Wunged

During my history of yarncraft, I have prided myself on being able to finish stuff within a reasonable amount of time. Project started, then project finished. I don't like loose ends. I lie awake at night trying to work out fit issues, colour combinations, yardage calculations. "I bet I could make that," I say. And I want to do it now. Today, not tomorrow, not next month.

Darn it all, life throws a lot of obstacles in the way. Work, family, and, for the first time, surgery, have classified my most recent project as "epic." December to March. That's a long time for me. And it bugged me.

What didn't help was that I had absolutely no idea what the heck I was doing. I started with a barely legible chart from a Russian site and ended up with pieces that looked like this:

And I fought with my yarn the whole way through. The yarn itself was a dream: two shawl skeins I bought from my friend's Etsy shop, Dragonfly Dyewerx. But my ballwinder and swift were not cooperating while I was winding it, and so I ended up with these stupid long loops in the middle of my yarn cakes. They weren't quite "yarn barfs," where the yarn just pops out from the inside in a tangled mess. I'd call this "yarn spittle."

But, in the end, I did my normal thing: winging it. A lot of "Oh whatever, let's try this thing and see what happens." And winged it... or wunged it, as I like to say. Wunged seems like the proper past tense of winging it...

I added a left shoulder, because the toga look doesn't quite do it for me. And then I made sleeves. The stitch pattern kind of swirled around like a barber's pole up my arm, so I'm hoping it doesn't look too awkward. Oddly, one sleeve seems longer than the other, but I think that might be because I made one before I had surgery and one afterwards. Heh, talk about different tensions...

One of the balls had more black in it, so I used one for the left side and one for the right. And, since it's basically made of a bunch of triangles, I ended up with an asymmetrical hem, which is cool, but a real pain in the butt to photograph, since I needed to fiddle with a camisole that would both show the stitch pattern and look decent under the angled hem at the same time.

To make sure it was wide enough, I added side panels. This one looks like it's pulling at the bust, but I think that's just because of my awkward pose.

In the end, I was quite pleased. It was a satisfying experiment, which taught me that I can make a crochet top out of fingering weight yarn that I can actually wear. And, despite all the ripped out stitches, reworking piece after piece over and over again, it worked.

I'm off to figure out something for dinner. I've wunged more than one dinner in my time. It's not a bad way to live, after all.