Last year I learned to knit. I wanted to knit a baby blanket for my new niece, and there is a knitting group at work. We meet every other week, and knit and gossip. So the baby blanket was a bad idea, because it was taking forever before I’d see progress. I never finished it; it’s still in my desk at work. I could see I probably wasn’t going to finish, so I started on something easier – a scarf. I ended up making something like 8 scarves and a couple of hats for Christmas. Not bad at all!
This year I’ve discovered I make a lot more progress when I knit with others, because when it’s just up to me I procrastinate. I was going to make a few scarves and a hat for coworkers this year. I figured it would be a cinch after everything I made last year. The mistake I made was I let the first person pick their own yarn and pattern. I had a ton of yarn at work, opened the drawer, and told them to pick what they wanted. Then I looked up free patterns on ravelry.com with that sort of yarn. As my luck would have it, the chosen pattern wasn’t fast or easy. Usually you can just straight knit a scarf, and it goes quickly because you don’t really have a pattern that you have to track. Not this time.
For people unfamiliar with knitting, the smaller the number on the needles, the smaller the needle. In the past, I’ve made scarves on size 35 needles. We’re talking huge honking needles. The needles for this scarf are 6. Bigger needles make fatter knit. When you combine the size of the needles and my tendency to procrastinate, it equals “OH CRAP! THIS WILL NEVER BE DONE BY CHRISTMAS”.
Tonight I got to it. An online friend was knitting as well, so we checked on each other along the way. Hubby timed me to see how long it took to do one row in the pattern. Based on the time and approximate number of rows that still need to be done, I think this scarf will be completed in 2012. OK, not really, but if I keep at it steadily it’s going to take another 8.5 hours. Last year I could make at least two scarves and a hat in that time!
Lesson learned: NEVER let the recipient pick out their own pattern & yarn. Period. Also, find more friend who knit!
Her Voice 