At my last class, on Friday, we spent time looking at peoples' UFOs. I had decided that my message was to be "sometimes that project is stuck for a very good reason. Its bad. Bin it, frog it, any way you want it. To reinforce my point I had taken along a motley rag and tag of silk crochet that had been haunting me for....a lot of years.
I really don't know what I had been thinking of with this piece. It was meant to be a randomly crocheted waistcoat. To do this with any hope of success, you need a template that is a fairly accurate representation of the size and shape you want to end up with, and then to match your scumbles to that. This I did not do. You need yarns in a group of colours that end up in some sort of coherent harmony, even allowing for a few high contrast notes. Well, that wasn't happening, either.
I eventually got it to be an alien computer's idea of what might be a fit for a human being, in that it had back, sides, armholes, etc. Beyond that....a shapeless mess. I kept thinking that I could add a bit here, add a bit there, and at the end of the day, throw it in to a dye pot, and with a wave of my magic wand render it instantly beautiful.
No. Never.
So there it sat until last Friday, when I urged my students to believe that sometimes things are never, ever going to work, and that the healthy thing to do is to throw in the towel, and deconstruct.
So that is what I have been doing, and very soothing it is too.
1 comment:
Well, hey! In a *great minds think alike* moment, I have been deconstructing two sweaters. The pile of yarn is quite big, and I don't have any idea what to do with it. But the sweaters were a pile of knitting that I didn't know what to do with, so where there once was disappointment, there is now potential. :-) Hi to DSM and all.
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