Let 'Er Rip

All week I've been knitting and frogging (that's "unravelling" to non-knitters). As in ripping out work. It's probaby a testament to my excitement, ambitiousness, and the unhappy realization that for some projects (the patternless ones that I make up as I go along) I might not have enough yarn. Sometimes despite knitting a swatch I end up overestimating how a fiber will stretch sideways. If I'm a couple of inches deep into a project I don't mind doing it again. I guess I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Sometimes. Thank God for the nostepinne and the yarn winder!

Funny. I used to be the little tween hothead who plugged the new Betamax directly into the 220v socket without reading the manual and promptly fried it. I could list down everything I've done in that nature when I was younger and more foolish. Have I grown up? When confronted with a morass of crochet cotton that looks like the instant mami you could eat after three minutes in boiling water, I set to work unravelling, unknotting and winding with a single-minded focus for at least 30 minutes. Now that's a long time for most people. I could leave it, go to work, and return to it after dinner and not go to sleep until everything's just right. It's so nice to wake up to neat, usable balls of yarn. OK, that sounds OC, but if I don't impose some kind of order in my yarn wilderness I can't move on to my next project. It's a different kind of satisfaction.

Now I can face myself in the mirror and say: You've bitten off more than you can chew, so at this point take a look at your work and see if you can finish it. You might end up hating the project and go off knitting altogether. You don't want that. You don't want that. Just rip it up and do it all over again. (Somehow the prospect of doing things over sparks my interest in the project afresh!)

Of course this sort of thing only works if you really enjoy something and want to keep at it for the long term. And I really, really want to keep on knitting. Especially as I just bought some inexpensive made in China bamboo straight needles! Photos later. More knitting coming up.