The opposite of knitting...

For what was meant to be a knitting blog, there's been a conspicuous lack of knitting posts lately, and that's because there's been a lack of knitting in my life.  In fact, it's actually worse than that, there's been a lot of the very opposite of knitting - frogging.

First up - my Marin.  I was knitting this for a friend of mine - her birthday is in September and I thought I'd get an early start on it (given my mojo lately, it might get to her in about 2 birthdays time)... I had been plodding along on it at a steady pace around Christmas time, then I put it down and it went into my knitting bin (which is literally a tiny purple wheely bin) for a while.  Then I picked it up again when I was visiting Canberra and was lucky enough to snag a knit date with my favourite knitting companion. Ahh it was bliss...

We spent a few hours happily knitting away... I felt the Marin was starting to look a little strange but didn't think much of it until I got back to Sydney and was re-reading parts of the pattern to find where I was up to and I saw this:

I had totally forgotten to do that after I'd started back on this project after it's hiatus.  There was just nothing to be done but to rip it. So I ripped..

And ripped...

Until it was just a ball again...

As heartbreaking as ripping back the Marin was, this next project was even HARDER to rip back...

D's sweater is something I've been working on for literally, YEARS and for a while, I've known that it's not really working out.  In fact, I blogged about it here.   The pattern is not clear, I'd done a tonne of mods but hadn't kept a good record of them, and the whole thing was looking really "off".  But I've had the thing in hiatus for ages and so on D's birthday, I pulled it out to have a look at it and my heart sank.  I just couldn't keep knitting on a project that I didn't think would work.  So, with a heavy heart, I decided that this huge pile of knitting had to go.

I immediately went on to Ravelry (where I'm "stealthknits" by the way), and found a sweater pattern by a reputable designer that a tonne of other Ravelers had knit (successfully!) and seemed to be something D would wear: Brownstone by Jared Flood.  Within 15 minutes of deciding to stop knitting on the original sweater, I had picked the pattern, bought the pattern and had cast on for the sleeve.  It's going well and I'll share some progress pics soon...

But I just don't have the heart to rip the original sweater.  There will come a time that I have to rip it out so I can use the yarn - but until then, I think I might just leave it the way it is...

XOXO
Bee