So, I cast on a Hanami Stole yesterday.
I’m here to write about my experience today, so we’ll skip over the beaded cast-on (which went well), and the knitting-of-the-first-row and the unpicking-of-the-first-row-when-working-with-tiny-fuzzy-yarn and the part where I reached that point after getting to the end of the first row for the third time where I just went ‘sod it, I’ll do a couple of yarn overs. No-one will ever notice” and which I’ll probably live to regret.
No, today we get to the part where I”m sitting here and my yarn is tangling (because I couldn’t find my ball winder and had had far to much wine by that point to effectively search for it, and wound it by hand instead) and I’m working back and forth on slippery circular needles, and losing my place on the chart (I have a complicated relationship with charts. I love them dearly, but quite often they betray me) and…
I realised that my breathing was shallow, my shoulders hunched and my face fixed in a grimace.
Now, normally I very much knit to relax. This is not relaxing. But I’m hoping that as I get to grips with the chart and the repeats, as I get comfortable with the yarn and as the chart starts to take on less importance, that I’ll be able to relax into this and enjoy it.
Of course it’s entirely possible that it’s not the stole’s fault. The tension could have something to with the fact that I’m trying to knit this pretty complicated lace project at the dining table while supervising two small boys (one 5, one 3) who have been let loose with ink stamps, paints and water and who insist on saying “Mum, look at MY picture” “No, look at MY picture!” “I need more blue”, “NO! The BLUE is MY-INE!!!!” every four seconds.
Hmmm.