Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Frog One, Knit One

I have begun working on one of my crafty resolutions - to go through all the unfinished projects lurking in the shadows and either finish 'em or frog 'em.

First up - the spiral motif shawl that I started years ago. I bought the yarn at my very first MS&W but I just couldn't find a pattern that did the yarn justice. Even with the spiral motifs, the pattern was lost and the yarn didn't look good.

But I wanted it to work, so I just kept making the motifs, trying to convince myself that the finished project would be so much better. Denial lead me to create 7 large motifs that when pieced together, still looked awful. So into the bag the motifs and leftover yarn went and in the bag they sat, waiting for the right pattern.

I finally found that pattern at last year's MS&W when at the same booth I first acquired the yarn, I saw it hanging on the wall - the most beautiful knitted wrap in a plain garter stitch using very large needles.

I had my idea, but I didn't have the time last year to act on it, so the boucle sat untouched for many more months until...

Two weekends ago (before snowmaggedon), I started poking around the craft room, trying to visualize how the new cabinet I ordered would look (more on that in a separate post). I saw the bag of beautiful boucle and decided right then and there to frog it. There was some swearing as the boucle loops were knotting themselves together as I tried to rip out the stitches. Some inches of yarn were lost to knots and breakages but I salvaged almost all of it. The small balls of yarn were a marked improvement over the motifs.

Then I pulled out the giant knitting needles I bought in Ireland and cast on. So far, here's what I've got:

Red Boucle Shawl 02

More photos and details on Ravelry. So far, so good. It's fast going and I love the way it looks and feels. I probably could have used slightly smaller needles - but I'll save that experiment for the other skein of boucle I have in blues and greens.