KNITSTER

You know that sweater that my son asked for, the one that was supposed to have flames on it? The sweater from hell? (Well, he wanted Hot Wheels flames, he knows nothing of hell.) Or at least hell to me? I finally broke down and frogged it, and I’m making a plain red sweater for him instead. Why? Well, look for yourself:
The pattern, and the sweater from hell.

As you can see from the photo, I have a lovely diagram of how the flames were going to look, based on the pattern I was using. There were eighty stitches across for about 11 inches, so this easily would– or should– have worked. But as you can see, reality didn’t match the fantasy.  So I frogged the whole darn thing. Poof! Up in smoke.

This was my first real foray into color knitting, and I think I bit off more than I could chew. I think I was going in the right direction, but it was just too daunting after a while. I spent more time untangling yarn than I actually did knitting. I tried to combine the techniques of fair isle and intarsia to better manage the design, and it still didn’t work. I think I was going in the right direction, but look at it! It looks awful. So, I showed Drew the work so far, and he agreed, and understood that Mom just doesn’t have the skills yet to do something that fancy. He only asked if the replacement sweater could be red, and I said, “of course”, since that was my intention in the first place. Well, you can’t say that I didn’t try to please my little one, since he usually doesn’t ask me to knit him anything.

Even after this, I’m not put off from doing color work, but I think I need to build up to it, rather. Start out with some two color work, or something like that. Maybe someday I’ll be able to handle four colors! But not yet. I think I have some more learning to do.  I knit because I enjoy doing it, and even projects that are “must-do” for whatever reason, I usually get some joy out of it. I wasn’t really feeling the joy in this one at all, which is sad. It was starting to take shape, but it looked too…amateurish. And well, it IS, but I didn’t want that either. I wanted to make something that people would say, “Ooh, that’s cool!”. Like I said, I’m confident I’ll get there someday. Just not yet.

Of course, I’m still trying to figure out my shrug that I started last year too. Talk about trying to design something in a freeform way! But I think I have some direction with that, we’ll see. I’m too far along with that one to frog it now!

Posted on February 24th, 2008 by Dani
Filed under: Patterns, Photos, Projects, Works in Progress