I took yesterday off as a vacation day from work, planning a magical, 4-day weekend bursting with creative accomplishments and getting so! much! work! done!
Hahahaha. I should have known that my anticipation was inviting folly.
I spent all of Thursday night and much of yesterday knitting and ripping out swatches for design submissions that just weren't working. I finally got one success, then decided to revisit my yellow Fyberspates Vivacious DK summer WIP. I pulled it out, knit two rows, then looked down and realized: what the fuck am I making?
There's nothing WRONG with this, I just...don't like it.
If you get my weekly newsletter, this week's was about wardrobe planning. I've been reading as many resources on this as I can get my hands on, because I do want to have a more thoughtful, cohesive wardrobe (including the handmade elements.) I quoted Karen Templer who said:
I’ve long followed that rule about not buying anything if I can’t immediately put together three outfits with it, using only things I already own. And yet that has never applied to my knitting.
Lightbulb lightbulb lightbulb! I have a lot of handknit pieces, design samples included, that I just don't wear because they're not...me. I love the idea of them but I don't love wearing them.
I started this yellow number before that lightbulb moment and well, I'm just not going to wear a short sleeve open front cardigan with a chevron and bobble hem detail. No matter how cute it looks above, or how cute it will look when I'm finished. I have not gone through my wardrobe and thought, "I need a short sleeve wool cardigan." That gap doesn't exist.
I consider myself to be a happy marriage between a process knitter and a product knitter. I have to like the process enough to stick with it, but I also need to want that FO to keep my going as my carrot on the stick. The yarn looks great knitted at this firm gauge, but I'm not enjoying working stockinette at this gauge, with this yarn and these needles, and I really have no use for this style of garment.
So I'm putting this in time out until I decide what's a better use for the yarn. Knitting as a business means I don't get much time to knit for pleasure, so I want my business knitting to be as pleasurable as possible. It's taken me a few years to get to this realization. I would kill myself knitting things I hated process-wise for the sake of the deadline, and yeah, the end result would look amazing in the magazine photos. But then as a result, I hated knitting.
I don't want to hate knitting.