WIP Wednesday. It's ugly: but it's done

Today I'm doing a WIP Wednesday post, with thanks to the link party on Tami's Amis - the post is here.

O how I love you, Stylecraft Special DK in questionable colours

My first WIP is actually not a WIP, it is a FO. For those of you who come here for the cats and pole dancing, by this I mean, it is a finished object, not one in progress. I am not sure it is very attractive: in fact, I think it probably is not. However, I have been having the Devil's Own Job finishing anything at all, recently, and I kept starting new things, thinking, some day I will start something and it will be the One Thing which will be so effortless that I will finish it without even noticing. And then that will propel me to unearth all the other terrible lurking things and then finish them too. And then I will be a better person. Anyway, this one I did finish! So perhaps it was indeed the One Thing which will lead to me becoming a better person! I do hope so. It's a shame it's slightly questionable. I'm getting a seventies vibe, I'm getting Nag Champa, I'm getting Patsy's mother, I'm getting accessorising with brown and mushrooms...

The fence-gallery back in action, hooray

If you would like to make one too (and I can't imagine I haven't sold you on it), it's actually a kit from Get Knitted, using Stylecraft Special DK, and it was an excellent bargain, especially with free postage - nice clear pattern (I know it's just a granny square), and it's ended up a good lap quilt size, so will be very functional. It is folded up in our living room on the pouffe waiting for me to fall asleep under it in front of Judge Judy.

However I suspect my real Work-In-Progress is dealing with the backlog of Lurking Projects that for some reason I have not had the motivation to finish, but you'll be glad to know I'm making inroads there too. I dragged out my Noro Striped Scarf (pattern here - knitted as written), and I have cast off but am just finishing weaving in the ends.

Too Stressed For Noro

I'm sure I'm unusually neurotic, but I find knitting stripes with Noro a surprisingly stressful experience. This is the theory, for those of you Noro-virgins who clearly have more sense than I, who cannot resist a bit of colour: Noro has long colour runs, so, if you stripe different balls, you will have gradually varying stripes which contrast in delightfully changing ways, and it will be the perfect balance of control and surprise. What actually happens is that within about an inch you give up on the idea of delightfully changing anything and just hope for the two balls to be sufficiently different so that you can tell your scarf is striped and you will not have to cut, wind, and join another bloody end in again.

Because, however perfectly you start, and however utterly your two colours are contrasted - say, yellow and purple - within a few hundred yards there you see it sneaking up on you: the same brown on each ball. The same dark brown! So then you find yourself desperately counting coils of yarn to see if there is any chance of you getting the brown on one ball over with and started on the pink before you are in the darkest brown part of your other ball, and if you have an all-brown bit for a few inches whether that will look ugly. Or, you convince yourself that you actually have got a contrast, when, strictly speaking you haven't, which is why I have not shown you the twelve inches of muddiness in the photo above. One of my noros just gave up and became entirely green for half of its life, which meant I had to cut out all the green in the second ball, which made me furious, and means there are so many ends in one half of my scarf that it is all quite silly. And then at the point where I had nearly finished, I discovered one ball was full of knots, and at this point I was just about ready to email them, and I had to remind myself that knitting is a delightfully relaxing hobby and how meditative I was finding the whole experience.

Anyway. I have another project on the go now but I will not jinx it by showing it too soon. I will unveil it next week. The Lurking Things Project won't be done in a short time, you know: there are layers and layers of unfinished horrors. It's like sedimentary rock formation in our back bedroom. As someone with fewer scruples than me once said: I'll Be Back.

(For more (and frankly possibly better) WIPs, go and have a look at Tami's blog! - Hope you find something good ;-) )