The Soul of Compromise

All I wanted on Friday, with every fibre of my being, was to pitch all that I was knitting and find something "better."  I didn’t give in right away, but spent a little time wondering, my fellow knitters, what "better" was. 

See, by all traditional markers, I don’t know how you find something much better than a the tank top I’m working on.  I think the pattern’s really neat.  I like the yarn a lot, it’s pretty interesting.  It’s going slowly enough that I’m challenged – but quickly enough that I haven’t lost all faith in there ever being a tank top at the end of it. I can see that there’s a tank top on the horizon, which is awesome.
I’ve learned that I might be a true process/product knitter.  If the process of making something isn’t paying off by being fun, interesting or challenging, then a project finds it’s way out of my life faster than a boyfriend who’s mum’s making him a Comic-con costume. (Note: I am less biased if you’re making your own costume.)   Conversely, if I don’t see how what I’m doing is going to end up with something I want (to keep or to share) then I can’t imagine why I’m investing in it either.   Either way, this tank is interesting to knit and I can see how at the end I’ll likely wear it, so there’s no logical excuse for why I spent all of Friday looking at it like it was gum stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

A shawl.  A lace shawl.  That was all I could think of, and I didn’t even have one in mind.  I just knew I wanted out of that tank top, and I didn’t care how I got there.  I went upstairs to pillage the stash for something appropriate, flinging laceweight around and pondering my possibilities – when in the very back of one of the cubbies, I found this.

It’s the Summer in Kansas shawl from years ago. The whole thing is knit except for the edging, and just like the tank top, for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I trashed it.  I looked back in the blog archives and realized something really interesting. First – that it’s pretty nifty to keep a running tally of what I was knitting when, and second, that I had done away with the shawl at almost exactly the same time that I’d gotten rid of  the tank top.  I was knitting both of them in June of 2006, when apparently some problem with the tank wiped it from the earth, and a mistake on the edging of the shawl meant it suffered the same fate.

I was apparently going through an intolerant phase where knits that didn’t play nice went for a FOUR YEAR time out.  Perhaps it was a mood that overtook me, or another something that distracted me, but how interesting (isn’t it?) that I walked out on both at the same time and now have found them both back together. Perhaps the mood has passed. (I don’t like to think of myself as someone who has four year long knitting hissy fits either, but … er.  Let’s not talk about it.) The irony is that it took all of 10 minutes to fix the problems with both projects.

Welcome back, blue shawl.  Let’s see if you and your tank top friend make it this time.  I’d watch my step if I were you.  You’ve had four years to know who you’re dealing with.