Tuesday 13 October 2009

A Crisis of Confidence

I sat down on Sunday morning and began to knit.  Yes, yes I do this every Sunday but I was working on something I have thought a lot about.  

I've not been given to knit with fuzzy yarns, but lately, there are mohair things of great beauty showing up everywhere.  My current obsession is from Sally Melville's Mother Daughter Knits.  The Classic Mohair Shirt   Sigh  I love this project.  I love the idea of this project, and from the moment I saw it, I began to hatch a plan to knit one.  


I found a yarn, Phildar's Phil Light.  It is a 100% nylon yarn, but it is soft, isn't going to itch and I love its muted colours. They are so muted they are almost not colours at all, just a hint of the colour to come in each strand of yarn.

I calculated for the changes I needed, I knit and then I recalculated, and though it is telling me it ought to be just fine, I am sitting here unsure of it.  I am suffering from a crisis of confidence in my yarn and my math skills (deserved) and my ability to measure.  You know how it is.  The measuring tape will lie.  Gauge will lie.  The yarn might even lie, though this seems to mannerly a yarn to ever do so.  I really really want this one to turn out.    

I think I need to step back and think, and calm my mind, set it to order.  If the math is right, and the gauge is on, and the knitting looks good, you must let it go and just knit, right?  So I knit on this, a sock in Australian Merino, 



and I knit on this, Ilga Leja's Cafe Capelet, in Woobu from Blue Moon.

I knit on a few other things too, but I need to save them for tomorrow.  

While I knit these alternate things, I planned, and thought and decided.  I decided I'm going to set aside the mohair yarn for now, and do up the same project in a different yarn of the same gauge.  This different yarn is going to be a yarn that I can take apart and knit a humdred times if I need to. When I am confident in the changes I must make, I will knit the mohair.    

So Tuesday is for spinning, but it is also for stash diving.      




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