Knit Whining

Whining about knitting is like whining about your spouse. You know you're in love, and the whining is just one way of demonstrating that love.

Knitting With Passion
Anything that I'm passionate about is worthy of as much attention as I can focus on it. Even if that focus might be complaining about it sometimes. Knitting is like that for me. My complaining about how long Donegal is taking is just another way for me to express how much this sweater means to me.

I don't personally believe that angry or hateful thoughts you have while knitting are somehow inbued in the finished garment. Physical aspects of my knitting are also not affected by my mood. So, for instance, my tension is not tighter when I'm tense/angry/stressed, nor is it looser when I'm relaxed/happy/loving.

In the 18 or so years that I've been knitting, there have definitely been times where I started to hate a garment I was in the process of making. I hated the color, I hated the stitch and/or I hated the yarn.

A perfect example of that was the first Aran sweater I ever made.



It was a raglan-sleeve, cable sweater from a book called Knitting Today's Classics.



It was my first attempt at any cabling (which took me forever). It was done in a deep forest green wool...at this point, I don't even know what yarn it was...Bainin maybe? Anyway, by the time I was finishing the first sleeve, I would have been happy to have never seen this yarn or sweater again.

Thank dog I have a stubborn persistence, and I finished it.

I put the sweater away for a few months, and when I discovered it in my armoir a number of months later, I was thrilled to have this great looking handknit classic. To this day, I love the labor that went into that garment.

Anyway, I'm glad Peter brought up this point, so I can say what Marilyn said much more succinctly. I'm a whiner, but it doesn't mean I love knitting or the resulting garments any less.


Donegal
This sleeve is FLYING now that the number of stitches keeps reducing every third row. Changing yarns and weaving in ends is the hardest part. I don't even have a chance to memorize the pattern repeat before it changes to the next row.

Here's how it looks.



I will definitely have this sleeve done this week and I'm going to push to finish Donegal by the end of next week. I'm already getting excited at the prospect of checking this one off my to-do list.

All I can think is that if I'm so ready to finish Donegal, you folks will probably be twice as happy to see me working on something else.