I like to pretend that all my "works in progress" are actually works in progress, but truth be told the survival rate for a knitting project that falls of my radar is pretty horrific. A project that goes out of rotation and lands in one of my baskets might make it, since there’s a chance I’ll see it enough times to care about its fate… but a project that lands in the back cupboard has likely been given a terminal diagnosis. It might be ugly, it might be gauge… it might have a yarn problem I can’t solve, a pattern error that I don’t feel like messing with, but for whatever reason, if a UFO (UnFinished Object) goes into there, it’s like a doorway to the seventh dimension. Kiss it goodbye baby. That cupboard is a one way trip to goodbye land. I’m happy to announce that against all odds, a project has struggled its way back from the abyss.
It’s the Beaded Bells Kit. I was knitting this a while ago, really loving it, making good time…. and then totally misplaced the pattern and absolutely couldn’t find it no matter what I did. I’d always meant to reverse engineer/fake them to finish, but somehow it ended up in the cupboard with very little hope of ever being seen (or at least admitted to) again.
Then, when I was pulling together my self-directed sock club, I found the pattern (totally by accident) and then found the socks (totally on purpose) and tossed them into the sock club, making them April’s socks because I knew April was going to be hairy, and these were half knit already. So there you have it. Me and a pair of socks that almost didn’t make it to sockdom are grooving in the Vancouver airport and I bet they’ll be finished socks by sundown.
In the face of all the projects in all of our cupboards that don’t make it, I thought you’d want to hear about a brave little pair of socks that beat the odds.
(Admittedly, all they’ve survived is my incompetence and powerful ability to misplace things… but there you go.)