Where are they now? - 2KCBWDAY4

Bonus picture of the Cam

You may have noticed that I was absent yesterday when I should have been posting about how my yarn is organised. There is no organisation in this house at the moment, Partner has carefully taken all the boxes out of the box room in a bid to ‘reorganise all the systems’ and has piled them on the living room carpet. Now he feels ‘oppressed by boxes’ and has gone wandering off into town. So you can see that if I had done a post on organisation yesterday the terrible irony might have made me stray into territory that was not delightful and woolly (also, it is just all in a bag). Anyway today we are on safer ground where I am instructed to blog about:

Whatever happened to your __________?

Write about the fate of a past knitting project. Whether it be something that you crocheted or knitted for yourself or to give to another person. An item that lives with you or something which you sent off to charity.

So I thought I would show you my Clapotis.

A rare view of the bird feeder still with peanuts in it. Where is that squirrel? Is he full?

One of the things I have realised since I have been active (well, I say active) on Ravelry is that I am not really a process knitter. I do like the process but I only really do it for the finished result. Although I think this will mean I am never as wonderful a knitter as some of the people whose blogs I admire (Crafty Cripple! Marushka!), it does mean that if knitted items survive my lack of concentration/ peculiar tastes enough to actually get cast off then I wear them absolutely to death. Such an item is my clapotis.

I knitted this pattern for reasons that were shallow and wrong. Firstly, I looked at the picture on the pattern of the creator wearing it in front of a Parisian café. ‘I sit outside Parisian cafés!’ I thought to myself. ‘I sit drinking Kir and reading Bandes-Dessinées! I wear scarves! I wear scarves all the time! I spend my entire life looking like Wilfred from the Bash Street Kids! This is a pattern that has my name on it!’. Secondly, I was encouraged (this may sound bizarre: this was pre-Ravelry, or, pre-me-discovering Ravelry) by the note in the pattern that said people had complained about the original instructions telling you to buy too little yarn and so they had changed the yarn requirements. Because this suggested to me that living beings had knitted from this pattern and given feedback.

Detail shot of the thrilling bit where you drop stitches

When I first started knitting as an adult, before I had properly discovered the whole knitting-internet scene thing, I was always scared that patterns Might Be Wrong. Because I am not a quick knitter, and especially when I first started I didn’t know enough to correct mistakes in patterns. A P2Tog rather than a P3togTBL at the wrong moment could have destroyed weeks of work and there I would be, helpless and whimpering. And who knew that Debbie Bliss wasn’t sitting there thinking, Jesus Christ another cabled sweater I am so bored, I shall put a deliberate mistake just before you start the armhole shaping on the front and see if anyone reading this book ever actually gets that far, HA HA HA HA! So I set off on my Clapotis with enthusiasm, reassured that it had been knitted before and that I would end up with something wearable. And I did. I wore it today, in fact. I wear it all the time. I hate the yarn, though. It pilled. (Lorna’s Laces Lion and Lamb. If anyone wants to suggest a nice soft worsted though, I’m absolutely up for knitting another at some point. Come on with your yarn prOn).

Of course now with the project facility on Ravelry I can check before I knit anything how it has gone for other people, and for me this is a boon on a par with the invention of the wheel. Without it I would still be on garter stitch scarves. With it I occasionally venture into more advanced waters. Thank you, all you lovely process knitters, for paving the way and making it easier for such as I. I thank you with all my heart, and in return I ask only that you never make me Magic Loop anything. Thank you for your understanding.