With the Christmas season approaching at the speed of light, I was pleased with myself for having adopted the 'dot system' developed by my friend
Joan Hamer. Along with a bunch of other helpful schtuff on her website, one can find Joan's 'red dot system', designed to help take control of the UFO's that appear to be taking over our lives, if not our woollie rooms.
Having said that, I was right on track last Tuesday; and I finally finished this sweater for my little friend Spencer. Having ripped out each sleeve three times, I was psychologically ready to be done with this project before my fingers were able to make it physically happen.
So, I determined that I
would finish the sweater Tuesday night (last)...which, I did. (Let the crowds go wild).....There, in all this wild and festive celebration, I victoriously turned the sweater right side out and held it out to admire, ignoring, of course, the straggling strings that I knew still needed to be woven in. Well, kind of like in the picture, I had to squint and turn my head this way and that to wonder............whaaaaa?????????
....so I squinted some more and bobbled some more and looked a little closer.........
...and Son of a Gun (and a few of his closest friends as well)
balls of yarn. Being that it was all of 8:30 pm, and my coping skills were apparently not all that they could be...I announced to my husband that I was either going to be ill or going to bed; because I simply couldn't even think about this without feeling physically ill. Nonetheless, I went to bed considering edging and embellishment, while not feeling very encouraged by either, knowing that this is not a design that lends itself to whimsy and embellishment. It was not a pretty night for this churning stomach....
HOWEVER, a little background to this horrid story is that I started visiting a local yarn store probably last year, which has turned out to be a wonderful source of not only inspiration, but instruction. The owner is an incredibly intelligent woman, whom I greatly admire for not only the way her head works.....is constantly working...., but as well for her very generous way of sharing her years and years of experience. So when I awakened the next morning with the idea that I could simply remove the stripe from the sweater, I told my husband that I believed that I must have been visited by the muse of Susan A, the owner of this shop. I am quite sure that no other person would have inspired me somewhere along the way to have come up with the otherwise INSANE notion that I could simply remove this stripe and reknit the 'off' portion.
What had the night before been a sick and dismal feeling immediately turned into the thrill of knowing that I was going to be forced by need to learn a skill that I not only do not have (grafting), but otherwise would not have made myself learn, atleast at this point in time. So I visited her on Saturday with horror in hand; and God love her, but she spent the next 3 hours not only showing me how, but separating the sweater and re-situating each end on waste yarn and needles for me to reknit and take back to her for learning to re-graft.
Is that cool, or WHAT!!! The bottom is now reknit, and my next couple of hours are scheduled for knitting a swatch to practice my grafting skills on. I will take these back to Susan on Saturday, when she will teach me the tricks of grafting that she has accumulated over the years. I have no doubt that she will get me on track to getting this little friend back together in seamless form.
I wish everyone the gift of a mentor who is so ready and willing to share their skills so freely. I am sure that I will attribute some of my finest skills to Susan for the rest of my life. I will certainly pass along the skills to others and make sure that the recipient knows of the incredible woman who shared them with me.
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