Wednesday, March 06, 2013

possibly a bad match

When your current knitting project appears to be just the perfect match to compliment the mood you are in, but your mood is...well...crap...maybe it's time to switch projects??
And perhaps have a project that is a contrast to your crap mood rather than a compliment to it?? 

Case in point:

 
This is supposed to grow up and one day be lap-blanket.  The yarn is handspun camel from the Gobi Desert, which I find ridiculously intriguing. The yarn sales support a really great non-profit, which is cool. It's a club knit-along project, which is also a fun thing to participate in.

But I am not having a fun time with this project at all!

For starters, the blanket is now starting to get too big to haul around, and my life for the next month requires absolute portability.  Secondly, although I adore naturally colored wools, it's a little bit too beige for me right  now (life is blah enough already and it the beige might just be enhancing my case of doldrums).  And worst of all, it's sort of itchy. 

What I at first found ridiculously intriguing (handspun, camels, deserts) also means that all skeins are not created equal.





I'm cool with that. I'm going to entertain the notion that I will have a blanket made up of four different camels and spun up by four different spinners (I have no idea if that is true or not, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it LOL).  I am only 2 skeins into the 4 that I have, and while the first one was fairly soft, the second has quite a bit of guard hair (for the non-spinner, that is the longer coarser hair, often reserved for things like rugs).  The skeins also seem to be including a fair amount of VM (vegetable matter).  Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mind a bit of grass and whatnot in my yarn. I'll pick it out as I knit.  I usually find "a bit of the farm" to be quite charming actually, and this is beyond farm in the best way possible.  It's desert!  Cool!  But apparently whatever vegetation camels encounter in the desert is quite pokey.



It's like little splinters. Sometimes I can spot them and pick them out, but sometimes they are so well spun and buried into the yarn and in the direction of the plies that I don't feel it while I am actually doing the knitting. The splinters I don't catch then go into the the knitted fabric, and  where the yarn bends into the shape of stitch and the splinter pokes out and becomes scratchy.  I am blindly trusting that these little bits will soften some with washing (~let us pray~).

Meanwhile, as I knit, this danged blanket is sitting in my lap, itching and scratching at me....irritating me the whole danged time I am working on it. If you are following along on the blog here, you will know that I am already feeling quite irritated about other things.  I do not need to be irritated by my knitting, too!!


So let's file this under the category:
Life is too short for bad knitting.

Tonight I will cast-on for that brightly colored baby sweater.




2 comments:

Donnaj said...

Stop digging and get out of the hole. Life is to short for bad knitting and bad dance companies. Just walk away.

=Tamar said...

Changing to a portable project in a happier color - Yes. Re the spiky bits: I once got some thrift shop yarn that was Lopi with huge amounts of actual thorns in it; it must have been machine spun, it would have torn the hands of any hand spinner. Some inches had more thorn than wool! I slowly cranked it inch by inch through a ball winder, pulling out the thorns etc, and only missed a few that I removed when I came to them in knitting. It can be done.