Friday, August 12, 2011

My first knitalong

I've knit sweaters before, but until this summer, hadn't finished any of them. Meaning I get to a certain point and I give up, mostly because I see all these mistakes and I think "Why bother? It'll drive me crazy to wear this thing with all those big glaring errors staring back at me." (Yeah, I've a got a wee problem with perfectionism.) I forced myself to finish the February Lady sweater; what helped was that there were no seams to finish at the end. That and I was pretty careful about checking my work as I went along, even though I did make one big glaring error in the beginning but decided to let it go and live it with it, another new page in the playbook.



I've been casting about for a new sweater project, preferably one without seams. I've had Jordana Paige's Cadence sweater in my Ravelry queue since April, and when I saw that Sarah at Rhinestones and Telephones was co-hosting (with Kristen at Kristen Makes) a knitalong for it in September, I quickly joined up. It's part of my New Me program after my brush with cancer, which I haven't talked about much at all here, but will at some point. I'm not a joiner AT ALL, but in an effort to get out of my comfort zone, I jumped in without thinking too much about it.

My yarn budget is tapped out for now and I don't have a yarn stash for sweaters, so I'm thinking of Stitch Nation Alpaca Love in Peacock Feather. This aran-weight yarn gets pretty good reviews on Ravelry and it's inexpensive. I naturally gravitate toward dull greens, browns, and grays with an occasional foray into bright yellow and orange, but recently I've developed a love for jewel-like shades of teal and deep turquoise. What do you think? A good choice for this sweater, yay or nay??

 

4 comments:

  1. Very nice. Personally I don't mind seams ever since I took a class about them. I used to hate the finished seams in my garments, but it's quite easy to make them look, well, seamless, and there are quite a few options too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's what I should do, take a class. It's funny because I make a lot of my own clothes and obviously there's a lot of seaming in sewing? But with knitwear? Ugh!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Welcome to the knitalong! I used to shirk from joining too, but it is so fun now to do things with other makers, what a generous and kind bunch the knitters and sewists can be. Love your blog, esp. as an American living in the UK. I can't wait to dive in and read more!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Kristen! I'm finding out that knitters are indeed a kind and generous bunch, both online (blogs/Ravelry), as well as IRL. I whip my knitting out everywhere and meet such interesting fellow knitters. Looking forward to the knitalong -- thanks for setting it up. :-)

    ReplyDelete

I love comments!