Blue Monday

I'm an incredible hoarder (pack rat), one of those people that keep everything, just in case. I know for a fact, that the minute that I ditch something, it would either (1) be essential and irreplaceable or (2) very valuable (why did I let my mom throw away my collection of Vogue Knitting from the 1980's?). Of course, this does mean that I live in clutter, which also drives me mad, since I am forever misplacing things and blaming it on someone else for moving it, hiding it or taking it down to the dump. This could had be a great damper on marital harmony, except that my husband is so used to my scattiness that whenever, I even start making accusory remarks, he just mentions an incident about a misplaced 'carte du sejour' and I'm put in my place.

So, after the 3rd avalanche in as many days, while burrowing for something, I realised that I had to start on the enormous task of... tidying the wool room/study. It's a tiny room, just big enough for a desk, chair and about 25kg of assorted fibres, piles of papers, books and magazines. What started out as a few hours on Sunday, literally melted away. Even with the extra hour due to daylights savings time ( we are now GMT and no longer BST), I got nearly nothing done. Well, that's not quite true... the room is far more untidy than when I started.

Why? I was waylaid. A few old magazines were unearthed and once I started flipping, I had to go to the bookcase and pulled out a few other magazines to compare designs. So, at the end of this there were more magazines in the room than when I started.

Next there were some, well a few UFO's... nearly FO's but not quite that were put aside for whatever reason. This one is the picot-edged baby sweater from Fiona McTague's Baby Knits. The original design was in the discontinued Jaeger Cashmere but I substituted with some Jaeger Baby Merino 4 ply that I bought in the Silkstones closing down sale. It's soft and machine washable, so parent as well as child friendly. The yarn wasn't as springy as I would had liked though (tension came out a bit uneven), and I ended up using 2.75 mm needles.

I started this months ago, in June for my nephew. I think my nephew is probably too big for it by now. The reason that it ended up in the UFO pile, is that I bought some lovely buttons for it, but the buttons were too small, so I put the project aside and started other stuff. So, on Sunday night, I darned in all the ends, did the picot- edged for the bands and did the i-cord button loops. Now, I just need to find some buttons, and it'll be done.

In case you're wondering, yes I do have a lot of blue yarn in my stash. Blue is one of my favourite colours, but this was stashed in anticipation of small presents, because most of my friends happen to have sons, which limits the possible knitting palettes (I supposed that boys can wear pinks, lilacs and mauves, but I wouldn't want any of them to be mistaken for little girls) and that also confines me to very simple garments, with no frills.

What started the avalanche, which led to the tidying of the wool room ? A quest to find a pattern, what else? and no, I didn't find it.

Posted by atu at October 27, 2003 09:43 PM