Well, do you remember this thing?
Elann's Moonlight Sonata in RYC Kidsilk Haze. It's bigger than it was in this photo, but I dropped it like a hot rock for Mystery Stole 4 and the Whispering Pines shawl. I could do that without guilt because MS4 has a set time period and Whispering Pines was a Christmas present. But, now that those obstacles are out of the way, I have WIP guilt.
No big deal, right? I'll just finish it and then I'll be done and I'll be happy and can move on.
Except, there's just one thing. I HATE it. Not so much the way it looks, though it doesn't inspire me the way the sample photo does. But I really, really hate knitting it, and I think it's mostly the yarn's fault. For one thing, the color is too dark; I let my romantic fancy run away with me and the idea of knitting Moonlight Sonata in a color called "Nightly" just really appealed to me. For another - it's just a little tough to work with for the level of stitch manipulation that's required in this shawl.
And, just to add insult to injury, there's a dropped stitch in the middle of one of the sunspot thingies several repeats back. normally, this would not be a big deal; I would get a crochet hook and fix it. But the problem is, it appears to have been dropped from a decrease, so there's no where to ladder it up TO. I'm really not sure what to do about it. I have a few options:
1. Rip back to it and fix it, and accept that I am going to have to be knitting on this thing that much longer. To this, I have one word to say: Mohair.
2. Drop selected stitches down and drive myself crazy with the fiddly madness of unding and then redoing all those stitches. This is not an appealing option to me, since the motion of the pattern would make identifying the correct stitches to drop difficult and annoying. Also, mohair. The fact that this dropped stitch is still sitting in the middle of its sunspot while I
3. Snip the yarn at the top tip of the sunspot, right at the spot where you knit numerous stitches together (which is probably where the trouble began in the first place, undo only the sunspot stitches, redo them while somehow holding on to the snipped thread (the mohair works in my favor this time), and then felt the snipped spot together again. Fiddly, and slightly dangerous, but theoretically possible. It frightens me that this is the most appealing of my options.
4. Use a tiny piece of the yarn to tie the loose stitch into place, and count on the fuzzy, felty stickyness of mohair to both keep the knot from untying and hide the lump. This is the second most appealing of my options, and while the previous option is certainly possible, it is kind of scary.
Then, there's option 5, which is to throw my hands up and call the whole thing a wash. And, honestly, I really think the only thing that has kept me from doing that is knowing that this yarn is expensive and frogging it will be hell.
I am generally not an advocate of knitting a project that you don't like. There's too many other things I would rather be doing (Swan Lake!). In fact, the other day I felt like knitting lace and I was so turned off by the idea of working on this shawl that I went upstairs and got out MS4 and worked on that instead. Since that is also a UFO and I didn't feel guilty about working on it the way I would have felt guilty starting something new. (actually, this turned out to be a good thing, since some time away bled away some of the ill feeling I had towards the center of the stole, and I am now able to think rationally about how I will change it to make me happy, which means I may actually finish the thing).
I'm kept from a chronic case of startitis by this wierd little timer in my brain, which arbitrarily decides when I have been working on something too long and flips a switch that means I feel guilty starting something new until I finish that item. There is also some OCD part of my brain that doesn't like seeing too many WIPs in a row on my Ravelry project page. I'm okay as long as I am knitting items that take up different types of knitting time - I have TV knitting (sweater, hemlock ring) and exercise bike knitting (attempting to get a pair of plain socks started but can't find the right needle size) and I have travel knitting (Carribean socks) and I have fiddly lace knitting ($@@#$ sonata) and as long as I don't have too many projects competing for time, I am happy and content. If I start 3 fiddly lace things at once I am destined for gloom and despair at how long it's taking me to finish, and if I start too many TV things at once I get bored, etc.
So, this project is clearly weighing on me and I am clearly avoiding it, which says to me, that I shouldn't knit it. But, if I decide not to knit it, then I have to frog all that mohair or cut the ball and call it a loss. But, if I keep going, I may never knit lace again out of sheer frustration.
Maybe what I ought to do is go find out what else I can knit with four (or three and a half, if I don't frog) balls of kid mohair that WOULD make me happy. Then I can lay the pattern aside, because I do really like the sample photo and in another yarn I do think it would be quite pretty and not so frustrating to knit.
****
In other news I didn't make it to the bead store last night even though I was in the area, because I am silly and read the hours for their other location instead of the one for the location I was at. I did look at some of the beads I have at home, because I do have some white and neutral beads that miiiiight work, maybe.
I got a very handsome offer on yesterday's blog post from Angela for beads, so that's something to explore. Angela, I'll be in touch! ::phone fingers::
*****ETA: Seascape may be a winner...Moonlight sonata, your days may be numbered!
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