A sweater tale

Once upon a time, not so very long ago -- say, June of 2006 -- there was a knitter. One day the knitter stumbled upon a Dale of Norway pattern that she found absolutely adorable ... so adorable, in fact, that she decided that she simply HAD to knit it.


picture from Dalebarn nr. 125

Since at the time the knitter had no very little girls living in her house, she decided to make the sweater for her niece. From the beginning, however, the project did not go smoothly. There were puckers and colors carried in such a way that they faded into obscurity and a horrible counting error which went undiscovered until almost the entire body of the sweater had been knit. The knitter persevered for a while, making adjustments and working around the problems as best she could, but in the end her enthusiasm for the project died when she ran into trouble on the cuff of the first sleeve. Frustrated and fed up, she jammed the whole kit and kaboodle into a project bag, tossed it into the far reaches of the stash closet, and did her best to forget about it.

Many years passed, during which the knitter had a new baby girl, who wore her mother's handknits with patience and panache. One day in her daughter's second year, the knitter stumbled upon the pattern book that contained the Fana sweater she had abandoned so long ago. Realizing that the cardigan would look cute on the baby, she decided to try the pattern again.

Not wanting to waste perfectly good yarn, she looked for -- and found -- the long-ignored project bag, pulled out the half-finished sweater ....



frogged it ...


this felt surprisingly good

borrowed a niddy-noddy from a good friend, re-wound the yarn ...





gave the skeins a bath until the kinks fell out and hung them to dry ....



which left her with five perfect skeins of yarn, ready and eager for a second chance.



Right after this was all done, the holidays, NaKniMitMo 2010 and parenting four children made the knitter forget all about her grand plan. The yarn might still be wondering what it had done to upset the knitter this time, had her LYS not decided to sponsor a team for the Ravelympics. The knitter was keen to participate (despite having crashed and burned four years ago), and in trying to decide on a project, remembered the freshly washed yarn, eager and ready to redeem itself be pressed into service.

There was brief panic while the knitter tried to find the pattern book (found jammed into a laundry basket full of toys; the knitter hopes this isn't indicative of her daughter's feelings about the sweater she's hopefully going to be wearing by the end of this month), but yesterday afternoon, while her son carefully wrote his classmate's names on 27 3-D SpongeBob valentines, she wound the yarn ...



and readied her project bag.



She is hoping that this time around, the story will have a happy ending.