knitabit

Mindless knitting - so I thought...

I haven't knit in so long, I thought it would be good to get back in the swing of things with something easy. So I found this Kaffe Fassett pillow kit in my knitting closet. It was a free gift with a subscription to Rowan knitting magazine a couple of years ago.

It's plain stockinette, but the color patterning is intarsia (click on link for appropriate sound effect). How bad could it be?

The pattern calls for double strands of yarn. The tumbling blocks have four repeats, so I needed four balls each of double-stranded yarn for each color. The yarn in the kit came in hanks, so I had to wind each hank into eight balls, and then combine the balls in pairs to make double stranded yarn. There are seven separate colors in the pillow. Do the math - that's a lot of annoying ball-winding.

Here it is, about ten rows into it. I hate it already. Note that I'm using little strips of velcro to hold the yarn balls together.

I'm having a lot of problems lately with knitting projects that aren't satisfying.

I hate the sock that I'm knitting because I can't remember the twisting pattern when I don't work on it for days at a time.

I hate the baby sweater that's not done yet because I need to use a sewing machine to apply the trim.

I hate the fair isle sweater I worked on last winter because doing a fair isle sleeve in the round is brutal, brutal I tell you. It's a lovely sweater, however.

I need to chuck all this crap into the closet and get out some simple worsted weight yarn and knit myself a simple sweater. I've got this pattern lying around, and some yarn that would work with it:

Sadly, the yarn I would use for this is in hanks, not balls, so that poses yet another dilemma.