knitting is a hereditary disease

On being a perfectionist

Posted on 01/17/2008 by Andrea | Comments (0)
Filed under : Spinning

I'm stuck in sort of an endless loop of perfectionism in my knitting/spinning lately. I have a love-hate relationship with perfectionism, and it's because I'm also kind of an impatient person. I want to figure out how to do something perfectly, but I don't want it to take forever. In the past, I've let impatience win out and ended up making a bunch of stuff I wasn't too happy with. Lately, I've been letting perfectionism take over, which means it's hard to finish anything.

I need balance!

This is what I'm currently working with, and it's destined to become a scarf for a friend of mine. She saw the singles I was spinning in this colorway and loved it and wanted a scarf. I started to have some very specific ideas of what sort of scarf would be perfect for this person, and that's what led me down the path of perfectionism. I've never spun anything with a knitting project in mind. I've always just spun yarn and then figured out what to do with it. So this adds a whole new realm in which I can be a perfectionist and take forever to accomplish anything.

I plied the singles I had spun. They weren't right. I wanted longer, slower color changes. I wanted a thinner yarn, yet still soft and lofty. I then spun and plied four different versions. Navajo plying gave me the types of color changes I wanted, but it used up the singles so fast that the color changes were distinct, but very short.

I finally settled on splitting my rovings in half lengthwise and labeling the other half of each one that I used to spin my first single, so that I could spin a second bobbin using other halves of the rovings in the same order. I added very little twist, creating a fluffy, squishy yarn. The colors lined up surprisingly well when I plied them together.

So now I've been knitting and reknitting swatch after swatch trying to come up with the perfect pattern that will be just right for my friend. I've come up with about five different scarf patterns that might be right for some other yarn or some other person, but I think I FINALLY hit on the right one, last night.

Creating this scarf is taking way longer than it really needs to. But it's satisfying to have a vision and try to create something that's right for a particular person or a particular situation. The key is to be able to realize when it's good enough or it will never get done.

My latest swatch has promise, but I made it a little too narrow. I think it's safe to say this will be the last time I'll have to rip this out and start over. Stay tuned....