much more under control than they were, some work still required but I feel that's a job for after I get my own place because once I know how much space I will actually have for storing my physical media I can reassess what a reasonable amount of said media actually is in terms of my space. Therefore, this year I'm instead working on de-statshing my wool - or at least knitting up my stash. While I was at home for Xmas I pulled out my stash bags from the attic and gifted my mum (who's recently got into crochet) my odds and ends stash. The other bag was my 'projects' stash, wool that I'd bought for various knitting projects (mostly things in my ravelry queue) before I moved to Inverness. My goodness, my knitting skills and tastes have evolved a lot in the last four years. There's some lovely stuff in there but also some choices that were clearly informed by having much less wool budget back then. (These days I tend to buy wool less often but I buy nicer wool so it probably works out roughly the same but nonetheless.)



Speaking of changes, as part of this project, as well as knitting the projects I've had wool waiting for ages for me to knit, I want to have a good clear out of my Ravelry queue, figure out what I'm actually going to knit - there's some patterns on there that have been in my queue since 2010/11 - and dig through knitty and the physical patterns I have and plot some new stuff to knit too. We've been talking about having a yarn swap at knitting, so it would be good to have some decisions made so that if there's wool for projects I'm never going to make, I can either repurpose the wool for other projects or let it go to someone else who'll love it more.

My current project - a ridged wrap - has been on needles since May 2015 according to my Ravelry page, and until last week had been sitting at 80% done for approximately 3 out of the intervening 3 and a half years. Not that it's been sleeping that entire time, I've picked it up again a couple of times with good intentions and then abandoned it again. On Tuesday I remembered why, it's knit in two parts and one part of it (the ridged part of the 'ridged wrap') is comprised of a repeating pattern of reverse stocking stitch and stocking stitch, 8 rows of each, except I'd done 6 rows of each, so it didn't work out, and trying to make it work caused me to run out of wool. I needed to rip it back and clearly couldn't face it. Last Tuesday I faced it, frogged it back and have been re-knitting it correctly since. It looks much better, and also like I'll actually have enough wool left to pick up the stitches for the arm cuffs. It's actually been the perfect project for this last week, as it did not require a great deal of brain to knit and when I felt like I'd done nothing and was no further forward with anything, I could look at it and think, I've knitted x amount of fabric. (Checkmate nihilism, indeed.)

The main advantage of coming back to this project after a couple of years is that, in the interim I've had lots more practice at sewing up and assembling items of clothing. This one is a pretty straightforward knit, what complexity there is, is in the making up, and I feel much better equipped to tackle that now. Before I eyed it with concern and essentially said 'urble burble help' whereas now I reckon I know how to do it, though I'm still taking it to do at knitting bee in case I get stuck. There's a satisfying feeling of progress to knowing that back when I started this project, I'd be taking it along to go 'help help I've no idea what I'm doing' and now I'll be taking it along to say 'I'm thinking of doing x or y here, what do you folks reckon will work best?'


I'm sure there was originally going to be more to this post, but I don't remember what it was, and given that I started it on Monday morning and it's now Wednesday evening, I'm going to just post this before it gets ridiculous!