ideaphoria

WHERE WAS I?

The week has passed by in a blur, and I've been too busy too blog. Let me pick up where I left off, last Wednesday evening just before Guild meeting, which was a celebration of the Guild's 20th anniversary. Many members of the founding and early boards were in attendance last Wednesday night, and they reminisced about those first few meetings.

For Show-and-Tell last week, people were invited to show what kinds of knitting they were doing, 20 years ago. Now, Seattle Knitters Guild is so big that, as a general rule, etiquette limits people to showing only finished items at Show-and-Tell. But for this 20th anniversary party, we made an exception, and allowed people to show items that weren't yet finished. The point being to show what kinds of knitting yarns and projects were popular, circa 1985.

About six finished Aran sweaters were shown -- timeless classics, all (and some very impressive examples of superb knitting!). A couple of color-blocked, intarsia'd, wide shouldered sweaters were shown, too. A local knitting teacher was wearing a short-sleeved, lacy cotton top that I would have sworn came out of the most recent Rowan magazine -- this turned out to be her own design, something she'd made 20 years ago. (And it fit her perfectly, still. Oh, to be that talented a knitter, and to keep my figure, too!)

In the midst of all of this, I was a nervous wreck to stand up and show my 20-year-old project. You see, in 1985, I was in graduate school at the University of Washington, and I got this bug about knitting myself a sweater. Prior to this, I'd knitted only headbands and scarves. But I was fearless, and chose a lace sweater, having no preconception that lace might be "hard." (I still don't believe that lace is difficult to knit.) I loved mohair, even back then. And so --

I knitted the front, the back --

one sleeve, and most of the next sleeve --

and then I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. I thought, This sweater isn't going to fit me now (having no idea how long it takes for a pregnancy to blossom). And so I put the sweater project away.

A couple of years later, I tried to finish it off. But I couldn't ever figure out where I was in the pattern, so I couldn't pick up where I'd left off on that unfinished sleeve. I had plenty of yarn, and tried to knit a whole new sleeve, but somehow have always managed to find fault with my beginner-level knitting and be disappointed in these sweater pieces and so it remains unfinished. During one household move, I had even asked my husband to take this project and the tote bag it was in to the dump -- but the next thing I knew, there was the project at the new house, strewn across the floor of the garage. Picked it up, expecting it to be drenched with motor oil, but it had miraculously escaped getting a speck on it. Seems I can never finish it, but never get rid of it, either. At the Guild meeting last Wednesday night, I wondered aloud what I might do with this UFO, and MaryB hollered out, "Make a vest!" Perhaps something like that lies in this yarn's future.

Since last Wednesday night's Guild meeting, my schedule has been full with taking Allegra to performances in her dance recital, and also visiting with my sister. I've had plenty of standing-in-line time, waiting for performances to start, and so I started knitting one of those perfectly portable projects, a sock. (It's for my sister, who chose the yarn colors.)

Yarn is Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, in the colors Cedar and Gold Hill. Pattern is from Betsy McCarthy's book, Knit Socks!

The Fall 2005 issue of Interweave Knits is now on sale at Two Swans Yarns! It's the magazine's biggest issue ever, with the wide variety of sweater, sock, and accessory patterns that you've come to know and love from this publication.

All for tonight -- tomorrow I'm driving down to the Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, Oregon, with Terri.

Posted by Karen at June 23, 2005 08:47 PM