Sometimes it takes me a long time to get from "oh, that looks like an interesting knit" to "hey, I have finished knitting that thing." Kate Davies published her Sheep Carousel tea cozy pattern way back in 2012. She offered a free pattern to newsletter subscribers a few years later, and I picked that one as my freebie. But I didn't cast it on until June of last year, and I am still not quite finished.
I've done all the knitting, but I still have to tack down my steek facings and weave in the ends. The picture shows the unblocked version. Those sheep are already less wonky as I type this post.
I found the fun:drudgery ratio fairly unfavorable for this project. I wanted to learn how to work those Latvian braids, but they are a pain. I don't love stranded colorwork with long floats, but you can probably tell just by looking that there are a bunch of long floats in this project. And applied I-cord is the most boring form of knitting. You have to pay attention, so you can't, like, read to a child at the same time because she will complain that you are paying too much attention to your knitting. But it's so slow and repetitive that if you're not careful your brain might melt and slide out of your skull, like that guy at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark only internally and without the ideological concerns.
The third of my three Colourwork Club parcels landed in my mailbox at the beginning of the month. This project is mittens, but not just any mittens. They have a tricky Estonian braided cast-on (I was a little worried when Ysolda herself said the cast-on took her a few tries), an afterthought thumb, an optional flip-top, and an I-cord button loop. Oh, and a contrasting lining!
As with the other club projects, the yarn is really nice. It's a toothy Norwegian yarn, DK weight for the exterior of the mittens and light fingering for the lining. The opportunity to play with new Norwegian yarns has been one of the most fun parts of the club membership. I wasn't expecting to enjoy the colors and textures quite as much as I have. Even in this kit, the neutral kit, I find the colors deeply pleasing -- the golden brown in particular is a rich toasty color, like pumpkin bread. I almost want to eat it (ed. note: but maybe that's just because I was drafting this paragraph at 10:25pm on Good Friday).
There was a glitch somewhere in the pattern-writing, and it caused the color-coding to be reversed across most but not all of the print pattern. So technically I was supposed to make the mittens with a silver background for the palm and a black background for the back of the hand, but I did it the other way around. I am not too worried that the knitting police will smite me for failing to read the fine print.
It seems a little less pressing to finish these mittens as the temperatures rise, but on the other hand it's nice to have a portable project for warmer days. The last time I made a pair of Ysolda mitts it took me months to finish them because there were so many stinking details there at the end. So here's hoping that either these are less fiddly or that my level of motivation is higher. So far my experience of the pandemic is not characterized by an abundance of motivation, but I suppose we'll see how it goes.
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