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The Dog Days of Summer

This has been the longest knitting slump ever. All summer, I’ve been knitting this:

Pink scarf in progress
Pink scarf in progress

It’s a pink scarf for my friend Jen, that I was hoping to have done in time for her visit IN MAY. So much for that! I take the scarf with me absolutely everywhere, but over the last few weeks it’s only made it out of my bag a few times. I took it with me to dinner at the pool tonight, and I got THREE WHOLE ROWS done. Whoop-dee-do. I really need to find my mojo and get this project done! I had such good intentions. Don’t I always?

The sad truth is that my UFO pile is at least three times bigger than the pile of things I’ve actually finished. This has me wondering at times if I even like to knit! Oh, I know I do like knitting, but am I passionately in love with it? I don’t know. Probably not at the moment. I need to find a project that really excites me and makes me want to finish it. Heck, some projects even have road blocks to getting started! Such as:

  • The Lace Yarn Sampler Shawl from Knit Picks. It’s even purple, people! My most favorite color. What’s stopping me? It’s knit on two strands of each yarn throughout, so you can drop one and add another color, one at a time. So it blends nicely. Cool idea! Except I don’t have a yarn scale and the idea of winding two little balls out of each hank seems like a pain in the butt. Stupid, huh?
  • The Girasole Blanket by Jared Flood. I got some beautiful Eco-Alpaca to knit this in. It is SO soft, and so pretty,and I got it on a discount! But that ball winding thing again is getting in my way. Why oh why do I find ball winding to be a chore? Because my kitchen table is always a cluttered mess, that’s why. I seldom have enough room anywhere for my swift and ball winder to be set up. Sigh…
  • The Tam of Doom. I don’t know why I call it that. But I never got past the cast on before having to frog. I’m trying to learn Tubular Cast On and I messed up. I will get back to this…someday.
  • My conscience. This is my biggest roadblock of all. I have so many UFOs, so, so many, that really, honestly? I have no business starting something new. There’s a pink scarf to finish after all, and my February Lady Sweater, and let’s not even talk about last year’s abandoned afghan. It was for a sick co-worker. The co-worker is well now, thank goodness, and the afghan is just mocking me. It’s in my active project bin, snickering. Can you hear it?

Sigh.

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3 responses to “The Dog Days of Summer”

  1. Lea-Ann Avatar

    I know, I know . . . been there . . . and had a friend intervention help me! We sat down and listed ten of my UFOs that needed finished and which needed finished first. Then that is all i worked on. In the case of the never-ending scarf, I figured out how much i could realistically knit on it every day without feeling like I was spending all of my time on it — an inch, two inches? I then put a removable market on the row I was starting at and my goal for the day was easy to meet and it was done before I knew it. I am definitely not a one project person and when I have so many to tackle, I really do get overwhelmed and shut down knitting-wise. Hmm, same could be said for tackling laundry, dishes, etc. Its the flylady thing that maybe is seeping a little into my habits. Hope you find something that works for you!

  2. Jen Avatar

    Ok! Got some ideas here. 😉

    Step 1: Frog the afghan. Let’s see if those little balls of yarn can still snicker once they’re neatly stowed in plastic bags. No reason to let them guilt you–the coworker is well, and isn’t that all that matters?

    Step 2: See if an LYS or friend will wind yarn for you. I actually enjoy the process–you might have a (closer) friend who does too. Or your LYS might, even if the yarn didn’t come from there, if you’re a loyal customer.

    Step 3: Anytime you’re sitting there with empty hands, work on the scarf. I think that’s your biggest roadblock right now. Get past that and I think the rest might flow more smoothly. And if you’ve gotten the yarn wound, you’ll have that exciting project to move onto next. 😉

  3. […] Last week I complained that I needed to be able to split my yarn hanks into two balls each to work on a shawl project. I had seen this scale for a while on the Knit Picks site . It’s also available on Amazon, in a wider variety of colors. Now I can finally wind the yarn for my purple shawl and get going. Something new to work on… I think I needed this. […]

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