It's Only Fun After It's Done

They tell you about the road to hell. They tell you about it very early in life and it gets repeated in the knitting life. It is paved with all that good intention stuff. You are looking to do a project and you say to yourself: 'Self, make some squares out of stash yarn and when you get enough of them just sew them together and make an afghan. That would be cool.'
You know how the conversation goes and you get yourself all kinds of excited because this is a culmination of a bunch of knitting stuff.

First, there's knitting/crocheting: just the very act of it makes us giddy with delight and we are enthusiastic about what will becoming off the hooks and needles.

Second, using the stash. There's a love/hate relationship with the stash - you love to have one, you hate to use yarn out of it because then there would be no more stash and you love your stash but using the stash means going to the LYS or yarn section of the craft store to buy more yarn ( GOOD!!) and refresh/renew the stash - and we love that.

Third, the creativity - every square can be different. We can experiment with stitches and colors and mixing fibers together and almost anything goes because if you rim the square and then the entire afghan with an unifying color then the whole thing comes together and if it doesn't you can get away with it by calling it rustic.

It all sounds really good - and it probably really is - but what they don't tell you; what they save and make you discover for yourself is that there are details - details that you will have to deal with. "Oh, yes, all those squares will have ends you have to do something with." "You will have to sew or learn to crochet them together", "You will have to watch carefully so you match things up just so..." They don't tell you that and I think they leave it out on purpose. It's a test to see if you really belong in the crafter's circle. All craft genres have their little quirks that the crafter has to deal with. The very first person who discovered he had to deal with a yarn end decided not to tell the next person because he wanted them to have that unique experience for themselves and the when the second person discovered he too had to sew in an end, went to the first guy and said,"Dude."

To which the first guy replied," Yeah, I know." and the code was made. When women started to get into the guilds, you know they didn't share the code with them. So now, this discovery is something of a rite of passage but we never really learn it. We forgive the process because we like the end result. For all the swear words we say while we are making our projects as soon as the delivery is over we fall in love and forget about the pain that was with us just moments before.

We even look forward to the next one that's how sick we are. So, this one moves from the WIP to the complete pile. Now there are four WIPs in the hopper and I don't see a completion date in the pike for any of those and I'm looking two weeks down the road. I am running into a little snag with the biased crochet afghan and I hope I am working it correctly considering every row has a color change and this is the third time starting it. If it doesn't work, then all those color changes will become a granny square afghan. Hmmm, now I don't know what to hope for.