Willpower Isn't The Problem

It's won't-power, as in "I won't start another project". Hah!

It's not as though I haven't been a good little multi-tasker and made all sorts of progress - I have! I'm almost at the shoulders on my cardigan, 

and more than halfway to the centre front knot on the pullover - and I'm so loving the yarn.  It's all I want in a wool yarn: soft, spongey, lofty and knits up evenly. 

Actually, I rather like the pattern too, as I think it's fairly forgiving. (Confession time: I didn't swatch. I guessed. This is not uncommon for me). If my gauge were too small, I could easily add a border along the bottom for length and extend the vee neck, making it deeper, to ensure that the cable/knot which lies front and centre is positioned correctly. Since the width is controlled by working outwards toward the side seams, that's easily adjustable too. Obviously a hugely large gauge is rather more limiting, but from the photos, this is intended to be a fairly loose sweater, and anyway if I had serious gauge doubts, I might have swatched. Probably would have. Perhaps.

The thing is, I'm tired of cables and I need colour.  Yes, I know, the sludge thing and all, but sludge absolutely does not imply either absence or singularity of colour, it merely indicates the type of colours I like. Sometimes you just need lots of them. This I learned from Deb Menz: there's no such thing as too much colour. She's right, you know.

You certainly can't have too much colour in a single yarn. More is definitely better, and right now, I'm going to go into the Madame Futura business: I predict that these bobbins, when plied, will make a yarn that I will want to knit with, and you might too.  Want to knit with. (Yes, I dangled both of them on purpose).

Here's my thinking.  The two complete bobbins were spun from pencil rovings dyed by Judy Jackson. In the skein (pencil rovings often come in skeins, hanks, or whatever you prefer to call those twisty things), they both looked murky, edgy-cool with a bit of fire. The first turned out rather bluer than I'd expected, less purple (the purple was on my hands. For a day or two. I don't believe it's a Bad Permanent Crocking Issue so much as an over-saturation issue that will resolve when I finish - i.e. wash - the yarn). The second turned out to have more white on the bobbin than I'd have guessed, or desired, come to that. Also orange, which paled in the spinning, and greenish, ditto.

So given a bobbin with lots of white and a bobbin with lots of dark, the perfect bridge will have some colour, not too saturated, not too pale, containing at least some colours from each of the two existing bobbins and a few extra for interest, right? What on earth possessed me to buy merino roving dyed easter egg colours (as usual I'm suffering from Poor Photography, so what you see as blue is in fact lavender, and the orange is more, as is the green. More orange, more green, respectively), I'll never know, but I'm glad I did and am betting on my imagined excellent colour sense that this will work. Of course, if it doesn't, there's no defeat of any sort because I Can Always Dye.

Anyway, back to my weakness. The latest weakness.

A swirly pentagon. Soon I'll have five more. Then I'll knit on a collar that is higher in the back than in the front, and then I'll start working ziggy-zaggy in the round, increasing at an appropriate tempo until I reach a suitable armhole depth, at which point body and sleeves will go their separate ways. I will probably not even shoot for any sort of colour congruity after The Great Divide, because I'm aiming for, quite frankly, a mess of colour. If I'm in the mood (read "bored") I may insert some squares in the zig-zags. It'll be fun.

In reality, I'm going to rip this one out because the yarn around the outer edge is a tad too thick and crocks badly (I should only ever indigo dye with professionals, no matter how much fun I think I'm having with with my friends), and I want to do something more organic with the colour striping. And I haven't blocked and measured but it might be too big. It's my swatch, dammit!

At this point I should say that my delusions of grandeur extend to multiple self-styled titles of royalty: I'm also The Queen Of Small Amounts. I'd rather sample than rule out or make large commitments, so I'm perfectly happy buying single ounces of fiber. Sometimes three oddies might conjoin to become a 3-ply yarn, but I have no problem ending up with one-ounce balls of yarn either. I also hate to waste all the yummy samples from SOAR workshops, which (if they're really tiny and in unspun format) I might combine on the carder, or else just find a use for those few odd yards of silk boucle or navajo-plied soy silk or Judith's Very Own buffalo or that nasty ingeo by which I will NEVER EVER be tempted again. For example.

What this means is that I have a goodly selection of small amounts of coordinating yarns that will get thrown into the mix randomly, leading to the above-mentioned mess of colour.

Unless I change my mind or get distracted, of course.

Don't laugh.