A while back I posted about wanting to knit “Rinia”, a sweater with contiguous sleeves but I got side tracked. The yarn I originally chose for this project just wasn’t working for me and this pattern, with multiple cables, proved to be more than I could keep track of while learning a new technique. I haven’t given up on the contiguous sleeve though and Astrid Schramm, the woman who designed Rinia has a much more simple pattern that might be more appropriate for my first try at this new method but…..of course there is always a “but”.
This sweater requires fingering weight yarn, in fact, it seems all of the contiguous-sleeved sweaters I want to knit require fingering weight yarn, and I have some in my stash (of course I do). I have some beautiful Madeline Tosh merino light in “Steam Age” which is, possibly, the most awesome color-way of all time. And that’s the problem.
I think I like this yarn too much to use it. Is that possible? It’s happened before. I had yarn I thought was so lovely I couldn’t bear to make it into something, paralyzed by the idea I would finish the project and then find something that would have been better.
The fact is, that original “to lovely to use” yarn has now been in my stash for five years. I’m “saving” that yarn for something special, is what I tell myself, but will there ever be a project that is “special” enough for yarn too precious to knit?
Years ago, when I was rooming with my BFF, we were doing a bit of spring cleaning when we found a chocolate bunny in her dresser. No. We found what was left of a chocolate bunny. The previous year she had shoved it in there to “save” it for another time and then forgot about it. Sometime during the next twelve months a small village of bugs found the chocolate bunny and ate the whole thing leaving behind a hallow foil shell and a mass of dried bug carcasses. They might have died of chocolate overdose, who knows? The point is she didn’t actually “save” that chocolate bunny at all, in fact, she wasted it.
That’s how I see this yarn. I must make it into something before it turns into a bug infested chocolate bunny. At least, with yarn, I can always rip it out and start over. Not so with the chocolate bunnies.
