the knitlit twit: Love Your Library

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

WIP Wednesday: It's all about (Lexe)me!

I joined in on Inspiration Saturday, so I figured tagging along with Tami's Amis and Other Creations for Work in Progress Wednesday would be a good excuse to start chatting about what I'm working on now, especially since I don't have to be secretive about it. It's not a gift, it's all for me!

No, not the cute kitty. It's the Lexeme cardigan in Berroco Lustra. Well, the back piece of it. It's going to be this:

Photo credit: Berroco, Inc.

I mentioned yesterday, when I outlined my plans for loving my library, that this cardigan has a history. I first started it a few years ago. I made it about two inches in before it was set aside for a series of less daunting and more instantly gratifying projects. Over time, this went from my 'work on between projects' project to my 'stuffed into the closet, maybe one day' project. Now that I am an older and wiser crafter, I wanted to tackle this task again, and was spurred on when one of my Ravelry groups decided to do a knitalong for sleeved garments. Plus, I found buttons that match it perfectly during the Yarn Crawl, so I thought that was probably a sign from Bob.

And so, pulled back from the depths of the closet, released from the inky shadows of crafting obscurity, the cardigan that never was had to endure one more indignity: it had to be frogged. Because if it was worth doing, it was worth doing right from the very start. And I wasn't the same size as I had been the first time around.

I'm a few weeks into the restart, and I've already passed my previous marker, reaching the end of the ribbing. And since I took the progress picture, I've made progress on the stockinette section as well, having already done two of the increases.

If I hadn't already had everything about this cardigan planned, I might have switched things up and tried something that was either a little more riveting, stitch-wise, or a little more simple, construction-wise. There's going to be a lot of sewing things together, with the back panel, the left front panel, the right front panel, and the sleeves. And then the cute little ruffle as well as the button band comes from picking up all of the stitches and knitting them on at the end. I would have preferred something seamless, maybe top-down.

But I'm going to get this done anyway, though it might take me a while, and though I will need my mom's help. I won't pretend that it will be my main project for most of the time. In fact, it's already sharing my craft time with spinning some yarn for my mom that was meant for Christmas. I'd like to make more progress on that whenever I can, and leave the cardigan for those times when spinning isn't practical, like for bringing along to the coffee klatch at work.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Loving my library and quelling my queue

I think everyone uses their favorites and their queue differently in Ravelry. For me, the favorites are a mass of patterns that constantly grows. I see something pretty, and I add it, just for safekeeping. But my queue I save for projects that have not just the pattern picked out, but also the yarn. Unfortunately, that's getting a little long as well. Nothing compared to my list of favorites, but I've got an unlucky thirteen in there right now. And that doesn't even count the one I've already started!

So one of the things I did in one of my bursts of organization over the holiday break from work was to put any yarn for a queued project into a single plastic tub (one of those that slides under a bed). So that the next time I need to grab a project, I'll go straight to that tub and not get sidetracked by anything else shiny in my stash. Because that will only lead to me browsing for patterns for that skein, adding more to my favorites, and it's just a vicious cycle.

I read about the Love Your Library challenge set by Emily at snapdragon crafts, and I think that's a good reinforcement for my efforts to avoid temptation. She's aiming to complete a project from her library every month, and I don't think I'll be able to do that, but I am going to try and limit what I do cast on to projects that are in my queue. The only exception will be for swap crafting, since it's kind of hard to queue patterns for someone I don't even know I'm spoiling yet.

Tomorrow I'll have an update on the first project that has gone from queue to WIP to hibernation to queue and back to WIP again over the course of several years. But here are the other thirteen for 2013:

Spoked Cardigan by Carol Feller