Spring Celebration Wrap

This was a long time in the making but now that it's done, I think it was worth the effort.  I bought the yarn, and I think the pattern as well, on my last birthday.  August 11.  I worked away at this until sometime in October when one of my dogs gave the yarn a good shake and the yarn cake exploded.

This was a mental setback more than anything as I couldn't bear the thought of having to untangle 350 meters of lace weight yarn.  So it was packed up and put into a bag where I could forget about it and focus on the Christmas knitting where I turned out three more scarves, a cowl and two pairs of socks.

Then on a long break over Christmas I decided to get this out and see how much damage the dog did.  It took just over an hour to wind everything back up and get it all sorted again.  I worked away on this for a while and got to the point where I thought "OK, just one and a half more repeats (60 rows) and you'll be done".  Except it was two and a half repeats.  100 rows.  I don't really know why, but that was crushing.  I stopped again and knit another scarf, learning how to add beads while I was at it, and two more pairs of socks.  It was about this time that I dubbed the scarf "the Never-Ending Stole" and it was about five minutes after that that I realized that if I never worked on it, of course it would never be done.

So I got it out again and plodded along but found it hard to focus - not a good thing when knitting lace.  Frequent breaks were necessary but I'd find myself cruising through Ravelry to see what else I wanted.  My company's new office space is considerably cooler than the last location so I wanted fingerless mitts.  I went stash diving and found some lovely worsted weight wool that would be perfect and found a pattern that I thought would work well with the yarn.

But that wasn't getting the stole done.

I've never really lost the drive to finish something and I don't really know what the problem was here.  It isn't a boring pattern, but neither is it difficult.  You do need to pay attention but it's easy enough that you can watch TV without making mistakes. I plodded on with it.

And then, on the second day of spring, it was done.  I put it aside until the weekend when I could have good light to do the grafting.

In celebration of the arrival of Spring, I'm called this Spring Celebration Wrap.

Happy Spring.