Getting my Knitting Mojo Back

You may have noticed a lack of knitting posts around here. Last week, I finally came to terms with the fact that I just wasn't feeling excited about my two current WIPs - last seen here in a post from early March.  I have made really minimal progress since them, which tells you just how unexcited I was about them.  I felt weird not having a knitting project to take with me on the subway and on car trips, and that I felt like working on at random moments, so I finally admitted that despite all my claims of disliking having too many WIPs, it was time to start another project.  I cast on these socks some time early last week and must have had a lot of pent up knitting energy, because I finished them yesterday! (OK, so it may have also helped that we flew across the country for a short but lovely visit with friends in California for a long weekend, so I had lots of knitting time on the plane).

I do really still want to finish this sweater - clearly it will not be done by our one year anniversary as I had hoped/declared (since that date has come and gone),  and but I hope to finish it up in the next month or two.  I think I stalled out on this one partly because I just have trouble staying interested in sweaters and actually finishing them up, and partly because I starting having doubts about the fit, and whether I may have made the armholes too big, which definitely made me less motivated to finish it.  After having given it a good solid break though, I tried it on again the other day and feel much better about it.  Plus, I am nearly done with the body and then I just have to knit the two sleeves, which will be much more portable to carry around with me.  This is definitely the most complicated (and smallest gauge) sweater I have ever knitted and I think I should take the difficulty down a notch for my next sweater or two to try to minimize my sweater-finishing problem.  I really want to be a sweater-knitter!

These dragonfly socks were actually supposed to be my fun distraction from not feeling like knitting the sweater, but I was feeling less and less excited about them too.  Partly because they pale in comparison to the original, lost dragonfly socks, partly because I think there is just too much going on here with the yarn and the lace pattern, and then finally because they seem a bit too small when I've tried them on... I haven't decided yet whether I will finish these up or just frog the yarn and put it back in the stash for a more appropriate pattern.

In the end, the stripey socks were a much better distraction from sweater-knitting woes.  Knitted with a fun self-striping sport weight yarn that my mom had given me for Christmas a few years ago, they were quick and entertaining to knit.  I had even more trouble than usual finding the center-pull string and had to deal with a lot of "yarn barf" (Lawson loves this term) at the beginning - it was much worse than the remainder you see above - but I finally got it figured out and it was smooth sailing from there.

I even got the pattern repeats to match up on the two socks!  Miraculously, my first sock was nearly exactly 2 pattern repeats long, so I just tried to pay attention to keeping them lined up as I knit the second sock.  I don't mind socks that don't match, but it does bug me when they almost match but are just a tiny bit off, so I figured I should do my best to sync them up.  Now that these are done I actually cast on a baby hat with the remaining yarn, and am determined to get back to work on my sweater soon!