Fiber Monday - Unknitting

Let's start with the fun item. I am nearly done weaving the warp on my floor loom. I finished the gamp and am now playing around with different colors to see how they work with the yellow. One thing I quickly learned when I started weaving is that colors by themselves do not look the same as they do when woven. I find it to be tricky to try to imagine what any two colors will look like together. So I'm taking advantage of the extra warp to experiment. Here is my current color weft which is a dark grey.

I'm using the same treadling pattern for the entire color and I think I mentioned that I'm going to try to make zippered bags out of each color. I love how easy it is to see the twill patterns with the dark grey against the yellow. Before the grey I used a bright pink which you can see just a little bit of down at the bottom. I'm pretty sure I will finish weaving this in the next couple of days. 

Now on the the not-so-fun item. You know that I spent the winter spinning the yarn for a cardigan and had begun knitting it. The back of the cardigan went great. I moved onto the left side, which in theory should have taken far less time than the back since it was half the size. It has now taken at least three times as long mainly because I haven't been working on it as much. It wasn't for lack of desire to knit, but because somewhere along the line I had made an error, didn't notice it at first, and kept knitting. Then I realized it, was annoyed, decided to ignore it and try to fix it later, and kept knitting. Except that I didn't keep knitting. I didn't like how it was looking and didn't want to spend time working on it. I knew deep down that the right thing would be to unknit it back to the error and do it correctly.

Boy, I hate unknitting.

At the last minute I threw it all into my bag to take to Arizona, where it continued to sit for a few days. One afternoon when there was nothing I needed to do, I took a deep breath and realized that I would never have the same sort of extended uninterrupted silence to do the unknitting and repairing, so got it all out and ripped out the rows that I needed to. 

The whole process, while not fun, probably took less than an hour. I figured out what I did wrong. (I when picking up extra purl stitches I didn't twist them so it created huge holes, for the knitters among you.). Then I reknit everything I took out. It looks much, much better and I'm not avoiding it like I was before. Here is what I have now.

I probably have a couple more inches of the twisted cable section to knit before I start shaping the shoulder. It is a relief and I'm glad I took the time to make it right rather than ignoring it. Plus, I now understand the process of adding in stitches much better than before. 

I'm sure there are probably many broader life lessons from all of this, but you will have to think of them for yourselves. I stayed up far too late last night finishing a mystery and am not thinking overly clearly.