It Looks Like Something

Grit means holding onto hope and faith that today’s actions, no matter how futile, frustrating and disappointing they seem, will yield benefits if we persevere. Grit cannot exist without hope and faith because they provide the fuel we need to continue when doubts and frustrations arise. -- Jennifer L. Ayres, PhD, The Counselor's Corner

One thing I wish all aspiring knitters/crocheters/weavers/crafters would realize when they express their desire to learn a new skill is that they have to learn to tolerate one of the most intolerable conditions of the modern age: tedium. This stuff is beautiful and impressive and brings me a lot of joy, but it is entirely about doing one tiny little thing at a time. What's more, some of the time, you have to UNDO one little thing at a time for several hours until you can start over again.

But when you stick with it for long enough, you start to see something coming out of nothing. That's what it's been like with my Dahlia Cardigan. This is the first week when I can truly say it looks like something:

I might have given the wrong impression in my last post about this project about it not having any seams. It does have a couple of seams in it - one down each side and another along the underside of each sleeve. I decided to sew them up this week because I was tired of lugging around something that looked like a cut up blanket. As always, seams are tedious and slow, but it made me feel so much better about it, and it also allowed me to try it on properly so I could see what I was doing:

Another thing I decided to do was to go back and unpick a bunch of sewn-in ends that I'd worked when I was knitting the back. I had worked them in by holding the end of the finished ball together with the start of the new ball. This is normally a perfectly good way to join yarn ends, but this fabric is so wispy that all I could see was this ugly line of thick stitches in the middle of the left back shoulder. It bothered me so much that I spent time with a darning needle and a good light to pick most of them out again:

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with those ends yet, but the result is currently much more satisfying:

I'm currently working on the left sleeve, and it's going pretty well. I learned a lot from knitting the first sleeve, and for once I wrote down notes about each decision I made so that I could actually remember how I did it. That's another thing about knitting that you really need to know: you will NOT remember what you did, so you really should write it down. It's only taken me fourteen years of knitting to figure that out.

Fourteen years? Have I really been knitting for that long? That can't be right at all.

Meanwhile, I just got a phone call that our furniture is FINALLY going to be delivered this coming Friday. Talk about sticking it out. I was beginning to have daily tantrums about it, and the poor hubby was probably regretting the decision to buy new stuff. This news has swung my attention to all the furniture accessories I've been thinking about knitting: new cushion covers, a stool cover, maybe ANOTHER throw...

Off to make dinner. Have a great week. Maybe next week I'll introduce you to the NEW Adriene's Couch...