Fearless Fibers Yarn

I Found My Motivation

In my last post, I told of my woes knitting two of my three current projects: the summer sweater with the demon yarn and the never-ending pair of spiral rib socks. I vowed to finish the socks and make good progress on the sweater before allowing myself to cast on anything new. The problem with this plan is that it's awfully difficult to get motivated to knit more than a few rows here and there when I'm not enjoying the knitting as much I usually do. I think I found the solution to this little dilemma yesterday! And here it is:

Now I know you must be wonderfing how that little skein of Anny Blatt Merinos yarn can provide the motivation to move forward on my current projects. Perhaps this will explain it:

Yep. That's a mountain of 18 skeins of this luscious yarn in the Tomette color! (I have no idea why they chose to call it Tomette. It sounds like "Tomato" and that seems wrong. The color is a dark, rusty shade of burnt orange. It's most definitely not red or a shade that resembles any tomato I've ever seen.)

I was at my favorite LYS yesterday for the Friday morning knit group that I try to attend whenever I can, and I found myself wandering around the shop perusing books and magazines in search of inspiration for my next big project. I knew that I wanted to find the pattern first and then pick the yarn, rather than the other way around which always seems to lead me into trouble.

My favorite LYS is a wonderful haven chock-full of glorious yarn, but the one area that it lacks a bit is in the selection of books and pattern leaflets. There's a pretty good variety to choose from, but other than new magazines that arrive, there's not a whole lot of change in the selection from one visit to the next and I've already seen most of what's there.

After ten minutes or so of flipping through books I'd looked at previously, I suddenly remembered a sweater I'd seen and loved quite some time back in an issue of Vogue Knitting. The gals in the knitting group suggested I ask Sandy, the owner, about it. They were dead sure that I could describe the sweater to Sandy and that she would know which one I meant. Indeed they were right! All that I had to tell Sandy was that it was a sweater jacket in some shade of blue, with a zipper in the front, using an Anny Blatt yarn. Within minutes she emerged from the back area with the 2004/05 Winter edition of Vogue Knitting open to the very page with the sweater I had in mind. Amazing woman, that Sandy!

Since I can't find any photo of this sweater anywhere online, here's an attempt to get a picture of the photo in the magazine. It's a design by Shirley Paden.

I decided that for this project, I need to take the safe route and buy the exact yarn that the pattern calls for. I could probably get away with substitution my sportweight superwash merino, which is also a 4-ply superwash like the Anny Blatt, but I don't want to risk it. With a big project that's going to take a good amount of time and energy, I definitely don't want to end up with some slight variation in gauge or miscalculated adjustment causing me grief down the road. There are plenty of other ways that I'm sure I'll find along the way to make this project harder on myself than it needs to be! Heh!

And so, this is my new motivation. I will not cast on for this new project until the socks in progress are done and I'm nearing the end of the demon sweater. It was just yesterday that I bought the yarn for this new project and already I've zipped through about half of the back of the summer sweater, as well as a couple of inches on the foot of sock number two of the endless pair. All of this just in the late afternoon and early evening yesterday.

Ah yes! The end is in sight. I just needed the right motivation!