Tuesday 14 January 2014

The Scarf

For Christmas last year a friend of mine at work made me a scarf that I loved.

I say loved in the past tense because I was wearing it in early spring and took it off and put it on the back of my chair at a meeting and then forgot about it, and by the time I remembered where I'd put it it was gone.

I was bummed because she'd made it for me and I loved it and it was my favourite colours and went with everything I wore (pretty much) and it kept me warm like with a hug.

By the time I lost it I had asked the friend to teach me how to knit the type of scarf and we'd gone and bought the needles and yarn and I'd started making some too, but that particular colour of wool was out.

And kept being out.  I couldn't even find it online.

Randomly, I went to the store in summer and there it was!  (I guess fewer people knit in summer or something.) I bought some and went home and happily knit myself a new scarf.

I was excited to wear it come Fall, but when I did, I noticed that it was longer than the one my friend had knitted me.  Instead of wrapping it twice (it's an infinity loop) I would have to wrap it three times and then it was too tight.  So it wasn't fitting the way I really liked.

I took it in to work and showed my friend and she said that I was just a much looser knitter than she was so my scarf was longer.

But I wanted it to be shorter, so I decided to pick apart the two ends I'd sewn together, and rip it apart a bit and refinish it, because I wanted it to be as perfect as the one she'd made me!

So I started to pick it apart, but it was not going as smoothly as I thought it should have and that's when I realized I was picking apart, not the join, but where I'd started knitting in the second skein of wool.  Ie.  Totally the wrong place.  Ugh.  I was making a mess.

I took it in to work again and asked the two knitting ladies (my friend and one other) for help.  Well, after taking a look at it, they told me the only thing really to be done was to rip the entire thing apart and start again.

Which, should have been easy enough except that somehow the way I knit?  Means there's a random almost knot at the end of each row.  (What?)

So tearing the thing apart was a little more frustrating and time consuming than it should have been, especially when the ball of yarn started to get bigger.

So now I'm re-knitting the scarf that I had already knitted to replace the same one that was knitted for me and lost.

And I don't even know how long I want it to be because I don't have the old scarf as an example to measure.

Le sigh.

This has got to be some sort of metaphor for something in my life, no?

This scarf had better get finished before Winter's over!

2 comments:

Jason Langlois said...

You know, as I was reading this I started thinking "Wow, this is totally a metaphor for life." and boom, you ended on that.

Also, weirdly enough, I only figured out what an infinity scarf is this weekend.

Good luck on the knitting, and I bet the new scarf is better than your first attempt!

Victoria said...

Totally a metaphor! ;) And, yeah, infinity scarves are pretty new to me too :) Thanks!