Remember this sweater?
I was worried about not having enough of the baby blue to finish the sleeves. I tried to be smart and before starting the sleeves I split the remaining blue yarn into two balls so at least the sleeves would be more or less even lengths. Good in theory...until my house became a mess and I now cannot find the 2nd ball of blue yarn to do the second sleeve. I am currently trying to decide if I should pitch the darn thing or just put it on scrap yarn and hope the other ball turns up eventually.
Also, remember this one?
This was the start of one of two heirloom christening blankets for my soon-to-be nieces. I foolishly picked the harder of the two to start, figuring that it would take more time. Soon after this my mother-in-law, who is a highly accomplished lace knitter, approached me and asked if I would be willing to split projects with her. She was going to make two Christmas sweaters for the babies, but lace is more her thing. We agreed to each do one blanket and one sweater, which seemed a more doable division of later. I got to the end of the border, a few rows past the picture above and was at the start of the lace pattern. We had a long road trip coming up, so I decided to wait until I had hours of free time in the car to figure out the pattern. There were many trials and travails that I won't go into, but long story short I got 5 rows into the lace pattern, of the right side lace rows, after 5 or 6 hours of work, and Every. Single. One. Of. Them. had gone wrong. Every one. Each requiring much 'tinking' back or correction in farther rows. I was heartily sick of the damn thing, and I was only 10 rows in to the 44 row lace section, of which there needed to be 3-4 repetitions for length. Crap.
I approached my long-suffering and ever-helpful mother-in-law and gave her my options. I was contemplating ripping the whole thing out and starting over, or just giving it to her. Seriously, I hated every stitch, which is not good when knitting something for people you love. She very graciously agreed that if I was not having fun and it was becoming a chore then it would be better to abandon it and she was willing to take it on, being much more experienced with lace patterns. Seriously, she just won a lace competition, this woman is so good. Check it out: http://www.needleworktraditions.com/needlework-contest/ , it's seriously insane. And she said I could knit both the sweaters, which is more my wheelhouse anyway, so I could still making something for the babies.
I'm not happy about any of this. It feels like failure, I suppose because it is kind of a failure. The lost yarn is not entirely my fault (even though it mostly is, but I can ignore that), but the blanket absolutely is. I gave up. I chose to be done.
But I think my mother-in-law had a good point. This whole knitting thing, this crazy obsessive thing that knitters do, is supposed to be FUN. Whether we enjoy the making more than the created object itself, or if we like having the thing that we can say we made with our own hands, or if we like both, knitting is supposed to be fun. Relaxing. This blanket was feeling like a chore and was no longer in any way enjoyable. To complete this blanket would have been nothing but bad vibes and evil thoughts and making me thoroughly uncomfortable and annoyed. None of those things are what I want to wrap around a baby. So I can accept that sometimes you have to give up a project for the sake of your sanity and that's okay. Just as I've been coming to accept that my ability to help people or not at work is not a measure of my worth as a human, I should accept the same with my knitting. My ability to produce knitted things of any quality is not a reflection of my ability to be a worthwhile human being. That may seems like a rather extreme comparison to make, but we all judge our own self-worth by something and more often than not it's not a fair scale.
Don't be afraid to give up on something that is not making you happy, especially when it's something so inconsequential and something that is supposed to be fun.
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