Honey, You're Never Gonna Wear This...

My parents just got back from a little jaunt to the Southwest so we celebrated Mother's Day a week late. I was really tickled to be able to present the woman who taught me to knit with my first two cable projects, a pair of Irish hiking wristwarmers and Nakiska cabled headband.

I used Lion Brand Wool-Ease Worsted in oxford grey, very pretty for cable. (I also made this headband with the same yarn in black. It is very silly to bother cabling in black, I know. Very silly, you can't see the cables for squat.)

Now I'm working on an Irish hiking scarf using yarn I had leftover from my "Life" character baby blanket. I had SO much yarn left. I'd bought an extra skein, you know, "just in case" -- but it's a nice, soft, washable yarn in a wheat color, fortunately I like it enough for re-use. (Caron Simply Soft in Bone, inexpensive stuff actually, but has a nice sheen without that squeaky acrylic feel.)

Actually, I'd tried knitting up a little tank top with it first, this Asana tank. I had to completely recalculate the pattern for the yarn and my guage, plus, I'm really short-waisted. The sizing actually worked out okay -- EXCEPT, silly me, even though I read the pattern several times, I didn't realize the construction of the sweater involved folding the ALL three of the straps over in the back and fastening them with Velcro.

So by the time I finished all the knitting (and it looked really nice, lemme tell ya!) it dawned on me that I had all this extra strappage in the back. And since I was using a heavier yarn than the pattern called for (hence, a lesson in switching yarns without thinking the pattern through), I had BULKY extra strappage to fold over in the back, and loads of it.

I put the tank on and armed my friend Daniel with safety pins to try to wad up all the extra bandage behind my back. With his hands entwined in inches of bonus knit, dear Dan, ever the paragon of honesty, said, "Honey, you're never going to wear this." (In addition to all the extra sweater back there, I forgot to mention that beige-y neutrals are not good colors for me, either.)

Stubbornly, I sewed the bottom strap together anyway, folding it over on itself in the middle (foregoing the velcro, since there were already three layers of knitting now, heaven forbid I should add an additional layer of stuff to it), creating as small a pouch as I could so it would, uh, lay unobtrusively in the small of my back, where no one would notice it since the rest of the tank had come out so elegantly.

Then I let the sweater lie for a few days, and began knitting the hiking scarf. (Oh yeah, I had still more of the yarn left, lol)

Slowly, I neared the end of the remaining skein of yarn, and my scarf was only about a third of the way finished. I could hear Daniel's voice in the back of my mind. Honey, you're never going to wear...

He was right, and I had to admit it.

Time to frog. My first official frogging of an almost finished project! No matter how lovely the Asana tank looked from the front, I'd never wear that color (I'd only used the yarn because I'd had it, not because I'd wanted to use it -- I am a girl of pathetically little stash), and I'd never be comfortable with the way it was going to finish out with all of the excess in the back. Hence: frog, frog, frog.

But it wasn't so bad, really. The scarf is knitting up beautifully, and I think the yarn would rather be a scarf than a tank anyway.

And oh, I'd post pictures but I loaned my camera to Daniel.