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Oct 20, 2014

The Winding Road

Lately it feels as if I'm knitting a great deal but making little headway. This feeling is part reality and part perception.

The reality? Recent FOs include the Oyster Bay shawl, Wineberry shawl, fluted ridge cloth and Twegen Coffee afghan.

The perception? At the moment, most of my knitting time is focused on finding the right stash yarn for my newest knitting addiction, shawls.

For me "finding" means experimenting, and experimenting means swatching. This is just one of the many yarn combinations I've tested:


All this swatching has kept me busy:



The small ovals show the handful of color and yarn combinations that made it to the photo stage. The larger ovals show the two swatches promising enough to pursue: One turned into the Dojeling Wineberry and the other one is the Blackberry shawl.

None of the test swatches were fatally flawed, but it consistently took at least three tries to land on a color, weight and fiber combination that prompted that crucial "must knit this" reaction.

These twists and turns are a familiar part of the knitting journey, but it's a process others rarely see and may not understand. 

We're knit-knit-knitting but making little visible progress, because we're traveling a long and winding road.


UPDATE

7 comments:

  1. I do the same thing! Lots of knitting, sometimes not a lot of forward progress ... but it's an important part of the process ; )

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  2. wow, that is a lot of irons in the fire! lovely combos

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  3. Swatching makes all the difference, after all knitting is as much about the texture, the colours and drape as it is the process.

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  4. Ah, so that's what I need to do... :0)

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  5. Love all your colour combinations, but the one you settled on is gorgeous.

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  6. I'm awful about swatching. All of your color combos are beautiful. Hopefully one of these swatches will inspire you.

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-b