I'm really enjoying working in a pair of fair isle mittens, which is somewhat surprising given that I've ripped parts of them out and tinked back other parts back numerous times. If all of the knitting I've done on them was actual progress I'd be almost done the first one, instead it's about 2" long.
Before we left for vacation I'd swatched, gotten gauge, and charted out all of the design projects I planned on working on. I figured this would virtually eliminate moments like this. When I planned these mittens I'd put a lot of thought into the fair isle motifs themselves, but when I chatted them out in Numbers I just used pair of high contrast colours so the chart would be easy to read later; to borrow a phrase from a friend it looked like a drunk clown picked the colours. I have a bag of balls of drops alpaca (which I love, I have made about a dozen pairs of mitten with it) all different colours and I figured I'd just pick the colours as I went. I decided I would be spontaneous (which is entirely out of character for me).
I sat down to knit them on Monday and picked 6 balls of yarn, they were beautiful grays and purples that looked lovely together. But when I used them there wasn't enough contrast to make the pattern stand out. I abandoned that color combination and went for another, mixing colours wildly but decided it looked wonky; where the light and dark colours were just didn't work.
I'm still happily working on them, each new motif has gotten ripped out at least once as I fiddle with the colours, but I'm pleased with what I'm getting and I think the fact that I'm enjoying the process is because I'm learning, it's progress, just of a different sort.
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