Some people are yarn whisperers. I don’t remember where I first read the term, but the generally accepted definition seems to be: people to whom yarn speaks. It tells them what it wants to be and they go on to knit projects of intricate beauty in a perfect blending of material and pattern. Now I’ve never personally been to a yarn store and heard a skein going “Hey mate! Blimey, I’d be ever so chuffed if you could make me into a pair of lacy legwarmers and no mistake.” Because yarn, like most things, becomes twice as awesome with a fake British accent. I sometimes hear a voice in yarn stores saying it wouldn’t be a crime if I broke in at night and rolled around in the cashmere so long as I didn’t take anything and maybe dusted the shelves before I left. It’s the same voice that tells me to argue with people complaining about the disagree-button on Ravelry, so I know it’s best to ignore it.
I wonder if there is a word for people like me. I buy yarn and it will try to beat me into utter submission with a blunt object. But since I don’t speak its language, I do not know what it is trying to tell me and eventually, I have to admit defeat. I struggled like this with the Schoppel Turandot that would not work for anything. (Incidentally, how has no one else on Rav stashed this yarn yet? Despite my complete failure, I still think it was rather nice.) Eventually I gave it away – after making a sort of ok-ish hat to retain some knitterly pride.
Today I had to surrender to another yarn. It’s strange because I love Miro - it’s machine washable, it’s a cotton blend, it’s reasonably cheap, especially since I live near the factory outlet. But I think the point has come where I have to admit that Miro and I, we just don’t get along. We got off to a bad start when I decided that a newsboy cap was a perfectly reasonable item to knit. After all, I don’t think the only right a hat has to exist is to keep my ears warm and I am clearly an orphan boy in a Dickens novel. So yeah, my first Miro knit gathered dust for two years before I finally ripped it to make baby hats. (I’ve realized now that making baby hats is my version of throwing a yarn away.)
I bought the green Miro at the same time as the brown and to be honest, I didn’t even love the colour then. But it was on sale for something like 15 bucks for 10 skeins and I was still a pretty new knitter who hadn’t yet realized that yarn stores will gladly store (hence the name) the stash for you until you actually need it and that there wasn’t any real risk of the yarn supply running out in the foreseeable future. Anyway, I bought it even though the colour was something I can only describe as “depressed moss” and it even became my first sweater. It also became my first frogged sweater. I blame my poor choice of pattern. I didn’t really understand them at the time, but I think I should have noticed that horizontal slits probably don’t make for very comfortable armholes. Or that my failed Turandot projects came from the same book of patterns and clearly, nothing in there worked for my particular brand of curvy. Well, I’m nothing if not resistant to insight, so my next project was Juliana. Again, this is something I think looks beautiful, but I would never pick it out in a clothing store and I have nothing in my wardrobe that remotely matches it. But I found it before the whole rectangle with two sleeves = cardigan became popular and it looked so good on the mannequin, so it would look good on me, right? Now, I’m not only curvy in weird places, I’m also quite tall. That means I need a loooong scarf-with-sleeves to wrap a sufficient part of my torso. Which means I’d need about twenty strategically placed shawl pins to hold something like Juliana in place. I don’t own a singly shawl pin. On a positive note, I didn’t have to knit the whole thing to realize it wouldn’t work – only about half of it. See? Progress!
This April I decided that the problem with my pound of dying-Kermit-coloured yarn was in fact its colour. I’m no Lady Gaga, I can’t pull off frog genocide as a style choice! So I went and dyed it all black.
Before.
After.
It did become horribly entangled in the washing machine and untangling all of it was probably the most satisfaction this yarn has given me to this day.
Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a sure sign of insanity. But my yarn was black now! Surely, knitting a third sweater was the right thing to do! My third Miro sweater was Spring Fling. It’s a cute little cropped cardigan and up to that point, Knitty patterns had never not worked for me. I feel I repeat myself here, but I don’t own a single cropped cardigan, cute or otherwise. In fact, when extra long shirts became fashionable a couple of years back, I thought it was the best trend EVAR! and threw out all my old pullovers which didn’t provide at least 50% butt-coverage. I also think cropped cardigans only really work with dresses. (HA! I do have dresses! I just never wear them.)
The body of my Spring Fling had been done for a while and after completing all my Nerd Wars projects last month I decided to finally do the sleeves. It only took me 75% of the sleeves to realize that I had made the armholes way, way too big (clearly, I’m still compensating for my first sweater experience) and that I would basically end up with a cropped kimono if I wanted sleeves that fit.
So that’s it. Moss-coloured, black Miro, you have finally beaten me! I’m sure there’s a perfect pattern for you out there and even though you still hold up remarkably well after all the ripping and dying, I just can’t keep looking for it. I’ve learned a lot of things, mostly that I cannot be trusted to make sensible knitting choices and also that it is possible to feel personal resentment towards crafting supplies. I’ve already started on the first hat:
