FoF: Getting Back To It, part 2

So I decided to pick up a small project after finishing that earlier frogging.  It's a hat.  One that, according to my project notes, I actually finished once -- but it was too small so I frogged it back to where the decreases began with the intention of knitting more rows straight. ... The notes, however, didn't specify how much more I thought I'd need to do. And looking at where I had placed a lifeline, I'm guessing that I've knit about an extra inch (maybe a little less) in pattern before the decrases.  Not sure how much longer I need to go at that.  I wish I'd done enough hats to have gotten a sense for how much I'd need to do to get the right size for me, but alas no...

Anyway, this is my "Dreaming of Berets" (pattern: Reverie by Amy Swenson):

It'll look better once it's finished and blocked, of course.

And as the baby has just woken from her nap, I'll have to put this project down and resume another time.

FoF: Getting Back To It

So, um... nothing has happened since that last entry so far as Finish-or-Frog is concerned.  Nothing until today, that is.

I saw my husband frogging his socks -- he wants to restart them and do them differently.  He hasn't knit in years.  ... so I decided I should do at least one thing on my Finish-or-Frog list while my daughter is napping.

So I grabbed the Forever Shawl and ripped!  Felt good to finally find an end to that eternity of wasted yarn.

Here's the photo I took in Feb 2012 before letting it hibernate:

... and it looked pretty much exactly the same when I pulled it out today.

But now, it's just a nice, compact ball of yarn.  Yay!  Only took a couple minutes to do as well as I hadn't gotten very far into the shawl before deciding I despised working the pattern.

Now I have a gorgeous skein of 100% Merino laceweight yarn that's slightly more purple/pink than the red in that photo above.  My cameras have never been good at capturing the color of things for me.

And I can't decide whether to hunt down a pattern in my queue that would be good with this yarn, or move on to another FoF project...

FoF: Starting Early

Sometimes it's best to get started on things when the inspiration hits rather than when you pre-schedule it.  I was feeling like I needed to accomplish something, so I went into my WIP closet and looked for something small that I could rip out or finish quickly.

Lo and behold, I stumbled on the learning piece I started for an entrelac class at Stitches West in 2012.  The pattern was supposed to result in a scarf, but I was never going to finish it because it required cutting the yarn (and therefore weaving in ends) far more frequently than I'm ever comfortable with.  Unfortunately, this also meant that the portion of the yarn already used was going to be useless if frogged.

So I slipped the live stitches back to the other needle, and retroactively bound off the stitches I could, leaving only 2 live stitches mid-row.  I then wove in the ends (all gazillion of them) and with an extended piece of scrap yarn, I wove in the 2 remaining live stitches.

And voila... a "finished object" that's about 8" x 5".  I have no idea what to do with it, other than give it to my toddler to see if she's interested in playing with it.

So that's one down ... 19 to go.

Now to put the remaining yarn back with its mates in the bins in the closet...

Goal for 2015: Finish or Frog

So I've got a bunch of unfinished knitting/crochet (mostly knitting) projects (aka "Works in Progress" or WIPs).  Many of these have been sitting untouched ("hibernating") for more than a year... some for far longer than that.  I can blame pregnancy complications and early motherhood for the past year (I wasn't able to work on anything between about August/September 2013 and September/October 2014), but not for much of the time before that.

Anyway, the time has come.  I am sick of having so many unfinished projects around - so I have decided that by the end of 2015 I need to go through all of those hibernating projects (currently 19 -- though possibly adding the 2 that are currently active WIPs) and make a serious decision: finish it? or rip it out (i.e. "frog" it) to reclaim the yarn?

If I choose to frog the project, I have to commit to doing that and actually get it done, or it'll keep sitting in my closet taking up space, using up a set of needles or a hook, possibly holding on tight to stitch markers or other notions.  

With 19 projects to sift through, I'm going to set a minimum pace of reviewing 3 per month, so that I will have gotten through (almost) all of them by the end of June to decide how I'm going to proceed with each.

Knowing me, I'll be somewhat paralyzed by the "what if" ... specifically "what if I regret frogging that?" though I can't think of any scenario off-hand where I might wish I still had a specific project on the needles when I hadn't worked on it in so long.  The other factors that may slow me down with my decisionmaking are sentimentality and my dislike of wasted time/work.

For example, some projects are ones that I think of fondly as "firsts" and I really would like to finish them, especially with the amount of time I put into them, but there are other circumstances that get in the way -- such as the shawl/wrap that I'm about halfway through but that is so heavily and intricately cabled that I can't figure out what row I left off on, and being the perfectionist I am, I don't dare try to restart work for fear of starting in the wrong place in the pattern.  I'm sentimental about this project, being also that it's the one that got me started with serious cabling (which I've since gotten over entirely), and it was the one that got me out to a specific local yarn store for the first time.

Hopefully, throughout the year, I'll be posting these various projects here with discussion about my thought process in deciding whether to finish or frog, and then progress photos.

As many of the projects are small, I should have no trouble finishing them if I choose.  However, some of the projects are significantly larger in size (e.g. blankets, sweaters, etc) and I'm going to allow myself leeway on finishing those.  Rather than requiring myself to finish them (if that's the option I choose), I'm going to require myself to make steady progress.

In the meantime, my goal for December is to finish the two crocheted blankets I started on over a year ago (one July 2013, one November 2012) and have already picked back up this year.  I'm close to finishing one of them, and the other might end up as a 20th WIP for the 2015 project... but at least I already know I WANT to finish it!

This is going to be a tough goal for me, but it should be doable.  Wish me luck, and keep me accountable!